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.

New Manuscript Discoveries in Athens by CSNTM

Rory P. Crowley, Intern Coordinator for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM), reports about the (re-)discovery of four Greek New Testament MSS during an expedition to Athens in May:

During this time, we discovered a twelfth-century Gospels minuscule! After that, Wheatley and Wallace discovered another two Gospels manuscripts. Later, J.D. and Paul found fragments of a manuscript of Acts in the back of a Gospels manuscript. Altogether, this expedition yielded four New Testament manuscript discoveries!

Read the whole story on the CSNTM blog.

CSNTM Expedition 2010 to Greece and Romania

This year's CNSTM expedition when four people, Jeff Hargis, Peter Gurry, Dan Wallace and Noah Wallace, travelled to Rome and Greece to photograph Greek NT MSS in Romania and Greece is just over. Although it started with serious problems with cancelled flights due to the Islandic volcano, and continued with the riots in Athens, it apparently turned into a great success in the end. The community of textual criticism is now eagerly waiting to hear about the new findings. We have already learnt about one previously uncatalogued lectionary, and a bird just whispered in my ear that we can expect many more such MSS, including more news about the pericope of the adulteress, which has been discussed recently on this blog.

If you want to follow and support the important work of CSNTM you can join its Circle of Friends – read more here.

Manuscript Travel to Turin 2010

Under "News" in the Virtual Manuscript Room of Münster Martin Fassnacht of the INTF has just published a fascinating report of his travel to photograph MSS in Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria Torino in Italy. Click on "zeigen" (show) to read the whole story, and do check out the accompanying photo gallery including nice images of the city, the folks and the manuscripts – the actual high-res. images of the MSS will be uploaded in the next days.

Also read my earlier report here.

Fifty Digitised GNT MSS and a New Blog

British Library curator Juan Garcés notified me that he has started a new blog, The Digitised Manuscripts Blog (which of course has now been added to our blogroll). The focus is to report on various issues related to the current digitisation projects at the British Library, in particularly the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

The British Library described the project in their "Annual Reports and Accounts 2008/2009":

Digitisation of Greek manuscripts

We are very grateful to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation for making it possible for us to undertake a project to digitise 250 of our Greek manuscripts to make them fully accessible to researchers around the world through the internet. We will also create catalogue records for each item and create a website that will enable researchers to search using key words and interactive technology that will allow them to upload notes and collaborate with other researchers virtually. We aim to launch the website in summer 2010. We are continuing to fundraise to enable us to add the remaining Greek manuscripts and papyri to the site in the longer term.

In a special post yesterday, "Greek New Testament Manuscripts", Juan announced that in the first phase of that project fifty Greek New Testament manuscripts will be digitized (!): one majuscule from the 7th century; 33 minuscules from the 10th-14th centuries; and 16 lectionaries from the 11th-14th centuries. I don't know, but maybe the majuscule is Codex R (027)? [Update: confirmed by Juan Garcés in the comments.]

Joy to the world: more digitized GNT MSS.

Greek New Testament Manuscripts in Turin That Survived the Fire

When I worked on Jude I had access to a microfilm collection assembled by the Swedish scholar C. A. Albin in the 50-60's. There I came across a microfilm of Greg.-Aland 613 = Turin, Bibl. Naz. C. V. 1, that contained Jude 21-25 followed by a copy of the third century tract, On the Twelve Apostles traditionally ascribed to Hippolytus. According to the Kurzgefasste Liste this MS had been destroyed in a fire, referring to the severe fire of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin in 1904 that destroyed thousands of books and MSS. I also found a letter from a librarian that was enclosed with the microfilm, saying that this fragment was the only thing left of 611, 612 and 613.

Last year at the SBL in Rome, I met Matteo Grosso for the first time. He presented a paper in our Working with Biblical Manuscript unit. Then I met him again in New Orleans where he presented an improved version of the same paper. Since Matteo is from Turin, I suggested to him that he should visit his library and examine the GNT MSS there. I told him there would probably be some suprises. He agreed. Then, not much later, Martin Fassnacht of the INTF in Münster, by chance told me he was going to Turin to examine and photograph the MSS there(!) This was of course a win win situation since Matteo could then help him out in various ways, which he did.

I was also able to report to Martin everything I knew about the MSS there, and that was probably helpful, because at first they could not locate C.V.1 at all, but I told him it should be there, because it had been extant long after the fire. And, lo and behold, they were able to locate this exciting box containing 85 fragments! So now, I suspect we are in for more than what was on the microfilm I had examined.

Photo by M. Fassnacht (Februrary 2010)









There are likely to be many other surprises — there were other boxes with many fragments of various MSS - but the material now has to be properly examined and Martin will write a full report. There will be another visit to Turin to shoot some remaining MSS, and the photos will successively be uploaded to the Virtual Manuscript Room starting soon. (Martin, by the way, is one of the developers of the VMR.)

