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A Greek fragment is the first-known New Testament papyrus written on the front side of a scroll

November 16, 2022 - Harry Ransom Center

Willoughby Papyrus

by GEOFFREY S. SMITH

A Fragment Makes History

A few months ago, I received a much-anticipated email that read, “The courier is scheduled to deliver the Willoughby Papyrus to the Ransom Center tomorrow.” The next morning, I anxiously watched as members of the Center’s conservation staff carefully removed from the oversized shipping package a small black archival box, no more than 8 inches square. They slid off its sleeve, opened the protective cover, and placed the object on the table in front of me for inspection. Mounted between two plates of glass was an ancient papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John, no larger than a credit card.

The manuscript was fragmentary, and some of the Greek letters were not easy to make out, but it had not suffered any damage since I had last seen it in person, nearly seven years earlier. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The “Willoughby Papyrus,” as it is known, had made it to The University of Texas safe and sound.

The world first learned about the Willoughby Papyrus in January of 2015, when it appeared for sale on eBay in a no-reserve auction with bidding starting at $99.99. Within hours, the listing caught the attention of scholars worldwide who blogged about it and shared links to the auction on social media. While manuscripts do appear on eBay from time to time, this was not a typical listing. In contrast to the crude forgeries that surface on the site, the Willoughby Papyrus looked authentic. It also did not resemble the illicit papyri that occasionally appear on eBay, unmounted, unidentified, and often sprinkled with a suspicious layer of dirt, as if recently pulled from the sands of Egypt.

Instead, the Willoughby Papyrus sat in an older professional mount and included a label identifying it as John 1:50-51. Greek papyri of the New Testament are rare—today only 141 have been published, and among these, only about 30 contain the Gospel of John. Yet because Greek papyri tend to be the earliest New Testament manuscripts, they are among the most important for establishing the original words written by the New Testament authors. Could this be an authentic and legitimate papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John? The listing seemed too good to be true, but I had to learn more about the manuscript.

I couldn’t let the papyrus slip into private hands. Something like this belongs at a university or in a museum, where it can be properly conserved and made available to experts for study.
—GEOFFREY SMITH

I immediately contacted the seller. During the course of a lengthy email exchange, a fuller story began to emerge. The owner discovered the papyrus in his attic. It was among a jumble of papers he’d inherited years earlier but only recently decided to look through. In the owner’s words, “I recently took time to go through [the suitcase] and [the papyrus] fell out from a stack of letters/papers.” The owner thought it would fetch a few dollars on eBay, but he was not prepared for the onslaught of attention it received. His inbox was flooded with emails from scholars like me trying to find out more about the papyrus, as well as wealthy private collectors offering exorbitant amounts of money to “buy it now.”

Harold R. Willoughby’s manuscript collection inventory
Inventory of Harold R. Willoughby’s personal manuscript collection, written in his own hand.

The seller also disclosed that the papyrus once belonged to Harold Willoughby, professor of early Christian origins at the University of Chicago. Throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Willoughby worked with his colleague Edgar J. Goodspeed to acquire manuscripts from dealers and private collectors in the United States and abroad for the University of Chicago. Willoughby would even recall an experience that “brought gangland suddenly near,” when he purchased for the university a Greek lectionary that was formerly used as an oath Bible for patrons of Colosimo’s Cafe, a Chicago restaurant owned and operated by notorious mobster Jim Colosimo. The seller provided documentation that the papyrus belonged to Harold Willoughby, who died in 1962, which meant that the fragment fully complied with the 1970 UNESCO convention of cultural property.

I couldn’t let the papyrus slip into private hands. Something like this belongs at a university or in a museum, where it can be properly conserved and made available to experts for study. After further discussion, the seller agreed and ended the auction before it sold. He graciously allowed me to
inspect the fragment and publish some preliminary findings.

The papyrus itself turned out to be as exceptional as the circumstances of its discovery. One particularly interesting feature is its format: The Willoughby Papyrus is the first known example of a New Testament papyrus written on a scroll. The vast majority of New Testament papyri take the form of the codex, that is, the book in its modern format.

The few New Testament papyrus scrolls that do survive are written on the back of existing scrolls. They are not scrolls by design, but instead take the form of the book they are repurposing. But the scribe of our papyrus seems to have wanted his copy of the Gospel of John to be a scroll. Christians are well known to have been early adopters of the codex, even while Jews and non-Christian Romans seemed to prefer the scroll. But since the first Jesus followers were not yet members of a distinct Christian religion, but members of a sect within Judaism, scholars surmise that there must have been a time—very early on—when New Testament writings were routinely written on scrolls. As the sole example of a Greek New Testament papyrus copied onto the front side of a scroll, the Willoughby Papyrus has much to reveal about Jewish and Christian relations in the ancient world and the history of the early Christian book.

This fragment has much to teach us about Christianity’s early centuries, and thanks to the generous support of a UT alum, the Willoughby Papyrus now has a permanent home in the Harry Ransom Center, where scholars and visitors alike can view and study this remarkable early Christian artifact.

Image: The Willoughby Papyrus, a manuscript fragment from the third or fourth century CE containing text from John 1:49–2:1.

Filed Under: Featured1, Featured2, Research + Teaching Tagged With: acquisition, Research

ABOUT GEOFFREY S. SMITH

Geoffrey S. Smith is Associate Professor, Fellow of the Louise Farmer Boyer Chair in Biblical Studies, and Director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins (ISAC) in the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

Interpreting “Fringe” in the Mel Gordon Papers

July 25, 2022 - Harry Ransom Center

Notebook page

Mel Gordon’s Notes on Expressionism with 1917 clipping, Mel Gordon Collection, Box 12, Harry Ransom Center.

by MACAELLA GRAY

In 2018, The New York Times lauded historian, curator, and writer Mel Gordon as a “drama scholar of the fringe.”

