Papyrus Rylands 463

Papyrus 463 is a copy of the apocryphal Gospel of Mary in Greek, which is kept with the Rylands Papyri in the John Rylands Library in Manchester. It is a papyrus manuscript in roll form. The manuscript has been assigned by the paleography of the third century. It is one of three manuscripts and an image obtained from two Greek fragments of the Gospel of Mary. It is longer than the Papyrus Oxyrhynchus L 3525 ( POxy 3525 ).

Description

Only a small fragment of a single sheet, presumably from a scroll that outlasted the time. The fragment is broken on all sides and includes the material that has been handed down on the Coptic manuscript in 7.4-19.5. The reconstruction of the missing parts (especially the beginnings and ends of lines) is not an easy task and one has to rely on the Coptic text. The completed form of the Greek text it can be speculated only on the basis of the Coptic version of Codex Berolinensis Gnosticus 8502. The manuscript is fragmentary and shows two errors.

There are some differences between the Greek fragment and the Coptic text. The Nomina sacra are written in an abbreviated form. The text was edited by CH Roberts in 1938. Today, the manuscript is under the signature Gr. P. 463 in the John Rylands Library in Manchester.