Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/297

Rh a rich man. Such a volume would, in those days, have been in the form of a roll, provided with ornamental rollers and perhaps covered with a wrap to protect it from harm. The book form to which we are accustomed was, at first, only used for note-books, and then for cheap copies of literary works; and it was more as a note-book than as a work of literature at all that this precious leaf must have been regarded by its first possessor. Into this note-book, which was of a size to be easily carried about with him, he had copied some of the sayings of our Lord, from a collection made, we know not how much earlier—perhaps in the days when the Apostles were still alive, almost certainly before the four Gospels had come to be recognized as the sole authoritative records of our Lord's life. Some of these sayings are certainly authentic, since they are also preserved in the inspired Gospels. Some of them are not found in the Gospels; but who shall say whether they are or are not authentic? If we had the whole book which that Egyptian Christian once carried about with him, we could answer this question more surely; but we have only a single leaf, separated from the others by some chance, and preserved by the marvelous dryness of the climate and soil of Egypt amid thousands of other fragments of papyrus in the rubbish heaps of Behnesa. One leaf, with eight sayings, each prefaced by the formula, "Jesus saith"; three of them completely or substantially identical with sayings recorded in the Gospels, three of them wholly new, the other two so much mutilated as to be unintelligible; yet, small as it is, the oldest extant record of our Lord's life upon earth.

N spite of the number of excavations which have been conducted in Egypt during the last twenty years, comparatively little has yet been done for the scientific exploration of the many ancient town ruins with which the country is studded, especially along the edge of the desert. The superior attractions of temples and tombs for the excavator have caused the sites of towns to be left, except in a few notable cases, to native diggers, whether for nitrous earth or for antiquities, with the result that many of the most valuable objects found never even reach the dealers' shops, while all the historical information concerning their date and provenance is lost.