Advanced technology recovers 42 lost pages of ancient New Testament manuscript

An international team of scholars led by Professor Garrick V. Allen of the University of Glasgow in Scotland has successfully recovered 42 lost pages of one of the most important New Testament manuscripts, known as Codex H.

The universityʼs College of Arts and Humanities announced April 24 that the codex, a sixth-century copy of St. Paul’s epistles, had been partially lost after being disassembled in the 13th century at the Great Lavra Monastery, located on Mount Athos in northern Greece.

Its pages were repurposed as binding material and flyleaves in other books, causing fragments of the manuscript to become scattered across libraries in various European countries.

“The breakthrough came from an important starting point: 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,” explained Allen, as quoted by the University of Glasgow.

Thanks to a technique called multispectral imaging, researchers were able to recover texts that no longer physically exist.

This allowed them “to retrieve multiple pages of information from every single physical page,” the expert added. To ensure historical accuracy, the team also turned to radiocarbon dating analyses conducted in Paris, confirming the parchmentʼs origin in the sixth century.

Although the recovered texts contain passages already known from the Pauline epistles, the discovery offers new clues regarding how the New Testament was transmitted and understood in antiquity. In Allen’s words: “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.”

Among the key findings are ancient lists of chapters considered the oldest known for St. Paul’s epistles, which differ notably from the current division of these texts. Furthermore, the fragments reveal how sixth-century scribes corrected and annotated sacred texts, as well as the medieval practice of reusing and repurposing manuscripts once they fell into disrepair.

The project was made possible thanks to funding from the Templeton Religion Trust and the U.K.’s Arts and Humanities Research Council in collaboration with the Great Lavra Monastery.

A printed edition of Codex H will be published shortly, while a digital version is already available to the public for the first time in centuries.

As highlighted by the University of Glasgow, this discovery not only recovers a portion of an ancient manuscript but also provides a better understanding of the living history of the transmission of the Bible throughout the centuries.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.