Papyrus 45

Papyrus 45 (45 or P. Chester Beatty I) is an early manuscript of the New Testament and part of the Chester Beatty Papyri. It was probably created around the year 250 AD in Egypt. It contains the texts of Matthew 20-21 and 25-26; the Gospel of Mark 4-9 and 11-12; Gospel of Luke 6-7 and 9-14; Gospel of John, 4-5 and 10-11, and Acts 4-17. The manuscript is currently housed in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland. A leaf ( folio ) but with Matthew 25.41-26.39 is located in the Austrian National Library in Vienna (Pap. Vindob. G. 31974 ).

State of the manuscript

The manuscript is badly damaged and fragmented. The papyrus was bound to a code, which probably consisted of 220 pages. However, these have only 30 pages survived ( 2 of Matthew, 6 of Mark, seven of Luke, John, and 2 of 13 of Acts ). All pages have lacunae (gaps ), very few lines are complete. The pages of Matthew and John are the smallest. The original pages were about the size of 25 × 20 cm. Unlike many other surviving manuscripts of the 3rd century, containing the Gospels, Catholic Epistles or letters of Paul, this manuscript contained more than a grouping of texts of the New Testament. This hypothesis is based on the use of the set of two sheets, a simple quire (25 sheets), as it had the most the Codes.

Text character

Because of the large scale of the destruction, it was difficult to determine the type of text. The manuscript was acquired by Alfred Chester Beatty in the first half of the 20th century and published in the book The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, Descriptions and Texts of Twelve Manuscripts on Papyrus of the Greek Bible by Frederic G. Kenyon in 1933. In this work, Kenyon identified the text type as Cäsareanisch and follows the definition of Burnett Hillman Streeter. Hollis Huston criticized Kenyon's transcription of many partially preserved words and came to the conclusion that can not be Chapter 6 and 11 by Markus in 45 seamlessly fit into a text type, especially in the Caesarean, because the manuscript of these special texts that for each text type on would predate the 4th or 5th century.