It is the year 700 CE, and a Palestinian scribe is turning his dingy little office upside down, looking for a few scraps of paper — parchment is hard to come by in the desert. Sighing, he decides not to sweat it and simply recycle older manuscripts. He picks up a dusty manuscript lying on a shelf and begins to erase it, hoping to reuse it for his work.
But little does he know the significance of his actions. After all, what he's so casually erasing is the book of Gospels inscribed with Syriac text, a language of ancient Syria. And it would one day turn out to be one of the earliest translations of the Gospels, made in the 3rd century and copied in the 6th century.
Fast forward to the present day, a medievalist from the Austrian Academy of Sciences has now deciphered the lost words on this layered manuscript, a so-called palimpsest. And what's perhaps most fascinating about this discovery is that Grigory Kessel managed this feat by shining ultraviolet light on the sheets — a technique where visible light is blocked, allowing the subject to be illuminated with UV rays only.
Researchers have left no parchment unturned to recover ancient Christian texts that were erased and written over by scribes in the 4th-12th centuries CE. And under the Sinai Palimpsests Project, they're working to make centuries-old valuable palimpsest manuscripts of St. Catherine's Monastery in Egypt readable again and available in digital form. In fact, 74 manuscripts have been deciphered already.
However, old Syriac translations of the gospels seem to be scarce. Only two such manuscripts have been uncovered yet, with fragments from the third manuscript recently identified.
And the 'hidden chapter' of the biblical text found by Grigory Kissel, which dates back 1,750 years, is only the fourth textual witness of the bible in old Syriac. Further, the ultraviolet photography that was used to view it revealed that this was the third layer of text, meaning it was a double palimpsest.
As the only known remnant of the fourth manuscript that attests to the Old Syriac version, this fragment offers a gateway to the very early phase in the history of the textual transmission of the Gospels.
For example, while the original Greek of Matthew chapter 12, verse 1 says: "At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath; and his disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat," the Syriac translation says: "[...] began to pick the heads of grain, rub them in their hands, and eat them."
Moreover, the Syriac translations were produced at least a century earlier than the oldest surviving Greek manuscripts, including the Codex Sinaiticus!
"This discovery proves how productive and important the interplay between modern digital technologies and basic research can be when dealing with mediaeval manuscripts," said Claudia Rapp, Director of the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
The findings of this study have been detailed in New Testament Studies and can be accessed here.
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