A researcher has uncovered a long-lost ‘hidden chapter’ of the Bible that was written around 1,750 years ago. As per a recent study published in New Testament Studies, a lost section represents one of the earliest translations of the Gospels.
The lost section on this layered text, known as a palimpsest, have now been recovered by a medievalist from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Grigory Kessel found one of the earliest translations of the Gospels, created in the third century and copied in the sixth on individual surviving pages of this manuscript.
Grigory Kessel said in a Press Release, “The tradition of Syriac Christianity knows several translations of the Old and New Testaments. Until recently, only two manuscripts were known to contain the Old Syriac translation of the gospels.” While one of them is housed in the British Library in London, another was found in St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai as a palimpsest.
Grigory Kessel used ultraviolet photography to identify the manuscript fragment as the third layer of text. It is currently thought of as the fourth textual witness Gospel. The fragment provides a special window into the very early stage of the history of the textual transmission of the Gospels because it is the sole remaining piece of the fourth manuscript that is currently known to support the Old Syriac translation.
Claudia Rapp, director of the Institute for Medieval Research at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, said in a press release, “Grigory Kessel has made a great discovery thanks to his profound knowledge of old Syriac texts and script characteristics.”