It is very nice to be able to be assist on a distance. Some time ago I was able to tip Dan Wallace and his team about an unregistered MS on Patmos when they were there. I had come across that one in a Danish microfilm collection.

Let's do our best to support these initiatives!

Travellers Conservation Copy Stand

The Friends of CSNTM newsletter reports that the the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscript (CSNTM) has received a donation that allows them to purchase their own The Traveller’s Conservation Copy Stand. The stand is the best availabe tool to protect the manuscripts as they are photographed. With the copy stand the CSNTM will apparently be able to cut costs for the average manuscript photography with one third (appr. $1000). The newsletter also reports that photography expeditions to the Bavarian State Library in Munich, Germany and to the Byzantine Museum in Athens, Greece are on the schedule.

I understand that the CSNTM staff already has some experience working with the The Traveller’s Conservation Copy Stand. In this report from June by Daniel Wallace you can see the copy stand in action in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library; a.k.a. the BSB) where the CSNTM staff took up the challenge to photograph the oversized majuscule Gregory-Aland 0142. They had then been able to borrow the tool from the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung.

The Traveller’s Conservation Copy Stand was first developed by a team of the Conservation Department of the University Library Graz (read more here). From 2006 the department is linked to a cross-department research center, VESTIGIA, at the University of Graz. For more information see the webpage of VESTIGIA Manuscript Research Centre of the Graz University.

Photographing for the CSNTM in Munich

Yesterday, Dan Wallace and his assistant JD Lemming from Dallas, and M. Fassnacht from Muenster, came to Munich, brought along all their heavy equipment and are busy to photograph about 28 NT manuscripts (mostly minuscules) of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek http://www.bsb-muenchen.de/ .This Library is one of the largest in Germany (about 10 million books; collection of many manuscripts, and about 18,000 incunabula, the largest collection of incunabula in Europe), and one of the most beautiful. This evening, I had the pleasure to take Dan and JD along on a small sightseeing tour including some Munich specialties. After photographing all day, they are working in the evening to shift / convert all the data to hard disks / DVD's etc. It's good to know that soon more high-quality photos will be available for the ongoing task of the full collation of every single manuscript.

Twenty-three New Manuscripts in Athens!

The team from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) has now finished their expedition to Athens. I hope we will see a final report from one member of the expedition, Eric Sowell, who has been blogging from Athens at Archaic Christianity. Also read our previous reports here and here.

The director of CSNTM and the expedition, Dan Wallace, has been there for nine weeks. Altogether, he reports, "we photographed nine NT MSS that Müenster has not yet catalogued; these will be posted on our site (csntm.org) in a few weeks." However, it doesn't stop with that. Altogether, the team examined 23 uncatalogued MSS in Athens (!) which means that 14 of them are yet to be photographed, provided that the holding institution gives their permission. To my knowledge, the two holding institutions which have been visited are the Benaki Museum and The National Historical Museum.

We look forward to seeing the nine photographed MSS on the CSNTM website, which means that the holding institutions have agreed to make them available. Read more about a few of them here.

To express my heartily support for the work of CSNTM I would like to conclude this post by citing an endorsement I wrote a while ago:

It is my great privilege to endorse the work of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM). Under the direction of Dr. Daniel Wallace, the CSNTM is performing a great service to the scholarly community, specifically in the area of manuscript studies and textual criticism, by their dedicated work towards the goal of producing digital photographs of extant Greek New Testament manuscripts. These physical manuscripts are scattered all around the world (including places where they have been practically inaccessible), and to make them accessible to scholars doing textual research is a crucial task. In this process, even a large number of new manuscripts, hitherto unknown, apparently have come to light and are becoming officially registered as Greek New Testament manuscripts.

In my own research on hundreds of manuscripts during the years, I realize the benefit I would have if I could access and examine original color images of the manuscript. In my experience, and judging from the samples I have seen of images from various expeditions, the CSNTM is truly on the cutting edge in terms of utilizing photographic technology to produce the best possible results. It is my hope that this enterprise will attract the support of a large number of stakeholders to embrace their exciting vision to make the manuscripts of the Greek New Testament available in digital form with the approval of the holding institutions. I am also delighted that the CSNTM cooperates with other leading institutes worldwide in this field of expertise.

Read other endorsements here.

A Photography Expedition in Greece: Hunting Down MSS

Over at Archaic Christianity we can follow Eric B. Sowell on a photography expedition to Greece with a team from the Centre for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) led by Dan Wallace. The trip will last from the 11th to the 28th (the 12th = day one in Greece) and Eric will report regularly on his blog. Interestingly, Eric says that "all of the places we will go is still an unknown." I must confess that I am a bit jealous of Eric, but I do hope his trip will be exciting and fruitful. Below I have linked to his three first reports.

Friday 10/4: Getting Ready For My First Greek NT Manuscript Photography Expedition

Monday 13/4 (about day one): Greece Trip Day 1 Travelling

Monday 13/4 (about day two): Manuscript Business in Athens