It is an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle in New Testament history and one of the oldest textual witnesses of the Gospels: a small manuscript fragment of the Syriac translation, written in the 3rd century and copied in the 6th century. A researcher from the Austrian Academy of Sciences discovere
About 1,300 years ago a scribe in Palestine took a book of the Gospels inscribed with a Syriac text and erased it. Parchment was scarce in the desert in the Middle Ages, so manuscripts were often erased and reused.
“The tradition of Syriac Christianity knows several translations of the Old and New Testaments,” says medievalist Grigory Kessel. “Until recently, only two manuscripts were known to contain the Old Syriac translation of the gospels.” While one of these is now kept in the British Library in London, another was discovered as a palimpsest in St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai. The fragments from the third manuscript were recently identified in the course of the “Sinai Palimpsests Project.
The fragment of the translation of the New Testament is visible under UV light. Credit: © Vatican Library The small manuscript fragment, which can now be considered as the fourth textual witness, was identified by Grigory Kessel using ultraviolet photography as the third layer of text, i.e., double palimpsest, in the Vatican Library manuscript. The fragment is so far the only known remnant of the fourth manuscript that attests to the Old Syriac version – and offers a unique gateway to the very early phase in the history of the textual transmission of the Gospels.
“This discovery proves how productive and important the interplay between modern digital technologies and basic research can be when dealing with medieval manuscripts,” Claudia Rapp says.New Testament StudiesThe Sinai Palimpsests Project aims to make the centuries-old valuable palimpsest manuscripts of St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt readable again and available in digital form. So far, 74 manuscripts have already been deciphered.
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