P J Parsons – författare

Papyri nos 4803-4843This volume adds to previously published early Christian texts four new papyri of the Gospel of John and also includes fragments of a lost play by Sophocles (Epigonoi), two prose works on Hellenistic historians and Hellenistic kings, a rhetorical exercise on speeches in Thucydides, and a lost novel with an Ionian setting. A further group of papyri of Iliad and related Homeric texts, including a paraphrase of Iliad I (its texts transmitted verbatim by at least two other papyri), scholia minora to Iliad I, and commentaries on Odyssey III and XV with scholarly credentials. Documentary texts include declarations of livestock, loans, leases, and other contracts. Finally it records publication of a group of drawings that appeared outside the series but assigns Oxyrhynchus publication numbers to them for the first time. Images of the drawings were prepared for and will be published in the volume Oxyrhynchus A City and its Texts (GRM 93) and Egyptian Archaeology 22.

Papyri nos 5573-5631. This volume includes editions of fifty-eight papyri and one text on parchment. Among the theological texts, three are of exceptional interest. 5575 is an early copy of sayings of Jesus corresponding in part to the canonical gospels of Matthew and Luke and in part to the apocryphal gospel of Thomas. Jesus is also the speaker in 5576 and apparently in 5577, where Mary is addressed. Both pieces may be loosely called 'Gnostic'; the latter appears to be Valentinian. Of the new literary items, the most extensive is 5584, a collection of short biographies of eminent Romans, written a century earlier than Plutarch. Plutarch's own Homeric Studies, now mostly lost, may be recognized in 5585. Early Greek philosophy is represented by 5583, a full column of what appears to be Antiphon's On Truth. The extant literary texts are fragments of two papyrological rarities, the historical work of Aristodemus (5586-7) and the astrological poetry ascribed to Manetho (5588-90). The documentary section illustrates social and economic realities of late antique estates, mostly that of the Apions; there is new evidence on the handling of wine distributions, on the pricing of equipment and materials, and on the more mundane relations of the Apion estate to monasteries.