Forty-two lost pages from a sixth-century copy of the Letters of St. Paul have been recovered by an international team of academics, the University of Glasgow said in a statement late last week.
The New Testament manuscript, also known as Codex H, was lost in the 13th century after it was disassembled at the Great Lavra Monastery on Mount Athos in northeastern Greece.
Its pages were then re-inked and reused as binding material and flyleaves for multiple other manuscripts, leaving surviving fragments scattered in libraries across the world.
Included in the recovered pages are the earliest known chapter lists for the Letters of St. Paul, which are drastically different from how they are divided today, as well as annotations and corrections belonging to sixth-century scribes.
Further, the pages shed light on how people interacted with sacred texts and how books were reused after falling into disrepair.
Using imaging to recover ‘ghost’ text from pages
“The breakthrough came from an important starting point,” noted team lead Professor Garrick Allen of the University of Glasgow. “We knew that at one point, the manuscript was re-inked.”
“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.”
Allen explained that his team had worked alongside the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL) in order to use multispectral imaging to “recover ‘ghost’ text that no longer physically exists, effectively retrieving multiple pages of information from every single physical page.”
His team also collaborated with experts from Paris to radiocarbon date the pages in order to ensure historical accuracy, he said, adding that they had indeed managed to confirm the pages' sixth-century origins.
“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," Allen concluded.
This project was made possible through funding from Templeton Religion Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), with the cooperation of the Great Lavra Monastery.