Discovery of 42 lost pages from an ancient new testament manuscript

Credit: University of Glasgow

#manuscript

An international team of researchers, led by Professor Garrick Allen of the University of Glasgow, has recovered 42 pages that were lost from one of the most important manuscripts of the early centuries of Christianity: Codex H

This finding represents an impressive advance for the study of the Bible and ancient history.

Codex H is a 6th-century copy of the Letters of Saint Paul.

It disappeared from history in the 13th century when it was dismantled at the Great Lavra Monastery on Mount Athos, Greece.

At that time, the pages were reused in a practical way: they were re-inked and used as reinforcement in bindings and endpapers of other books.

Because of this, the remaining fragments ended up scattered in libraries in Italy, Greece, Russia, Ukraine, and France.

The secret to the recovery came from a curious detail from the past.

The researchers knew that the manuscript had been re-inked at some point.

The chemicals in the new ink left “printing” marks on the facing pages, creating mirrored images of the original text – like a subtle ghost spread across multiple sheets.

To the naked eye, these marks were almost invisible, but modern imaging techniques have allowed them to be revealed clearly.

In partnership with the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL), the team used multispectral imaging to analyze the remaining pages.

This method allowed them to recover the “ghost” text that no longer physically existed, extracting several pages of information from each preserved sheet.

To confirm its authenticity, they also performed radiocarbon dating in Paris, which proved the parchment’s origin in the 6th century.

The recovered text contains known parts of Paul’s Letters, but the value of the discovery goes far beyond that.

It reveals how people in the 6th century organized and understood the Scriptures.

For example, it shows the oldest known chapter lists for the Pauline letters, which were quite different from the division we use today.

Furthermore, it allows us to closely observe the work of the copyists: how they corrected errors, made annotations, and interacted with the sacred texts.

The physical state of the material also tells the story of “medieval recycling”: how sacred works were disassembled and reused when they became worn out.

For Professor Allen, finding any new evidence of such an important manuscript would already be extraordinary.

Recovering 42 pages is monumental.

This helps to better understand not only the biblical content, but also the life of early Christian communities, their reading habits, and the fate of books throughout the centuries.

Now, the public and scholars can access these pages again.

A printed edition of Codex H is being prepared, and a complete digital version is already available for free on the website codexh.arts.gla.ac.uk.

After centuries hidden away, these pages are once again telling their story and enriching our knowledge of the roots of Christianity.

This discovery shows how current technology can surprisingly retrieve the past, uniting science, history, and faith in a collaborative effort that continues to reveal secrets kept for over a thousand years.

Published in 04/30/2026 00h13

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Text adapted by AI (Grok) and translated via Google API in the English version. Images from public image libraries or credits in the caption. Information about DOI, author and institution can be found in the body of the article.

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