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Document Details : Title: Papyrus Egerton 2 and the Healing of the Leper Author(s): NEIRYNCK, F. Journal: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses Volume: 61 Issue: 1 Date: April 1985 Pages: 153-160 DOI: 10.2143/ETL.61.1.556302 Abstract : The editors, two papyrologists of the British Museum, have presented this text in 1935 as a tradition variant of the Synoptic account of the healing of the leper: "One tradition, that represented by the Synoptists, remembered the prostration of the leper before Jesus and the touching of him by the latter ; another, that represented by 1 [i .e. Egerton 2], while dropping these points, retained (what the other ignored) the account given by the leper of the way in which he contracted the disease". This view has received the support of some form critics : "It may well be that the story had taken different forms in the oral tradition, and that it reached the author of the `Unknown Gospel' in a form different from that which it took in the tradition underlying Mark, which is itself the basis of all the canonical reports". However, the predominant reaction of New Testament scholarship was rather negative . The account of the man who "was travelling in the company of lepers and eating with them in the inn" and the order to show himself "to the priests" (in the plural) indicate that it is not an early Palestinian tradition, and the dependence on the canonical Gospels (the writer used them perhaps from memory) is generally accepted as the most adequate explanation of the resemblances. |
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