Important 6th-century Bible manuscript rediscovered

An international team of academics co-led by RCS's Kim Fowler has successfully recovered 42 lost pages from one of the world's most important early New Testament manuscripts: Codex H.

This 6th-century copy of St Paul's letters has a complex past. It was lost to history when monks at the Great Lavra Monastery on Mount Athos, Greece dismantled it in the 13th century to use as scrap paper for mending other books. Over time, many of its pages were taken from Mount Athos (often illicitly) by international travellers seeking antiquities. Today, the surviving fragments are scattered across libraries in Italy, Greece, Russia, Ukraine, and France.

Together with colleagues from the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL), the team used multispectral imaging to process images of the surviving pages of the manuscript. This enabled the recovery of ‘ghost’ text from missing pages. The traces of this missing text was left behind when the manuscript was re-inked and then closed, leaving invisible remnants of the text on once facing pages.

The team also worked with experts in Paris to perform radiocarbon dating, and were able to confirm the manuscript's 6th-century date.

"While the recovered text is part of the New Testament that we already know, the manuscript is extremely important because it is the earliest surviving example of an important annotation and formating system for Paul's letters. This discovery therefore provides us with a unique moment in biblical transmission history, illuminating the habits of scribes and readers of this manuscript in centuries past."

Photo credits: Damianos Kasotakis