Curetonian Syriac Gospels Digitized

I learned some good news by way of Ian Mills on Twitter today. The British Library has now digitized Add MS 14451, better known as the Curetonian Syriac Gospels. There are a handful of leaves in other places as well (see here). The images from the BL are listed as in the public domain.

Luther’s Marginalia on Erasmus’s NT Annotationes

For those interested in such things, the University of Groningen has a very nice digital version of Martin Luther’s personal copy of Erasmus’s Annotationes. Elsewhere, Luther says, “At first it was a good book, although he [Erasmus] is often devious in it.” That gives you a flavor for the marginalia too. The online edition nicely catalogues the marginal comments and gives transcriptions by Arnoud Visser. For helpful context, see Visser’s chapter in the FS for Anthony Grafton.

Luther’s marginal response to Erasmus’s hope that his reader is kind to him: “I am not a kind reader and you are a not a kind writer”

Mount Athos Repository On-line

The wonderful news has just reached me that over 3,000 digitised manuscripts at Mount Athos have been made available online (at this point only 177 are on parchment) in the Mount Athos Repository.

This is Karakoulis’s announcement (HT Hugh Houghton):

Thanks to the financial support of the European Union, a big part of the cultural heritage of the Holy Mountain of Athos has been digitised. The material includes manuscripts (Byzantine and post-Byzantine), early prints, documents and letters, material culture, photos etc. One should, however, be cautious about the “catalogue” entries: they are often not based on reliable catalogues. Some of the monasteries have undertaken the task of creating new catalogues (often with great success, such as the catalogue of Vatopedi manuscripts by Lamberz).

I hope new digitised manuscripts will be added successively to the repository including the hundreds of Greek New Testament manuscripts which are kept in the libraries of Athos.

Saving Manuscripts from ISIS

On Christmas Eve, the American news magazine 60 Minutes aired a good segment on the work of Father Columba and Father Najeeb Michaeel to save manuscripts in Northern Iraq. Father Columba runs the excellent Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. It is really sad to see the destruction left by ISIS—both material and human.

You can read and watch the report here.

The remains of manuscripts burned by ISIS

HT: John Meade

More Manuscripts from the Library of Congress (Montoro)

Earlier today, Peter Montoro alerted me to a new cache of manuscripts just published by the Library of Congress. Since Peter is more familiar with the contents than me, I asked if he would introduce them for us.

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In 1949–1950, Kenneth Clark led an expedition to Mt. Sinai and Jerusalem that microfilmed over 2500 manuscripts on behalf of the American Foundation for the Study of Man, the Library of Congress, and the American Schools of Oriental Research. A full account of the expedition can be found here.

Earlier this year, Peter Head alerted us to the fact that the Library of Congress had made the entirety of its Sinai Microfilm collection freely available online. A descriptive checklist for this collection is available here, and the full collection can be accessed here.

The Jerusalem collection of the same expedition, containing slightly over 1000 additional manuscripts, has now also been made available and can be accessed here. This collection contains manuscripts in Greek (669), Georgian (125), Arabic (96), Armenian (32), and Syriac (27), as well as smaller numbers in other languages. The checklist for this collection can be accessed here. The numbers in the checklist appear to be drawn from the earlier and quite thorough catalogue by Athanasios Papadopulos-Kerameus (in Greek).

I’ve added links to the volumes I’ve been able to locate at the bottom of the post. This catalogue can be quite useful as the descriptions in the checklist are brief to the point of cryptic and, in at least one case, simply incorrect. (E.g. Hagios Sabas 20 contains Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans, not Matthew—I’ve been in contact with the LOC and this should be corrected soon in the online description.)

Interesting drawings in Panagios Taphos 87

Though the collection is diverse in date and contents, it does contain a good number of New Testament manuscripts, as well as a very large collection of patristic writings. Included among these are some of the oldest extant copies of the Homilies of Chrysostom, dating back to the 9th century.

I’ve also been informed that the 1952–53 expedition to Athos, containing over 200 additional manuscripts is scheduled to be made available sometime this fall. As a sneak preview, the checklist for this collection is available here.