At first glance, the so-called “fringe” certainly seems to find a home in the Mel Gordon Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, with materials ranging from anthologies on erotic dance to German and French adult magazines.

Mel Gordon earned his PhD at New York University in performance studies and taught popular classes on theater at UC Berkeley throughout the 1990s. Focusing on histories of 20th-century sex and eroticism, mysticism, horror, and spectacle, Gordon wrote Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin and Horizontal Collaboration: The Erotic World of Paris, 1920-1946—earning him a reputation as a “provocative, risqué storyteller.”

Based on his book titles alone, one can see how Gordon’s language tends to sensationalize 1920s Berlin and Paris—epochs often mythologized with tales of crazed sex and loose morals. However, at the heart of Gordon’s scholarship lies a contradiction: he challenges historical mythologies as much as he contributes to them. Gordon often questions the perceived marginality of the communities and figures he writes about, including the German silent film actress, dancer, and poet Anita Berber.

[Read more…] about Interpreting “Fringe” in the Mel Gordon Papers

Filed Under: Featured1, Research + Teaching, Theatre + Performing Arts

ABOUT MACAELLA GRAY

Macaella Gray received her B.A in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and is the Visual Materials Intern at the Harry Ransom Center. Her research lies primarily in the modern and contemporary arts, with a focus on early queer histories, post-war print media, and experimental film cultures. She is also the recipient of the Ronald Schuchard Undergraduate Archival Research Prize and the John F. Newnam Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Art and Art History.

Dr. Clare Hutton: Q&A on Women and the Making of Joyce’s Ulysses

July 13, 2022 - Harry Ransom Center

Exhibition gallery

In an interview for Ransom Center Magazine, Dr. Clare Hutton explores how the exhibition, Women and the Making of Joyce’s Ulysses, investigates the important and largely unacknowledged role of women in helping Joyce’s novel gain widespread notoriety and success—including Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and Sylvia Beach.

[Read more…] about Dr. Clare Hutton: Q&A on Women and the Making of Joyce’s Ulysses

Filed Under: Authors, Exhibitions + Events, Featured1, Research + Teaching

MAPP partnership leads to collection discovery at the Center

June 28, 2022 - Harry Ransom Center

Panel of presenters in front of projection screen

From left to right: Dr. Amy Clements, St. Edward’s University; Kayleigh Voss, Hartlyn Haynes, Adrienne Sockwell, and Kristen Wilson, Ransom Center Reference GRAs. Photo by Pete Smith.

by HARTLYN HAYNES, ADRIENNE SOCKWELL, KAYLEIGH VOSS, and KRISTEN WILSON

The Ransom Center hosted the annual Modernist Archives Publishing Project two-day workshop on June 6 and 7, 2022 with the first day geared toward partner libraries and the second day open to the public. [Read more…] about MAPP partnership leads to collection discovery at the Center

Filed Under: Exhibitions + Events, Featured1, Research + Teaching Tagged With: archive

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Hartlyn Haynes, Adrienne Sockwell, Kayleigh Voss, and Kristen Wilson are Graduate Research Assistants in the Reference and Research Services department at the Harry Ransom Center. 

Winners announced for inaugural Schuchard Prize

May 17, 2022 - Harry Ransom Center

Schuchard award winners

Macaella Gray, Megan Snopik, Breigh Plat (clockwise from left)

The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin has awarded the first Ronald Schuchard Undergraduate Archival Research Prize to three outstanding researchers. The competition awards cash prizes to the top undergraduate research papers or digital projects created using primary source material from the Center’s archival collections.

“This award will recognize the incredible work that undergraduates do in our reading room and will encourage even more students to take advantage of our collections, expanding our research community, and bringing exciting new perspectives to the Center,” Director Stephen Enniss said. “The award directly contributes to our mission of supporting creative and innovative work based on these extraordinary collections.”

[Read more…] about Winners announced for inaugural Schuchard Prize

Filed Under: Featured1, Research + Teaching Tagged With: Undergraduate

Making the Banned Accessible: Digitizing the Hall-Troubridge Archive 

April 28, 2022 - Harry Ransom Center

Technician digitizing collection materials

by VEGA SHAH

The Ransom Center is home to the collection and papers of British author Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) and her partner, Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge (1887-1963), a sculptor and translator. The couple, being openly lesbian partners, are remembered as LGBTQ pioneers, with Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), making lesbianism more visible in English society, despite the banning of the novel in England.

The Hall-Troubridge papers have been digitized and are accessible online in a new digital collection. Explore more than 40,000 images of Hall and Troubridge’s papers, letters, and photos, that provide insight into their personal correspondence, as well as topics such as gender, politics, and spirituality.

[Read more…] about Making the Banned Accessible: Digitizing the Hall-Troubridge Archive 

Filed Under: Authors, Digital Collections, Featured1, Meet the Staff, Research + Teaching

ABOUT VEGA SHAH

Vega Shah is an undergraduate intern at the Harry Ransom Center and a senior at the University of Texas at Austin pursuing a B.A in Anthropology, a minor in Art History, and certificates in Liberal Arts Honors and Museum Studies. Her research interests include Islamic and contemporary art and equity in museum education and curation.

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