This is neat:
"American's donation lets pope peruse oldest copy of St. Luke's Gospel" - Catholic News Service, 1/23/07:

The Bodmer Papyrus XIV-XV, handwritten in Greek around the year 200, contains "about half of each of the Gospels of Luke and John."

"Come in person to the library to meditate, if I may say so, in front of that which can be considered a true relic, given that the church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord."

Before the Bodmer documents were discovered in Egypt in 1952, biblical scholars relied on references to the Gospels in the writings of the early church theologians to assert that by the year 100 the Christian community had accepted only four Gospels as inspired texts.

The Bodmer Papyrus XIV-XV, containing the last two Gospels, provides concrete evidence that the four Gospels were circulating among Christian communities as a complete set by the year 200, although the twin papyrus containing the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark has not been found.

Experts have been working to restore the rough binding, which was placed as a protective covering around the papyrus in the early 300s, when the text was already too fragile to use in the liturgy.

"The research on an ancient manuscript can never be said to be finished."

Before I read Dr. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, I would have been very excited about the availability of a "pristine" third century manuscript. It is still pretty exciting but I've learned that even those early manuscripts weren't all that pristine.

via Michael Barber at Singing In The Reign