According to the researchers, the document dates from the first half of the 6th century. It was hidden under three different layers of text in a manuscript in the Vatican Library.
An extraordinary discovery. A previously unknown chapter of the Bible has been unearthed thanks to UV scans some 1,500 years after it was written, reports The Independent.
The “Hidden Chapter” was discovered hidden under three different layers of text in a document belonging to the Vatican Library. Scientists used ultraviolet rays technique to reveal it.
“This discovery proves how productive and important the interaction of modern digital technologies and basic research can be in medieval manuscripts,” emphasizes Claudia Rapp, Director of the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
A “single gateway” to early versions of the Gospels
According to a study by New Testament Studies, this text is one of the oldest translations of the Gospels and has some differences from the more recent versions that offer more detail.
More specifically, it is chapter 12 of the Gospel of Matthew. An unprecedented discovery that researchers say offers a “unique gateway” to the time of the earliest textual traditions of the Gospels.
“Until recently, only two manuscripts were known that contained a translation of the Gospels into Old Syriac (old version of an Aramaic dialect, editor’s note)”, emphasizes the researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences Grigory Kessel.
One of these is a manuscript currently held at the British Library in London, while the other was discovered at St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, Egypt.
An early 6th-century text
“There is no doubt that (this text) was written no later than the sixth century,” the scholars say, based on the dating of the gospels.
“Despite the limited number of manuscripts from this period, the comparisons made with manuscripts in Syriac allow us to determine a possible date of writing in the first half of the 6th century,” they specify.
The document was discovered thanks to the intuition of the researchers: that the parchment was rare at the time and could be reused, and therefore could contain hidden texts. This hypothesis was thus verified.