VERY ANCIENT FRAGMENT OF A PAPYRUS ROLL, WITH PORTIONS OF THREE PSALMS WRITTEN IN GREEK
'Only Luke is with me' (2 Timothy iv. 11) wrote the Apostle from his Roman prison. The beloved physician was faithful to his great leader to the last.
How did Luke write, and what did his two books look like when he had finished them? He wrote on papyrus—that is, on reed paper, using an ink like black paint, and a reed pen.
As far as we know no portions of the Bible-books of this date are left in the world, but in the beginning of the year 1911 a large number of very ancient fragments of Bible-books were discovered in Upper Egypt, and with these was part of a translation of Luke's Book of the Acts—just shreds and tatters of fragile papyrus paper, the remains of what is up till now the oldest copy of the New Testament in the world.
Amongst the ancient manuscripts kept in the British Museum are old old copies of Homer's War poems, and here also are stored the precious fragments of the chronicles of that other great Greek writer—St. Luke.
Homer's book belongs to the forgotten past, for the heathen religion of Greece is to-day as though it had never been.
But the writings of St. Luke are as full of blessing and power as ever, and the war he wrote about grows more wonderful every day. For Christ, the Son of God, came down from Heaven not to fight against men as the false gods of the old Greeks were supposed to have done, but to fight and conquer for men, to lift up the fallen, and to win for the victors a crown of deathless glory.
The Apostle Peter, in contrast to St. Luke, was only a fisherman when the Lord bade him leave his boat and his nets to preach and teach the Gospel.