What did the pages hide?

Historian Hryhoriy Kessel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences announced this discovery in an article in the journal “New Testament Studies”. This is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Cambridge University Press.

Kessel said he used ultraviolet photography to see previous text under three layers of words written in palimpsest, a type of ancient manuscript that people use to erase previous writing and overwrite new text. However, traces of the original writing often remain. Scrolls were used in ancient times due to the shortage of parchment. The words were written over the material several times until several layers covered the words hidden beneath them.

The text described in Kessel’s find is a long-unseen version of Matthew chapter 12, which was originally part of the Old Syriac translations of the Bible about 1500 years ago. The scientist says he made this discovery in a manuscript stored in the Vatican Library.

manuscript shows some minor differences from modern translations of the text. For example, the original Greek version of Matthew 12:1, which is most commonly used today, says: “Then Jesus was walking in the fields on the Sabbath, and his disciples were hungry and began to gather ears of corn. to eat”. A recently discovered variant is slightly different. says: “they began to pluck the ears of corn, rub them on their hands and eat them”.

It seems that no major differences were found in the plot or they remain silent about it given that the work was done with permission from the Vatican.