How an American Coal Miner Acquired Sacred Biblical Papyri

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The Chester Beatty Library was once one of Dublin’s best-kept secrets. I often found myself the only visitor when I went there as a student. The library was tucked away in the leafy Dublin suburb of Ballsbridge, on Shrewsbury Road, amidst foreign embassies and the wealthiest homes in the city. Going there was like a pilgrimage. As I passed through the doors, time dropped away. Whole eras were evoked by choice pieces in the library’s galleries. But the greatest lure for an apprentice archaeologist like me was the Chester Beatty Papyri, a collection of Greek biblical manuscripts dating as early as the late second and third century A.D.

Things have changed since then. In November 1999, the library moved to the heart of the city, inside the courtyard of Dublin Castle, where it hosts an estimated 70,000 visitors per year. A glass-roofed concourse links the 18th-century Clock Tower Building that houses the reading room with an airy new exhibition building and its two floors of galleries. At last the collection has room to expand (although 034less than 2 percent is on display at any one time). The renovation has received international praise. This year the library became the first Irish institution to be deemed European Museum of the Year.

The Chester Beatty Library and its papyri are named for the American mining millionaire Sir Alfred Chester Beatty. You can learn about the man from an audio-visual presentation that runs continuously in the ground-floor auditorium and from an exhibit dedicated to his life and collection in the first-floor gallery.

Born in New York in 1875, Beatty began his career as a mining engineer, working first as a laborer in Denver, Colorado, where he learned the day-to-day operations of a mine. By the age of 32, he had become an international mining consultant (and a millionaire). Following the death of his first wife, he moved his business to London, where he remarried in 1913. Although in Denver Beatty had been an enthusiastic stamp collector, in London he began purchasing rare books. Bouts with asthma and silicosis, common diseases for miners, led him to spend his winters in Egypt, where he and his wife bought a house near the pyramids. It was here that he acquired the papyri that would be associated with his name. Late in his life, Beatty became disillusioned with restrictive British financial policies, and in 1950 he retired to Ireland, bringing his collection with him. At his death in 1968, Beatty bequeathed his private collection to the people of Ireland.

Beatty was nothing if not eclectic. His library contains a wealth of artifacts, paintings, wood-block prints, vestments, seals, snuff bottles and furniture from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Most important of all are the books: Chinese jade books, illuminated Persian manuscripts, Qur’an manuscripts, examples of early European bookmaking, and finely printed books illustrated by artists such as Dürer and Matisse.

A devotee of biblical manuscripts might go straight to the second floor’s Sacred Gallery, dedicated to the main religions of the world, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. Take time to accustom your eyes to the dim lighting, which illuminates the books and manuscripts in their temperature-controlled showcases. Here, a video shows rites of passage from different religions, including the processions of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians at Axum, the baptism of Greek Orthodox pilgrims in the River Jordan and the circumambulation of the Ka’aba by Muslims in Mecca.

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Parts of 15 to 20 different biblical manuscripts are usually displayed in the Sacred Gallery. However, it is the Greek biblical papyri found in the 1920s among a hoard of Egyptian medical and literary texts from Dishna, Egypt (near Nag Hammadi), that attract the most attention.^a In the 1920s, Egyptologist Alan Gardiner of the British Museum was tipped off to the discovery. He alerted Beatty and encouraged him to purchase the entire collection so that it would remain intact. Beatty did so through an antiquities dealer in 1928.

The collection of twelve papyri includes seven papyri from the Greek Old Testament (called the Septuagint), some of which contain portions of several biblical books. In all, the biblical books of Genesis, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Esther and Ecclesiastes are represented. Another papyrus has the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Three papyri are from the New Testament: One, called P45 (P for “papyrus”), is dated to about 250 A.D. and is thus the earliest known manuscript containing portions of both the Gospels and Acts. P46, dating to about 180–200 A.D., is the earliest known collection of Paul’s letters (of the 208 pages in the original, only 172 survive, 112 in the Chester Beatty Library and 60 in the library of the University of Michigan); P47 is the largest single section of the Book of Revelation preserved on papyri and, with a late-third-century date, the most ancient. The final papyrus contains a collection of Egyptian love poems.

Pages from P45, P46 and P47 are always on display at the library although one cannot guarantee which page, as the display is changed regularly.

