What a fun word to say! Oxy-REEN-cus. Say that at the next family dinner to impress all your loved ones. Oxyrhynchus was an ancient Egyptian City that resided along a canal that fed into the upper Nile River. During the time of Alexander the Great, this became a prosperous Hellenistic City—the third largest in Egypt. After Egypt was Christianized this became a densely populated Christian community. Over the next few centuries, Oxyrhynchus’ prominence and prosperity declined, until an Arabian invasion of Egypt in A.D. 641 sent it into disrepair. For more than 1,000 years the city dumped its garbage in the desert sands just outside the city limits. The canals dried up and buried this dump in deeper sand for another 1,000 years. Due to this city’s ancient greatness, it was home to significant amounts of information. Beginning in 1882, British archeologists began to do excavation works throughout this ancient Egyptian site. What is this all about? The vast amounts of Biblical and non-Biblical papyri discovered over the last 150 years. 

My recent study in the canon of Scripture has surfaced [pun intended] some of this study. Large amounts of secular works, along with Christian and pseudo-Christian texts have been discovered in droves. Ancient and early fragments of canonical works like Matthew, Mark, Romans, and 1 John have been found there. Some of the non-canonical fragmentary works like the Apocalypse of Baruch, Gospel according to the Hebrews, Shepherd of Hermas, and 20 sayings of the Gospel of Thomas. 

These are not the last works of antiquity we will discover that claim to be authentic. 

The practical question: what do we do when another archeological dig uncovers a lost work claiming to be Christian, works that may challenge our Bible? Do we include them in our Bible? Should we do a Bible Volume II? Do we revisit how we worship, the doctrines we teach, or who we believe Jesus to be? 

The simple answer: we do nothing. Consider how many works have been discovered in the last 150 years, works that were completely unknown before. I’m not a scholar and I can name more than ten. They will continue to unearth Gospel This and Epistle That. Don’t let that undermine your confidence in the books we have! “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, ¹⁷that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (II Tim. 3:16-17) 

Have faith, my friends, if it was required to make the man of God complete, we should believe God was, and still is, powerful enough to preserve it for us in the canon we have. 

For further study on the canon of Scripture see a special lesson I did a few years ago: “What About The “Lost Books” Of The Bible?”