P⁶⁶ and P⁷⁵

P⁶⁶ and P⁷⁵ are like two early snapshots of the Gospel tradition—faded Polaroids from the second-century Egyptian desert—that let us peek at how stable (or occasionally wobbly) the text was long before the great parchment codices strutted onto the stage.

What they contain.

P⁶⁶ is our early witness to the Gospel of John. It isn’t complete, but it gives us huge chunks—enough to see the scribe’s personality: energetic, a bit sloppy at times, but generally faithful.

P⁷⁵ carries portions of Luke and John, and the scribe is much more fastidious; the handwriting alone looks like the textual critic’s idea of a tidy monk.

When and where they were written.

Both came from Egypt—likely from the same broad scribal ecosystem that fed the Alexandrian stream. P⁶⁶ is often dated somewhere around 150–200 CE, while P⁷⁵ clusters around 175–225 CE. Dating is always a probabilistic art based on handwriting styles, so treat the years as approximations rather than GPS coordinates.

Are they Alexandrian?

They certainly lean that direction. P⁷⁵ especially lines up strikingly with Codex Vaticanus (B), one of the classic Alexandrian heavyweights. The resemblance is uncanny enough that some scholars argue P⁷⁵ preserves an earlier stage of the textual tradition that Vaticanus later inherited with remarkable steadiness. P⁶⁶ is more mixed: mostly Alexandrian in feel, but with some quirks that suggest its scribe didn’t have quite the same level of textual discipline.

What variants show up?

It isn’t the sort of carnival of wild additions you find in some later manuscripts. Both papyri tend to preserve short readings, stricter grammar, and fewer expansions—classic Alexandrian fingerprints. Some specific differences matter for individual verses (for instance, in John 1 and 10), but nothing overturns the overall shape of Johannine theology. P⁶⁶ shows a bit more correction on the fly—scribal second-guessing, marginal fixes, patches—like a copyist arguing with his own pen. P⁷⁵ is calmer, cleaner, and closer to later Alexandrian exemplars.

What conclusions can we draw?

The pair together undercut the old myth that early Christian textual transmission was a chaotic soup. They show that, already in the late second century, there were fairly stable textual lines, especially in Egypt, and that later Alexandrian codices were not revisions invented in the fourth century but descendants of a much earlier, disciplined tradition. They also remind us that scribes are humans with their own habits—P⁶⁶ is loose, P⁷⁵ is precise—but the overall shape of the text remains surprisingly consistent.

In a wider theological perspective, these papyri tell a story of continuity rather than upheaval. They bring the text of the Gospels remarkably close to their earliest composition and show that the community was already treating these writings with a seriousness that later scholarship sometimes forgets.