Byzantium · 6th century AD · Great Lavra Monastery, Mount Athos, Mount Athos, Greece
Imaging recovers 42 lost pages of 6th-century New Testament manuscript from Mount Athos
Codex H, a copy of St Paul's letters cut up for bindings at the Great Lavra Monastery, holds the earliest known chapter lists for Paul's letters.
Official announcement
Great Lavra Monastery, Mount Athos, Greece An international team has recovered 42 lost pages of Codex H, a 6th-century manuscript of the Letters of St Paul. Professor Garrick Allen of the University of Glasgow led the work. The text of these pages no longer survives in physical form.
The team read it from faint traces on other pages. When the manuscript was re-inked, the added ink left mirror-image copies of the writing on facing leaves.
Codex H has long been an important source for the study of early Christian texts. In the 13th century it was taken apart at the Great Lavra Monastery on Mount Athos. Mount Athos is a monastic peninsula in northern Greece, and the Lavra was founded there in the 10th century.
The monks re-inked the pages and reused them as binding material and flyleaves for other manuscripts. The surviving fragments are now scattered across libraries in Italy, Greece, Russia, Ukraine and France. Many pages were thought to be lost for good.
Lost text read from mirror images
The re-inking was the starting point. The chemicals in the new ink transferred the writing onto neighbouring sheets, sometimes several pages deep. These impressions are reversed. They are often barely visible to the naked eye.
The chemicals in the new ink caused 'offset' damage to facing pages, essentially creating a mirror image of the text on the opposite leaf
Professor Garrick Allen, University of Glasgow
To bring out these traces, the researchers used multispectral imaging. This method photographs a page under different wavelengths of light. A single surviving leaf could carry readable text from more than one lost page.
In partnership with the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL), researchers used multispectral imaging to process images of the extant pages, in order to recover 'ghost' text that no longer physically exists, effectively retrieving multiple pages of information from every single physical page.
Professor Garrick Allen, University of Glasgow
The team also checked the manuscript's age. Specialists in Paris carried out radiocarbon dating on the parchment. The results support a 6th-century date, in line with earlier scholarly assessments of Codex H.
Early chapter lists and scribes' notes
The new material lies around the biblical text. The recovered pages contain no unknown biblical passages, and their text belongs to known portions of Paul's letters.
According to the team, the pages contain the earliest known chapter lists for Paul's letters. These lists divide the letters very differently from modern Bibles. The manuscript also preserves parts of a system of notes and cross-references. This system guided readers through the letters and gave them historical context.
The scribes' corrections, annotations and layout choices show how 6th-century copyists worked on the text they were copying and responded to it. Archaeology News reported on the project. It describes this as evidence that copying scripture involved active reading and interpretation.
A book reused for its parchment
The manuscript's later history is also evidence in its own right. Parchment was valuable. The state of Codex H shows that books with religious content were dismantled and put to new uses once they had fallen into disrepair.
Allen called the recovery of this quantity of new evidence of the manuscript's original appearance "nothing short of monumental".
The Templeton Religion Trust and the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council funded the project. The Great Lavra Monastery cooperated with it.
A digital edition of Codex H, including the recovered pages, is freely available online at codexh.arts.gla.ac.uk. A print edition is forthcoming.
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