A story is making the rounds of the blogging world of a manuscript discovery from the Deir al-Surian monastery in Egypt. The story (found HERE) focuses on the recovery of a missing page of a codex housed at the British Library. The missing page, a list of Christian martyrs from Edessa in 411, was recently found beneath a floor in the monastery. But what is most interesting about the story (to me, at least) is the following:

The fragments were among hundreds discovered beneath a floor in the Deir al-Surian, which is itself a treasure trove of ancient books. Dr Brock and his colleague, Dr Lucas Van Rompay of Duke University in North Carolina, are now working on the first catalogue of the many manuscripts that are more than 1,000 years old.

Let’s hope some apocryphal texts will be found among the manuscripts.

Roger Pearse at Thoughts on Antiquity drew my attention to recent additions of on-line manuscript catalogues to the Syriac Studies Reference Library. This information is very useful to those of us who study Syriac apocryph–myself included, as I continue my work on a critical edition of the Syriac version of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

I discussed a few weeks ago the topic of palimpsests in CA studies. Anyone interested in the topic may want to see the recent publication J. Gippert, Palimpsest Codex Vindobonensis georgicus 2 (Monumenta Palaeographica Medii Aevi: Series Ibero et Caucasia. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). This Old Georgian codex contains a number of biblical, hagiographical, and homiletic texts, but the text of interest to us is a version of the Protevangelium of James from the fifth to the eighth century. More than 95 % of the codex has been deciphered.

While we're on the topic of technology and manuscripts, take a look at this video currently making the rounds on the internet (sorry, I don't know how to embed the video in this post). It is a skit from a Norwegian TV show.

Recently I finished reading Reviel Netz’s and William Noel’s The Archimedes Codex: Revealing the Secrets of the World’s Greatest Palimpsest. The book details the acquisition of a thirteenth-century Christian prayer book that contains, as its underwriting, several works by the third-century BCE Greek mathematician Archimedes. One of these works, Floating Bodies, is found in no other source. But in some places the underwriting is incredibly difficult to read. The Archimedes Codex describes the pioneering scientific efforts to recover Archimedes’ works.

The book led me to thinking about palimpsests of CA texts and the possibility that advances in reading palimpsests could aid in recovering our texts. I am aware only of one such palimpsest: Vindobonensis 563, an eighth-century manuscript written over a fifth-century collection of the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and selections from the Gospel of Matthew. Constantin von Tischendorf was the first scholar to see the manuscript and was able to decipher much of it; Guy Philippart (“Fragments palimpsestes latins du Vindobonensis 563 [V^e siècle?]: Évangile selon S. Matthieu, Évangile de Nicodème, Évangile de l’enfance selon Thomas”, AnBoll 90, p. 391-411) revealed more of it in 1972.

The manuscript is important for the study of Infancy Thomas as it is the earliest known source we have for the text; unfortunately, only a handful of pages from the original manuscript were used by the eighth-century recycler. Virtually all of this material is readable (save for a few lines on two folios). The Gospel of Nicodemus material is far more extensive, stretching over 35 folios. Philippart was able to read more of the text than Tischendorf but did not include the new readings in his article—he believed it needed an edition all its own. I am not aware of such an edition, though the AELAC team working on an edition of Nicodemus may be using it.

Are there other palimpsests of CA texts? Is it possible to use the new technology to recover their contents with greater accuracy?

But there is another option. According to an article in the International Herald Tribune, St. Louis University has copies of “nearly half of the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts” from the Vatican archives. The University has been stockpiling the material (on microfilm) since the 1950s; the collection even includes a copy of the Codex Vaticanus. I wonder: perhaps a microfilm order from SLU would arrive far quicker than from the Vatican.

Stephen Carlson of Hypotyposeis has provided a helpful update on the Oxyrhynchus story. He provides a link to Daniel B. Wallace at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts who has this to say:

The sensational report in the school newspaper of Bighham Young University about a new ending for Mark 16 in an early papyrus has circulated the Internet rather rapidly. Other publications have picked it up and the news has continued to spread, with scholarly speculation over what the ending might be.

All of this is premature, however, and in fact is based on faulty reporting. The scholars involved in the “discovery” have written a disclaimer and have asked me to post it. The three professors working on multi-spectral imaging of ancient manuscripts at BYU are Thomas Wayment, Roger Macfarlane, and Stephen Bay. I contacted Professor Macfarlane because of my interest in the discovery. He told me that it was a journalistic mistake. I would simply ask that the scholarly community recognize that not only is there no such manuscript to speculate about, but that the reputations of these professors should not in any way be impugned by this unintentionally false report of their findings. Please read their retraction for yourselves to see what has actually transpired. As all of us who teach know, our students don’t always hear exactly what we are saying. This is simply just another classic case of that, but the ramifications for the reputation of these gentlemen could have been unfortunate if they had not published a retraction of what was written. Please read the pdf file for yourselves. It’s simply called “retraction.”

We have not found a new text of Mark 16 for either the shorter or longer ending. In fact, we are not with any manuscripts or papyri of Mark 16. We have not found missing text associated with Luke, although we are working with new images of P.Oxy. 2382, which does demonstrate that Luke 22:43-44 are missing in an important early papyrus witness. Other significant errors include the claim that we have “found” an unidentified Christian apocryphal gospel and that we are working on a different version of two verses of Philemon.

Last week Stephen Carlson of Hypotyposeis and other bloggers mentioned an article from the BYU (Brigham Young University) web site about new technology that could aid in reading some of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (“Mysteries of Ancient Egyptian Papyri Revealed,” Feb. 14). It appears now that the article was either a case of an overzealous (and confused) reporter or an intentional attempt to mislead readers. The article has been removed from the web site but here is the excerpt that appeared on Carlson’s blog:

When I first read the article I thought the “discoveries” made using this technology too good to be true. A new ending to Mark? Justification for including the infamous tears of blood scene in critical editions of Luke? (if that is what is implied) This sounded to me like the Christmas wish of a King-James Fundamentalist. So I decided to wait on the news for a few days before posting it here.

It seems I was wise to do so. The Ars Technica web site features a discussion of a related (and similarly overzealous) article published in The Independent several years ago. Here is an excerpt:

The author of the post raised some important questions about the report including that it implies the Oxyrhynchus papyri are a horde of texts that are intact but simply too filthy to read, when in fact the problem with the remaining unpublished papyri is piecing the many fragments of them together to form coherent texts.

Another article, this time from the Washington Post, confirms that there is indeed a BYU team using multispectral imaging on the Oxyrhynchus papyri, after having used it successfully on the horde from Herculaneum, papyri which were carbonized by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. The results from using the technology on the Oxyrhynchus papyri will be rather small, recovering lines of text from underneath dirt rather than entire texts or considerable portions of “lost” texts. The Oxyrhynchus On-line site also describes the BYU project and includes an example of the dramatic results of the technology.

Perhaps the BYU reporter combined news of the Oxyrhynchus project with the information about Herculaneum and his own wish list of lost texts. For now, at least, there is no new apocryphal gospel from Oxyrhynchus. And this story should be seen as a cautionary tale when it comes to reading (and transmitting) unsubstantiated news about manuscript discoveries that are too good to be true.