Bodmer papyri

The Bodmer Papyri are a group of twenty-two papyri discovered in Egypt in 1952. They are named after Martin Bodmer who purchased them. The papyri contain segments from the Old and New Testaments, early Christian literature, Homer and Menander. The oldest, P⁶⁶ dates to c. 200. The papyri are kept at the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, in Cologny, Switzerland outside Geneva. In 2007 the Vatican Library acquired two of the papyri, P⁷⁴ and P⁷⁵, which are kept at the Vatican Library.

The Bodmer Papyri were found in 1952 at Pabau near Dishna, Egypt, the ancient headquarters of the Pachomian order of monks; the discovery site is not far from Nag Hammadi, where the secreted Nag Hammadi library had been found some years earlier. The manuscripts were covertly assembled by a Cypriote, Phokio Tano of Cairo, then smuggled to Switzerland, where they were bought by Martin Bodmer (1899–1971). The series Papyrus Bodmer began to be published in 1954, giving transcriptions of the texts with note and introduction in French and a French translation. The Bodmer Papyri, now conserved in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, in Cologny, outside Geneva, are not a gnostic cache, like the Nag Hammadi Library: they bear some pagan as well as Christian texts, parts of some thirty-five books in all, in Coptic and in Greek. With fragments of correspondence, the number of individual texts represented reaches to fifty. Most of the works are in codex form, a few in scrolls. Three are written on parchment.

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