Papyrus 137
manuscript of the New Testament
Papyrus 137 (designated as 𝔓137 in the Gregory-Aland numbering system) is the earliest surviving manuscript of the Gospel of Mark. It is a late 2nd or early 3rd century fragment of the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark (verses 7–9 on the recto side and 16–18 on the verso side.) The fragment is from a codex and has been published in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus series as P.Oxy. LXXXIII 5345.
Description
The fragment preserves parts of the bottom five lines (recto and verso) of a leaf; which could represent the first page of a single quire codex; and which may be reconstructed as having 25 lines per page with a written area of 9.4cm x 12 cm. On the recto side, the papyrus strips are laid vertically, while on the verso side they are laid horizontally. It is the earliest surviving witness to the text that it covers; otherwise the only early papyrus witness to Mark is in six surviving leaves of Papyrus 45, dated to the 3rd Century, which nowhere overlaps with the text in 𝔓137. Letters on the verso survive clearly, but those on the recto are seriously abraded. The handwriting is in a formal bookhand which the editors propose as having the characteristics of the "‘Formal Mixed" hand (juxtaposing narrower and wider letter forms) elsewhere found in dateable documents of the later second and third centuries. The editors propose the fragments Papyrus 103 and Papyrus 77 of the Gospel of Matthew, also from Oxyrhynchus and conserved at the Sackler Library, as being the closest New Testament papyri to 𝔓137 in handwriting and date.
Particular readings
The term 'Holy Spirit' at verse 8 on the recto is shortened from πνευματι to π̣̅ν̣̅ι as a nomen sacrum.
“Papyrus 137” enters the record as manuscript of the New Testament. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Papyrus, manuscript and Testament can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 3, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q55628560. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Papyrus 137” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.