BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Paul’s Lost Words Recovered

“Ghost” traces reveal 42 lost pages of Codex H

Codex H under waves of light that are invisible to the naked eye. Courtesy University of Glasgow, photo by Damianos Kasotakis.

An international research team led by Professor Garrick Allen at the University of Glasgow recently conducted a major manuscript recovery project of Codex H. This Greek manuscript written on parchment contains a sixth-century collection of the letters of Paul. The study combined traditional manuscript studies (e.g., handwriting style or “paleography”) with multispectral imaging to detect invisible ink traces, resulting in the reconstruction of a remarkable 42 lost pages. The team also used radiocarbon dating to securely anchor the manuscript in a sixth-century milieu.

It is not surprising to learn that a collection of Pauline epistles was in circulation in the sixth century. By then, Christian communities had for generations been circulating a body of literature that was becoming increasingly more standardized. Further, Paul’s letters were among the earliest to be treated as authoritative. While the New Testament canon was not fixed at a single moment, and regional differences were a mainstay, its core texts were stabilized in most Christian traditions between the second and fourth centuries. Codex H does not emerge from a period of canon formation, then, but from early canon use, i.e., a time when Paul’s letters were already scripture.

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Codex H pages in a multispectral study space. Courtesy University of Glasgow, photo by Damianos Kasotakis.

The manuscript’s later history is just as fascinating as its origins. At some point around the 13th century, Codex H was disassembled at the Great Lavra Monastery on Mt. Athos in what is today northeastern Greece. Like other manuscripts of the medieval period, it had parchment (animal-skin) pages. These were quite valuable and were thus reused in other manuscripts, e.g., if a book fell into disrepair. Today, recycled Codex H fragments are scattered across libraries in Italy, Greece, Russia, Ukraine, and France.

Allen explained: “The breakthrough came from an important starting point: We knew that at one point, the manuscript was re-inked. The chemicals in the new ink caused ‘offset’ damage to facing pages, essentially creating a mirror image of the text on the opposite leaf—sometimes leaving traces several pages deep, barely visible to the naked eye but very clear with latest imaging techniques.”

Multispectral imaging revealed “ghost” writings from when the manuscript had been re-inked in the medieval period. The new ink covered the traces of the old ink, but those older traces were visible under ultraviolet and infrared light. In a remarkable confluence of scholarly expertise and modern technology, the team was able to extract legible letter forms and reconstruct portions of 42 pages that no longer physically survive.

Intact Codex H pages were compared with the newly reconstructed digital material, allowing researchers to match textual sequences, estimate original page order, and identify previously missing sections. The results of the project do not reveal previously unknown passages of Paul, but they do, as the researchers recount: 1) reveal how sacred works were reused and repurposed; 2) show how sixth-century scribes corrected, annotated, and interacted with sacred texts; and 3) evidence the earliest known examples of chapter lists for Paul’s letters, which differ drastically from how we divide them today.

This last point raises a fascinating question: did early Christians navigate scripture differently than modern readers do? As Allen communicated to Bible History Daily, Titus provides a great example. Modern English Bibles divide it into three chapters, but Codex H organizes it into six, each headed by a short summative title. The fifth chapter covers what readers today know as Titus 3:1–9, and its heading reads: “On the obedience of rulers, following the leniency of Christ.” This is a title that offers more than navigational help: It suggests how the readers should understand the passage before they even begin reading it. In Codex H, scribes emerge as both copyists and interpreters. Their organizational choices shaped how Paul’s words were received. Codex H’s six-chapter Titus might preserve an older tradition of reading, reminding us that the chapter-and-verse grid familiar to modern Bible readers is not the only way, or even the oldest way, to move through these texts.

This new project out of Glasgow changes the scale of evidence available for Codex H, and, alongside it, the early transmission of Christian writings. A digital edition with the reconstructed pages of Codex H is available for free at https://codexh.arts.gla.ac.uk and a print edition is forthcoming. The project also produced a public digital edition through the Codex H project site.

Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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