New Oxrhynchus Papyrus 4009 Articles
July 8th, 2009 by Andrew Bernhard under Gospel of Peter. No Comments.
Thanks (again) to Wieland Wilker for calling our attention to two recent articles discussing Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 4009, one of the possible fragments of the Gospel of Peter.
Not all scholars agree that this manuscript fragment preserves a portion of the Gospel of Peter, and scholars have not previously been able to reconstruct one side of the badly damaged fragment. However, in the first article, Myllykoski proposes a reconstruction for the previously unintelligible side of the fragment and argues that it does indeed preserve a fragment of the Gospel of Peter. The second article explains the potential significance of Myllykoski’s reconstructions for textual criticism of the Gospel of Luke. I will have to examine these articles carefully.
The citations and abstracts are as follows:
Myllykoski, Matti. “The Sinful Woman in the Gospel of Peter: Reconstructing the Other Side of P.Oxy. 4009.” New Testament Studies 55 (2009): 104-15.
In 1993, Dieter Lührmann published a reconstruction of the more intelligible side of P.Oxy. 4009. He demonstrated that this side, which he called the recto, consists of passages parallel to Matt 10.16 par., Luke 10.3 and 2 Clem. 5.2–4. He also argued that the passage stems from the Gospel of Peter. However, Lührmann considered it impossible (‘ausgeschlossen’) to reconstruct the other side of the fragment. The aim of the present article is to demonstrate that a full reconstruction of this less intelligible side of P.Oxy. 4009, lines 1–13, is possible and that it enriches our knowledge of the Gospel of Peter with a new pericope which is an interesting parallel of Luke 7.36–50. The reconstruction also demonstrates that the side reconstructed by Lührmann is actually the verso, and that both sides together point towards the well-known anti-Jewish redactional tendencies of the author of the Gospel of Peter.
Myllykoski, Matti. “Tears of Repentance or Tears of Gratitude? P.Oxy. 4009, the Gospel of Peter and the Western Text of Luke 7.45-49.” New Testament Studies 55 (2009): 380-89.
In an article published earlier this year (NTS 55.1: 104–15), a full reconstruction of the less intelligible side of P.Oxy. 4009 (lines 1–13) was presented, and it was argued that this text belongs to the Gospel of Peter. These 13 lines parallel the Lukan pericope of the sinful woman (Luke 7.45–49) and demonstrate that the Gospel of Peter used manuscripts that represent the Western text of the earlier Gospels. The most notable Western feature, the omission in P.Oxy. 4009 of Luke 7.47b–48, is no coincidence. There are weighty arguments for the omission of these verses in the Lukan original as well.
