An incomplete chart of papyrus coverage for the N.T.

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By the fourth century, Sinaiticus covers the entire New Testament, and Vaticanus nearly does so again. In the fifth century, Alexandrinus also covers most of the New Testament. So, for the purposes of the present exercise, I'm really only interested in papyri from before the fourth century. For completeness, I've also included papyri whose century is marked as (III/IV) in NA28. Those might be third-century papyri.

I put together the chart below, which is complete for all the papyri listed in the appendix to NA-28. Unfortunately, as this started out as a little personal project I picked away at in bits and pieces of free time, I sometimes pulled data from the INTF website and sometimes from Nestle-Aland. My impression is that the two will be nearly identical, but still -- looking back, I now wish I had worked from a single source. Perhaps one day I will go back and straighten that out, but it shouldn't change the general picture.

When NA28 or INTF list a date as "c.a. 300" or the like, I record that as (III/IV) or the like. If a verse is covered at all, even only a single letter, I count it as covered by a particular manuscript. So the chart below covers verses that are covered even partially; it is not a chart of verses which are covered in full. In the case of a "tie" -- say if a particular verse is covered by two different third-century manuscripts, and nothing earlier -- then I will only record one of the manuscripts as the "manuscript of earliest coverage". So the idea is to get a sense of how early a given verse is covered in the manuscript record; not how many times.

After working through all IIIrd or III/IVth century papyri, I performed a search at https://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/liste for manuscripts from before 399 AD, and then went through them manually to see if any papyri or other manuscripts from before the fourth century were available. This turned up probably eight papyri (P129, P130, P131, P132, P133, P134, P137, P138, P141) and six uncials (0162, 0171, 0189, 0212, 0220, and 0312). The papyri are presumably papyri catalogued after the 2012 publication of NA-28, and in principle should be included, as with the uncials.

A reader who attempts to replicate my search of the Liste may wonder why I have not mentioned P141 or 0212 above. P141 is likely just a term for a fragment of another previously named papyrus, and so I have not attempted to use it independently. 0212 turned out to be a fragment of Tatian's Diatessaron, so it is not a New Testament manuscript in the stricter sense of the word -- I have not used it either.

Finally, while I am very confident that this chart gives the correct general picture of things, I would encourage any reader to double-check, either with NA28 or the INTF Liste, any particular fact from this chart before relying on it.