Scientists analyze lost pages of the New Testament manuscript: These are their key findings
A team of academics has successfully recovered pages from the Codex H allowing researchers to see a 6th-century copy of the Letters of St Paul.
Sometime in the thirteenth century, one of the world’s most important early New Testament manuscripts was disassembled and its parchment pages reused as binding material and flyleaves for several other manuscripts. Surviving fragments can now be found in libraries in France, Greece, Italy, Russia, and Ukraine.
Using the latest imaging techniques, an international team of academics has been able to recover 42 pages of ‘ghost’ text of the Codex H that no longer physically exists.
“The breakthrough came from an important starting point: we knew that at one point, the manuscript was re-inked,” explained lead researcher Professor Garrick Allen of the University of Glasgow. “The chemicals in the new ink caused ‘offset’ damage to facing pages, essentially creating a mirror image of the text on the opposite leaf – sometimes leaving traces several pages deep, barely visible to the naked eye but very clear with latest imaging techniques.”
The researchers were able to retrieve multiple pages of information from every single existing page using multispectral imaging to process images of the physical pages. “Given that Codex H is such an important witness to our understanding of Christian scripture, to have discovered any new evidence – let alone this quantity - of what it originally looked like is nothing short of monumental,” said Allen.
Key findings from the New Testament manuscript
Among the discoveries made from the retrieved text is the earliest known examples of an ancient list of chapters for Paul’s Letters that drastically differs from how these letters are divided nowadays.
Additionally, the fragments provide insight into how scribes in the 6th century corrected, annotated and interacted with sacred texts. As well, researchers have a better understanding of how sacred works were reused and repurposed in the middle ages once their state had fallen into disrepair to recycle scarce parchment.
You can view the recovered pages of the 6th-century manuscript on the University of Glasgow’s Annotating the New Testament website.
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