Researchers Discover 1750-Year-Old Manuscript of New Testament

Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences have discovered a piece from a 1750-year-old New Testament manuscript using ultraviolet photography.

The find is an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle in the history of the Bible, and one of the oldest textual witnesses to the Gospels. The small manuscript was found in the Vatican library and is a fragment of the Syriac translation from Greek. The Syriac language is an Aramaic dialect from the ancient region of Osroene.

“The tradition of Syriac Christianity knows several translations of the Old and New Testaments,” said OeAW medieval researcher Grigory Kessel, who made the discovery. Kessel identified the biblical manuscript by ultraviolet light from within a manuscript in the Vatican Library.

Until recently, only two manuscripts were known to contain the Old Syriac translation of the gospels. One of these is now preserved in the British Library in London, another was discovered as a palimpsest in St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. Fragments from a third manuscript were recently identified as part of the Sinai Palimpsests Project.

Parchment was scarce in the desert in the Middle Ages, so manuscripts were often reused.1,300 years ago a scribe in Palestine took a book of the Gospels inscribed with a Syriac text and erased it to use for something else.

“Grigory Kessel has made a great discovery thanks to his profound knowledge of old Syriac texts and script characteristics,” said Claudia Rapp, director of the Institute for Medieval Research at the OeAW. “This discovery proves how productive and how important the interaction of the most modern digital technologies can be in basic research when encountering medieval manuscripts.”

The found fragment is currently the only known remnant of the fourth manuscript attesting to the Old Syriac version of the New Testament, offering a unique access to the very early phase in the history of the textual tradition of the Gospels. The more translations are known, the more science learns about the original text of the Gospels and how best to interpret them.