Unpublished Sacred Monuments

...contains the writings of Severus, the Bishop of Antioch, who was famous from the Eutychian heresy The Eutychian heresy, or Monophysitism, was a 5th-century theological dispute regarding whether Christ had one nature or two. Severus was a major figure in this movement.. Not only are the Syriac books it contains unpublished—and the Greek language in which they were first written long since lost—but beneath the Syriac text (which William Cureton*) judged to have been written at the end of the ninth or the beginning of the tenth century), there survive most precious remains of three Greek parchment books that were erased with a sponge to allow for a second writing This is a "palimpsest," a manuscript where the original text was washed or scraped off so the expensive parchment could be reused for a new text.. When William Cureton noticed these remains and examined them a bit more closely, he realized with great pleasure that one set belonged to the Gospel of Luke, another (and these quite extensive) to Homer's Iliad, and the third to some book by Euclid. After briefly explaining all of these, he added two specimens of the text: one from Luke (1:69 to 77) and the other from Homer. At that time, that most learned man intended to publish the fragments of Luke as well as those of Homer. Later, however, pressed by the care of handling other books, especially Syriac ones, he published only the Homer from those Greek palimpsests. I first saw the other part—that is, the fragments of Luke—in the autumn of 1849. At that time, though I strongly desired to work on publishing them, Cureton had not yet abandoned his plan to do so; nevertheless, with the constant goodwill he showed toward me, he allowed me to use the various readings he had already transcribed and to examine the codex An ancient book composed of handwritten pages bound together, rather than a scroll. myself. I mentioned this in my editions of the New Testament in 1850 and 1854. However, when I learned from Cureton’s letters that he was so occupied with other labors that he no longer planned to publish the Greek palimpsest remains of Luke, I made an effort to return to London as soon as possible. When this happened, in early 1855, I considered nothing more important than to investigate the Greek of Luke lying hidden beneath the Syriac text of Severus. The labor of investigation was no small task, especially since the sky was much more often cloudy than clear, and the rules of the British Museum did not allow faded letters to be restored anywhere by pouring chemical solutions In the 19th century, scholars often used chemicals like "reagents" to briefly make faded ink visible, but this often permanently stained or damaged the parchment.. Nonetheless, I succeeded in reading almost everything—except for a few lines of one page (see page 85 below)—and only rarely did any doubt remain about the true reading of the manuscript.

Now I must briefly describe the technical arrangement of the codex. The Greek book, which seems to have once contained only the Gospel of Luke, was originally in a quarto format A format where the parchment sheets are folded twice to create four leaves (eight pages).; when it was converted to an octavo format A smaller format where sheets are folded three times to create eight leaves. by the Syriac scribe, damage was done—mostly by cutting away the margins of the parchment and, in places, the text itself. The parchment does not excel in thinness compared to other manuscripts of such great antiquity. The ink is brown, not of a yellowish color. The text, as accurately represented in this edition, is written in two columns on each page; twenty-five lines are placed in each column. The handwriting is in uncial script, of the type we know was mostly used in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. It therefore features square and rounded letter forms, full and not yet stretched in height. Indeed, the size of the individual letters slightly exceeds that found in most of the oldest manuscripts, even in the fragments of Homer discovered in the same codex of Severus. In this respect, it most closely resembles four manuscripts, three of which I have edited myself and the fourth of which I am about to edit. These three are: 1. the Gospel remains on parchment...

*) See the previously cited work, page XXX:

„in all probability the volume formed a part of the collection which was deposited in the
monastery of St. Mary Deipara by Moses of Nisibis, the Abbot, when he returned from Bagdad in A. D. 931. This
would refer the date of the transcript to the end of the ninth, or the beginning of the tenth century at the latest.“