Together these three collections form an enormous body of freely available manuscripts and should prove very useful to many lines of research.

Note on Downloading Manuscript Images

The LOC interface allows you to freely download these images at full resolution in either the JPEG2000(Jp2) or Tiff formats. While it is possible to click from image to image, downloading each one, I’ve found that it saves considerable loading time to get the link to one of the Jp2 files and simply change the numbers in the browser bar to get the needed folios.

Links to the ΙΕΡΟΣΟΛΥΜΙΤΚΙ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΘΗΚΗ, by Athanasios Papadopulos-Kerameus

• ΤΟΜΟΣ ΠΡΩΤΟΣ
• ΤΟΜΟΣ ΔΕΥΤΕΡΟΣ (Both Parts)
• ΤΟΜΟΣ ΤΡΙΤΟΣ
• ΤΟΜΟΣ ΤΕΤΑΡΤΟΣ

I have not yet been able to locate a PDF of the fifth and final volume of this series.

St Catherine’s Monastery Manuscripts: Photographs online

Just a quick post to alert you to the fact that the Library of Congress has put its collection of photographs of manuscripts from St. Catherine’s Monastery online. For example, here you will find 1,081 Greek manuscripts (!). Heavenly.

(HT: Alin Suciu on FB)

Codex Sinopensis (O 023) Online

The following is another guest post from Elijah Hixson. He is currently writing a PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh on the NT purple codices about which Jerome famously said, “parchmens are dyed purple, gold is melted into lettering, manuscripts are decked with jewels, while Christ lies at the door naked and dying” (Epist. 22.32).

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The Bibliothèque nationale de France have just made some very nice, high-quality images of (most of) Codex Sinopensis available! The manuscript is gorgeous and worth a look.

Codex Sinopensis (O 023), f. 8v.

Codex Sinopensis (Paris, BnF supp. gr. 1286; O 023) is a 6th-century manuscript of Matthew’s Gospel. It is one of the purple codices—deluxe manuscripts written in gold and silver inks on parchment that has been dyed purple (on Codex Rossanensis, one of the other 6th-century purple codices, see here). Codex Sinopensis is especially magnificent, because it was written entirely in gold ink, and there are five extant miniatures painted right into the pages of the Gospel. These are some of the earliest examples of Christian art in manuscripts. Art historians know this manuscript well, and its well-trained scribe was probably in his or her prime. There are very few mistakes and corrections in this manuscript, compared to its two siblings.

Its text is not especially exciting; Codex Sinopensis has an early form of what will become the Byzantine text. What is more exciting than its text is its textual relationship with two other purple codices, N 042 and Σ 042. These three manuscripts were all copied from the same exemplar. Back in 2015 at the SBL Annual Meeting in Atlanta, I presented a paper on Codex Sinopensis and its close relationship with its two siblings as a way to test the singular readings method of determining scribal habits (summarised here).

If my quick count of the newly available images is correct, the new images include 41 of the 43 folios at the BnF, but they also include images of the lost leaf from Ukraine. Shortly after Henri Omont published the editio princeps of the 43 Paris leaves, Prof. Dmitry Aynalov sent a photograph of a 44th leaf, which was in the custody of a gymnasium (the equivalent of American high school) in Mariupol, Ukraine. The leaf has been lost since at least 1966, when Kurt Treu could only write that it was formerly in Mariupol and to my knowledge, the leaf has never resurfaced. Now, however, the BnF has digitised their black/white photograph of the lost leaf, which is grounds for rejoicing.

The two pages I could not find on Gallica are folios 11 and 30, but both of those folios include miniatures, and images of the painted sides are readily available all over the internet. Realistically, that leaves 11v and 30r as the only pages of Codex Sinopensis that are still only accessible through Omont’s pseudo-facsimile in the editio princeps. Of course, Muphy’s Law would correctly predict that if one is writing a doctoral thesis on Codex Sinopensis, one would encounter a discrepancy on f. 30r, line 9 about which the editio princeps is unclear, but that is another story.

