[squirt]

of the entire New Testament, what is the earliest portion that we possess today? that would be a fragment of the gospel of John, containing material from chapter 18, it has 5 verses - 3 on one side, 2 on the other - and it measures about 2 and 1/2 x 3 and 1/2 inches, how was it discovered? it was purchased in Egypt as early as 1920, but it sat unnoticed for years among similar fragments of papri, then in 1934 C. H. Roberts of Saint John's College, Oxford, was sorting through the papri at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England, he immediately recognized this as preserving a portion of John's gospel, he was able to date it from the style of the script, he concluded it originated between AD 100-150, lots of other prominent paleographers, like Sir Frederic Kenyon, Sir Harold Bell, Adolf Deissmann, W. H. P. Hatch, Ulrich Wilcken, and others, have agreed at least to the reign of Emperor Trajan, which was AD 98-117, that was a stunning discovery, the reason: skeptical German theologians in the last century argued strenuously that the fourth gospel was not even composed until at least the year 160 - too distant from the events of Jesus' life to be of much historical use, they were able to influence generations of scholars, who scoffed at this gospel's reliability, here we have, at a very early date, a fragment of a copy of John all the way over in a community along the Nile River in Egypt, far from Ephesus in Asia Minor, where the gospel was probably originally composed, this finding has literally rewritten popular views of history, pushing the composition of John's gospel much closer to the days when Jesus walked the earth