DID YOU KNOW?
The answer
It's P52, a papyrus scrap carrying a few broken lines of John 18 on each side, usually dated to the second century. Nothing earlier has surfaced — no originals, no complete early Gospels. The earliest complete New Testaments come from the fourth century.
Why it’s interesting
The fragment was identified in 1934 in a Manchester library, in a batch of papyri purchased in Egypt years before — nobody had noticed what it was. Scholars still debate how narrowly it can be dated; handwriting styles give a range, not a year.
Scholarly consensus
You can know the Bible.
Not just the stories, but the history, authorship, and scholarship behind it.