The images are posted at Gallica (gallica.bnf.fr). The easiest way to find them, however, is through the links to each folio/bifolio at http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc24356w.

Hundreds More Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts from the British Library

Add. MS 9401 f. 3r. Genesis. Dated 1588.

Yesterday the British Library announced that more Hebrew manuscripts have now been digitized.

Our followers and readers will be delighted to learn that over 760 Hebrew manuscripts have now been uploaded to the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts. Generously funded by The Polonsky Foundation, the Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project aims at digitising and providing free on-line access to well over 1250 Hebrew handwritten books from the Library’s collection. The project, which began in 2013 is due for completion in June 2016, when the full complement of manuscripts will be available to a global audience.

I haven’t found a reliable way to filter for Old Testament manuscripts yet. If someone knows, let me know in the comments. A keyword search for “Hebrew Bible” returned 818 results but plenty of these were false hits. Just poking around though there are some beautiful Hebrew Bible manuscripts in this collection.

Add MS 11657 f. 171v. Isaiah. Dated 1300-1399.

Add MS 15282 f. 75v. Exodus. Dated 1300-1324

Add MS 9402, f. 101r. Daniel. Dated  1588.

The Chester Beatty Papyri Photographed by CSNTM

Press Release from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM):

17 September 2013



The Chester Beatty papyri, published in the 1930s and 1950s, are some of the oldest and most important biblical manuscripts known to exist. Housed at the Chester Beatty Library (CBL) in Dublin, they have attracted countless visitors every year. It is safe to say that the only Greek biblical manuscripts that might receive more visitors are Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus, both on display at the British Library.

The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) is pleased to announce that a six-person team, in a four-week expedition during July–August 2013, digitized all the Greek biblical papyri at the Chester Beatty Library.The CBL has granted permission to CSNTM to post the images on their website (www.csntm.org), which will happen before the end of the year.

The New Testament papyri at the CBL include the oldest manuscript of Paul’s letters (dated c. AD 200), the oldest manuscript of Mark’s Gospel and portions of the other Gospels and Acts (third century), and the oldest manuscript of Revelation (third century). One or two of the Old Testament papyri are as old as the second century AD.

Using state-of-the-art digital equipment, CSNTM photographed each manuscript against white and black backgrounds. The result was stunning. Each image is over 120 megabytes. The photographs reveal some text that has not been seen before.

Besides the papyri, CSNTM also digitized all of the Greek New Testament manuscripts at the CBL as well as several others, including some early apocryphal texts. The total number of images came to more than 5100.

CSNTM is grateful to the CBL for the privilege of digitizing these priceless treasures. Their staff were extremely competent and a joy to work with. Kudos to Dr. Fionnuala Croke, Director of CBL, for such a superb staff! This kind of collaboration is needed both for the preservation of biblical manuscripts and their accessibility by scholars.

Perhaps it is needless to say that this very prestigious enterprise will be important for the CSNTM and its professional reputation. Hopefully this success can open up many doors in the future so that the scholarly community and everyone interested in New Testament manuscripts can have access to state-of-the-art images of these ancient Christian artefacts and the text they carry.

Since I happened to know about this expedition beforehand, I managed with short notice to organize for a student to go along on the expedition for a few days in the summer and study one of the papyri on site for his thesis work.  He will do a guest blogpost about his wonderful experiences in the Chester Beatty Library – stay tuned.

Codex Bezae Goes Digital

The digital Codex Bezae has been released today in Cambridge Digital Library along with transcriptions of the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP). There is also a description of the codex written by David Parker. Here is the first paragraph:

There are half-a-dozen ancient manuscripts which are the foundation of our understanding of the text of the New Testament writings. Among these stands the copy known since the sixteenth century as Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis. Any manuscript which has survived from antiquity is a marvel for this reason alone, and as we explore its pages, we have a rare opportunity to explore a little of the written culture of late antique Christianity. Although in the past century some remarkable papyrus manuscripts have been recovered from the sands of Egypt, their discovery has in general served more to highlight the significance of the parchment manuscripts than to diminish it. 

Click this link to access high-resolution images and transcriptions of the IGNTP.