Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Codex Leaves

3 of 33 entries in Textual Witnesses. Click any to see everything it connects to.

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What survives of a book is very often not the book. Bindings fail, leaves are cut out and sold separately, and a volume broken up by a dealer can end its life as single sheets scattered across a dozen libraries. A few leaves are still evidence: the script, the ruling and the layout can be placed, the parchment itself can be radiocarbon dated, and what is written on them can be compared with the same passage elsewhere. What a fragment cannot tell you is what stood on the pages that are gone, so an honest entry says what the leaves carry and stops there. Detached leaves are grouped apart from whole books for that reason, and not because they matter less.

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Three Leaves and Fragments Surviving From Codices Otherwise Lost, One Quranic and Two Christian

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Codex Leaves gathers three items that are not complete codices but everything that survives of one, a single leaf, a small cluster of leaves, or a fragment cut from a once larger book, and it is this partial survival, not any shared subject matter, that separates the grouping from Codices, which the atlas reserves for volumes substantially whole.

The Birmingham Quran Manuscript is two parchment leaves carrying parts of three surahs in the sloping Hijazi hand of the earliest Arabic book hands, misfiled for decades in Birmingham's Mingana Collection until a doctoral student noticed the two hands did not match. Radiocarbon dating at Oxford placed the parchment between 568 and 645 CE, a range announced in 2015 that drew worldwide attention, though what was dated is the skin rather than the ink, and the writing may be considerably younger than the leaves it sits on.

Papyrus 46 is an incomplete papyrus codex of nine Pauline epistles in Greek, its surviving leaves divided today between two separate collections. Its ordering is itself evidence: it places Hebrews directly after Romans, ahead of First Corinthians, treating it as one of Paul's own letters rather than setting it apart, a detail textual critics read as showing how early some churches accepted Hebrews into the Pauline corpus.

Rylands Library Papyrus P52 is smaller still, a scrap some nine by six centimetres carrying verses from the eighteenth chapter of John's gospel, acquired on the Egyptian antiquities market and identified in 1935. On the dating its first editor proposed it is the earliest surviving fragment of any New Testament text, a claim resting on a handful of square centimetres of papyrus.

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