A researcher from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) came across a 1750-year-old remnant of the Gospel of Matthew, which can be read in the New Testament part of the Bible, written in the ancient Syriac language, while doing research in the Vatican library, the ÖAW announced.
The newly discovered two-page fragment contains the 12th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew almost completely, said medieval researcher Grigory Kessel, who published his article about the discovery in the journal New Testament Studies. Using ultraviolet light, Kessel found the original text remnant while scanning a piece of parchment.
According to the official position of the ÖAW, the text that can now be read on the parchment could have been written by a Palestinian person over the original text about 1,300 years ago. Since in the Middle Ages parchment was in short supply in desert areas, they were reused in many cases, rewriting the original text on them.
The found remains are also extraordinary because they may be the only remaining copies of the four manuscripts written in Old Syriac, thus providing a unique opportunity to learn the details of the early spread of the Gospel.- says the ÖAW statement. According to the ÖAW, the Syriac text dates from AD 2-3. century, at least a hundred years before the creation of the earliest Greek manuscript.
Until recently, three Gospel manuscripts written in ancient Syriac were known, and the fragment now discovered is certainly the fourth such Gospel fragment.
Source: MTI/dpa
(Header image: Grigory Kessel's Twitter page)
