Abstract

This article reevaluates the religious context of P.Oxy. 2074, a theological hymn from the Oxyrhynchus collection at Oxford University. Although P.Oxy. 2074 is generally thought to contain a portion of Melito of Sardis’s otherwise lost treatise On Truth, the text’s language, theology, and genre strongly indicate that it does not belong to a hypothetical lost treatise of Melito, but to the corpus of Manichaean writings. P.Oxy. 2074 most likely preserves the fragmentary remains of a fifth-century Manichaean hymn. As a Greek Manichean hymn, we should welcome P.Oxy. 2074 as a new addition to the lengthy paper trail left by Manichaeans living in Egypt, a text that speaks to both the vitality of the Manichaean literary tradition and the diversity of the religious landscape of late antique Oxyrhynchus.

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