The Dishna Papers 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 (1899β1971). 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 papyri, now partially conserved in the
Bodmer Library, 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. Books V and VI of Homer's
Iliad (P1), and three comedies of
Menander (
Dyskolos (P4),
Samia and
Aspis) appear among the Bodmer Papyri, as well as gospel texts:
Papyrus 66 (P66), is a text of the
Gospel of John, dating around 200 AD, in the manuscript tradition called the
Alexandrian text-type. Aside from the papyrus fragment in the
Rylands Library Papyrus P52, it is the oldest testimony for John; it omits the passage concerning the moving of the waters (John 5:3b-4) and the
pericope of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11).
π72 is the earliest known copy of the
Epistle of Jude, and 1 and 2 Peter.
Papyrus 75 (P75) is a partial codex containing most of Luke and John. Comparison of the two versions of John in the Bodmer Papyri with the third-century
Chester Beatty Papyri convinced Floyd V. Filson that "...there was no uniform text of the Gospels in Egypt in the third century." There are also Christian texts that were declared
apocryphal in the fourth century, such as the
Infancy Gospel of James. There is a Greek-Latin
lexicon to some of Paul's letters, and there are fragments of
Melito of Sardis. Among the works is
The Vision of Dorotheus, one of the earliest examples of Christian hexametric poem, attributed to a Dorotheus, son of "Quintus the poet" (assumed to be the pagan poet
Quintus Smyrnaeus). (
P29). The earliest extant copy of the
Third Epistle to the Corinthians is published in
Bodmer Papryri X. The collection includes some non-literary material, such as a collection of letters from the abbots of the monastery of Saint Pachomius, raising the possibility that the unifying circumstance in the collection is that all were part of a monastic library. The latest of the Bodmer Papyri (P74) dates to the sixth or seventh century. == Vatican acquisition ==