Many physical witnesses
Papyri remain separately identified. Multiple papyri may fill different gaps, but their evidence is never blended into an unnamed manuscript.
Greek papyrus witnesses · four Gospels
How the Earliest Papyri column works
This column is a governed composite of surviving Gospel papyri, not a reconstruction of an original New Testament and not one continuous manuscript. It shows papyrus text only where papyrus text survives. The red lost dots are part of the evidence and are intentionally retained.
Current status: source-complete; comparative alignment remains open to review. The independent corpus contains every admissible papyrus source word-unit without requiring agreement with another tradition. The live exact-once audit reports no missing, duplicated, unexpected, or altered diplomatic forms. Papyrus-only and transposition rows preserve readings that cannot yet be honestly harmonized with the shared grid.
Corpus and shadow-audit record
65
registered Gospel papyri
2,132
verses with a coverage record
51,431
source-token attestations accepted
33,590
rows carrying papyrus evidence
7,811
attestations with source-identified missing letters
46
disagreements preserved
Coverage means that a papyrus has material somewhere in a verse; it does not mean every word survives. The word-level system separately determines which letters and tokens are extant.
What this column preserves
One deterministic view
The compact column needs one reading per row. Chronology determines that display; agreeing sigla share the cell and dissenting readings remain recorded.
Survival, not completion
Where no registered papyrus preserves text, the column remains lost. Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Byzantine, and later codices are not fallback text.
Source hierarchy
Governing text
CNTR Class 1 papyrus transcriptions
Local P*.txt witnesses determine displayed readings. Their markup distinguishes readable text, damage, missing characters, and editorial supply. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Verification
INTF NTVMR diplomatic transcriptions
INTF checks witness identity and difficult conditions, especially leading loss. It does not erase a recorded disagreement.
Alignment aid
TAGNT and guide columns
They identify likely positions in the shared table. They are not papyrus witnesses and cannot create surviving text or decide between papyrus variants.
The seven-stage system
1
Register
Retain each papyrus siglum, date range, coverage, and source identity.
2
Transcribe
CNTR supplies governing text; INTF checks witness identity and difficult conditions.
3
Order
Scan surviving tokens forward in their own manuscript order; record transpositions.
4
Align
Guide witnesses locate shared rows but never supply papyrus wording.
5
Select
Earlier date governs disagreement; lower GA number breaks a date tie.
6
Condition
Keep readable damage, missing text, and editorial supply distinct.
7
Certify or hold
Admit source-supported tokens and retain unresolved evidence explicitly.
When papyri disagree
- Rank each papyrus by the starting year of its published date range.
- Display the earliest-ranked reading.
- On a tie, use the lower Gregory–Aland papyrus number.
- Attach only agreeing sigla to the compact cell.
- Preserve dissenting readings in provenance.
This selects a public display; it does not claim the earliest surviving reading is necessarily the autograph.
How rows are aligned
- Source order is preserved by contiguous forward scan.
- Vaticanus is the primary structural guide because it is early, Greek, and nearly continuous.
- Sinaiticus and Byzantine may corroborate placement where Vaticanus is absent or uncertain.
- A guide controls row location only—not wording, survival, selection, or English.
- Transpositions receive explicit provenance; word-count balancing is forbidden.
Damage and loss
- damaged
- Characters remain traceable and a supported word can be shown. Damage does not automatically mean illegibility, and every displayed reading receives a green extant dot.
- lost dots
- The papyrus text is physically missing or not preserved. No later manuscript fills it. Red is reserved for this genuinely non-extant state.
- editorial supply
- CNTR editorial-supply and identified-missing-character information remains preserved in provenance. Because the supported Greek reading is already visible, the table does not repeat a separate supplied label or turn its dot red.
Certification status
The independent corpus contains 55,231 papyrus source word-units across 3,317 manuscript-and-verse sequences. All 55,231 occur exactly once in live provenance: zero missing, duplicate, unexpected, or diplomatically altered source coordinates. They produce 35,405 displayed cells, all 35,405 of which match the selected governing papyrus reading. The current audits report zero held source words, source-token collisions, unsupported placements, provisional reconstructions, selection mismatches, missing target rows, non-papyrus mutations, or coverage-application errors.
Admission and alignment are separate. Papyrus attestation determines what appears; neighboring certified source coordinates and the comparative grid determine placement. A different reading normally shares the same row when it occupies the same position in the sentence—the disagreement is the evidence being displayed. Multiple papyrus word-units may share one cell when another tradition expresses the corresponding unit differently. Agreement with Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Byzantine, or another tradition is never an admission requirement. Separate papyrus-only or transposition rows are reserved for additions, genuinely unavailable comparison positions, and order differences that the shared grid cannot represent honestly. External scholarly review, pinned source revisions, and the separate English audit remain additional certification layers.
Evidence appendix
The Papyrus Map remains the public data appendix: chronology, coverage dots, Gospel distribution, chapter coverage, transcription status, and fragment records. It answers “what survives where?” This page answers “by what rules does that evidence enter the column?”
Explore all 65 papyri