The Independent are peddling more badly-researched, even deliberately misleading, material on the Oxyrhynchus finds, this time from Tom Anderson:
A newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament indicates that, as far as the Antichrist goes, theologians, scholars, heavy metal groups, and television evangelists have got the wrong number. Instead of 666, it's actually the far less ominous 616.
There are two levels to the misreporting malefaction here: i) the fragment discovered was published way back in 1999; and ii) the number 616 has actually been known as an alternative for the number of the beast since its origination, and never forgotten. The discovery of the papyrus, catalogue number P. Oxy. LXVI 4499, over five years ago merely added another important early reference.
The evidence for the first point is all over the web. Peter M. Head reviewed the document in the 51st Tyndale Bulletin in 2000, and the official Oxyrhynchus project site at the University of Oxford even has a page about the 616 mention, last modified 20th August 2004, containing an image of the papyrus. There are a handful of other mentions strewn across the web too. Even if yet another fragment has been found with the same alternate number, which I find no evidence of, the omission of facts is still contemptible.
For evidence of the second point, we can turn to A Key to Christian Origins written by Dr. Paul Lewis Couchoud back in 1932, and as requoted by Christopher C. Warren:
The figure 616 is given in one of the two best manuscripts, C (Codex Ephraimi Rescriptus, Paris), by the Latin version of Tyconius (DCXVI, ed. Souter in the Journal of Theology, SE, April 1913), and by an ancient Armenian version (ed. Conybaere, 1907). Irenaeus knew about it [the 616 reading], but did not adopt it (Haer. v.30,3), Jerome adopted it (De Monogramm., ed. Dom G Morin in the Rev. Benedictine, 1903).
Google uncovered that much, but there's plenty more. Jon Hanna mentions, for instance, that Robert Graves wrote about the number in his book, The White Goddess, published in 1948. For an obscure fact on the role of gematria in Christian eschatology, it sure seems to get around.
Jon Hanna argues that the bad reporting is “to allow those who hold no significance to 666 to laugh at the expense of those who do” but under-reporting or lying doesn't seem like the best way to go about that, and moreover this isn't an isolated incident. If it were just an isolated incident of five year old news being reported as new, we could perhaps brush it aside. But this is just the latest in the series of bad reporting on Oxyrhynchus by the Independent, for which it has been chided by many papyrologists, and on which the best exposæ so far written is that of a New York Sun article, with further coverage from Arstechnica.
That the Independent have jazzed up stories to make them sell is nothing to write home about, but to have plainly misrepresented such an academic topic when those who are most interested in it can and have easily found out the truth of the matter is at least rather baffling.