Between 1933 and 1958, Frederic Kenyon, the father of Dame Kathleen Kenyon (excavator of Jericho and Jerusalem’s City of David) and a former director of the British Museum, published the Chester Beatty papyri in 17 fascicles (volumes). In his comments on the Deuteronomy Codex, Kenyon wrote, “Unless all papyrus palaeography is at fault, this is not only the earliest manuscript in the Chester Beatty collection, but also the earliest extant manuscript of any part of 036the Bible and the earliest example of the codex form of manuscript.”

Today, it is difficult to imagine the stir these finds made. In the early 1930s, however, there was not the plethora of manuscripts that we have today. The second-century John Rylands papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John (John 18:31–33) had been discovered in 1917, also in Egypt, but it was just two small fragments and its significance as the oldest gospel fragment would not be recognized until 1935. The great Greek codexes Vaticanus and Sinaiticus^b had been dated to the fourth century—late in comparison—and the most remarkable finds of the 20th century for Bible scholarship, the Dead Sea Scrolls, were still lying undisturbed in their clay jars.

Scholars were surprised to discover that the papyri, then the earliest known Christian manuscripts of the Bible, were all in codex form (books with pages written on both sides made by sewing together folded sheets of papyrus). The early Christians were thus using the codex, rather than the more common scroll, long before it came into use for other Greek literature. Apparently, the portable codex best suited the needs of early Christian missionaries trying to spread the gospel.

Like the beautifully preserved fourth- and fifth-century Greek codexes Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, the Chester Beatty New Testament papyri represent an eastern version of the New Testament that scholars today call the Minority Text. This version is pitted against the Majority Text or Received Text (textus receptus) first compiled by the Dutch scholar Erasmus in the 16th century. The Received Text was the text found in a body of Greek manuscripts that scholars had at their disposal at that time. The antiquity of this version was corroborated by the Syriac New Testament—an early-second-century Syriac translation of the Greek New Testament that is virtually identical to the textus receptus. The King James or Authorized Version of 1611 has its origins in the textus receptus.

The Minority Text became available to biblical scholars in the 1860s, through the discovery of Codex Sinaiticus at St. Catherine’s monastery on Mt. Sinai. (About half of the original manuscript is now in the British Museum.) Two Cambridge professors, Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, proposed that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (in the Vatican Library) preserved the Greek New Testament in an almost perfect state. The New Testament section of the Revised Version (1880) was based on these—largely under the influence of Westcott and Hort.

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Ever since, opponents of this translation have maintained that the Minority Text manuscripts abound in omissions, alterations and transpositions of words and phrases. They claim that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were bad copies rejected by the Greek church because of their unreliable testimony. These manuscripts owe their survival and good state of preservation, they say, to the fact that they were not much used, compared with the much-handled fragments of the textus receptus.

Champions of the Received Text claim that the Chester Beatty papyri, too, are hostile to the traditional text. However, material from the papyri is embedded in the text of Eberhard Nestle’s translation of the New Testament (Novum Testamentum Graece) and this was used as a basis for the New Testament by the New International Version committee.

Today, the Chester Beatty Library is a meeting place for scholars discussing these textual variants. Visitors to the Sacred Galleries who are interested in how the New Testament developed should also take time to look at Ephraem’s fourth-century commentary on the Diatesseron of Tatian (120–173 A.D.). The Diatesseron is a harmony of the Four Gospels that weaves together the four accounts of Jesus’ life in one continuous narrative. The text became popular in the churches of the East, but Tatian was deemed a heretic, and his writings, including the Diatesseron, were suppressed. The only significant surviving portion is found in Ephraem’s commentary on the text.

When you have finished browsing the collection of texts sacred to the three major spiritual traditions, preserve your reflective mood by climbing up to the library’s rooftop garden. Here screens covered in climbing plants surround the deck, shutting out the city’s bustle. The serene timelessness evoked by this space is in complete harmony with the unique treasure-trove beneath your feet. It is a fitting place to contemplate the singularity of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty and his books.

The Chester Beatty Library was once one of Dublin’s best-kept secrets. I often found myself the only visitor when I went there as a student. The library was tucked away in the leafy Dublin suburb of Ballsbridge, on Shrewsbury Road, amidst foreign embassies and the wealthiest homes in the city. Going there was like a pilgrimage. As I passed through the doors, time dropped away. Whole eras were evoked by choice pieces in the library’s galleries. But the greatest lure for an apprentice archaeologist like me was the Chester Beatty Papyri, a collection of Greek biblical manuscripts dating as […]