Papyrus P9: 1 John 4:11–12 in a Greek Witness

Grenfell and Hunt excavated the fragment at Oxyrhynchus and published it as papyrus 402 in the third Oxyrhynchus volume. The Egypt Exploration Fund gave groups of Oxyrhynchus papyri to Harvard's Semitic Museum in the early twentieth century. In 1960 the papyri transferred to Houghton Library, where the fragment now carries the call number MS Gr SM3736 and is digitized. This chain provides a documented find city, first edition, institutional transfer, and present custody. It does not recover the codex's original owner or explain when the discarded leaf separated from its book. Archaeological context is therefore meaningful but incomplete rather than a complete biography.

The extant piece is roughly 7.3 by 5.2 centimeters, surviving from a leaf whose original page has been estimated near 11 by 15 centimeters. It was written in a heavy, crude, irregular hand with cursive tendencies and numerous phonetic spellings. The text includes contracted sacred names. Torn edges remove portions of each line, and the sequence jumps from verse 12 to verse 14 because the missing lower part once carried verse 13. The rough execution should not be romanticized as proof of an 'ordinary believer,' since the copyist's identity is unknown, but it does demonstrate that Christian books existed outside highly formal calligraphic production.

Palaeographic estimates cluster around the late third or early fourth century. That range is more responsible than assigning an exact year because there is no colophon. Oxyrhynchus was a Greek-literate Egyptian city whose rubbish mounds preserved texts from administration, education, literature, and religion. P9 belongs within that environment and within the Christian adoption of the codex. Its small reconstructed page could reflect an economical or portable book, but size alone does not reveal private or liturgical use. The date applies to this copy; the text of 1 John and the textual forms behind it are earlier.