Studied with the help of cutting-edge technologies, millennial biblical manuscripts teach us how one of the most widely read books testifies to the times crossed.
Does the Bible still have secrets to reveal? Apparently yes. An Austrian researcher discovered extracts from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew hidden under two other layers of text, in a document preserved in the Vatican. This work, published in April in the academic journal New Testament Studies (in English)unveiled an Old Syriac translation of part of chapters 11 and 12, buried under variants written in other languages.
These are not unpublished texts, but exceptional pieces of history which may have much to teach us. But what are we still looking for in these ancient manuscripts? How do scientists do it?
What is meant by “the Bible”?
“There are several Bibles, several types of Bibles”summarizes with franceinfo the historian of religions Katell Berthelot. “We thus list the Hebrew Bible, the Protestant Bible, the Catholic Bible, the Ethiopian Bible, the Orthodox Bible”, lists the director at the CNRS, without being exhaustive. “They do not necessarily include the same books and are not necessarily based on the same starting text.”
The Catholic Bibles currently on sale in French are generally complete: they contain both the Old and New Testaments. It is possible to buy only a New Testament, but, in this case, the title will be “New Testament” and not “Bible”, she specifies.
For its part, the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic. It is sometimes called the “Hebrew Bible”. The Qumran Scrolls, or “Dead Sea Scrolls”, discovered in 1947, include the oldest biblical writings, dating from 250 BC to 70 AD. With these texts, we have “the material existence of almost all the books of the Hebrew Bible”affirms Thomas Römer, professor holding the biblical milieus chair at the Collège de France, during a course within the prestigious establishment.
What are scientists looking for?
The study of biblical writings is at the crossroads of many disciplines: history, archaeology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology… Paleographers, specialists in ancient writings, can date a text thanks to the shape of the letters traced by the copyists. They also study the support used, the layout, the binding, the material of the cover. We speak more specifically of “codicology” to describe the study of the manuscript object and not of its content. In general, this research is part of philology, which is interested in ancient civilizations through the written materials of the time still available.
Researchers study the long life of these ancient texts, the way in which they spread, were interpreted, evolved. Copied, recopied, translated into multiple languages, the biblical texts have crossed more than 2,000 years of history and traveled to several continents. Hebrew manuscripts have been found “from England to India”reports Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, director of studies at the Practical School of Advanced Studies (EPHE).
This long journey is strewn with errors, linked to the copying by hand. A letter, a line or an entire passage can thus fall by the wayside. We then speak of“omission”. There may also be added items. In chapter 8 of the Gospel according to Saint John, the famous passage on the adulterous woman, including the quotation “let him who has never sinned cast the first stone”, does not appear in all manuscript versions of the New Testament. Specialists lean more towards a later addition to the first version of the Gospel of Saint John, advances Katell Berthelot. It turns out that copyists weren’t always just copying. Sometimes these scholars allowed themselves rewrites. A work “editorialized”summarizes the paleographer Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, according to the political, historical, geographical context.
What technologies do they use?
Let’s go back to the example quoted at the beginning of the article: a parchment bearing a text, erased then covered by another, twice. We are talking about a palimpsest. Parchment being an expensive medium, it was often reused. The Syriac text discovered is invisible to the naked eye. It was revealed through multispectral imaging.
The method consists of taking photos of a document with several filters or, more precisely, at several wavelengths, from ultraviolet to infrared. In addition to flushing out the palimpsests, this technique also makes it possible to decipher documents made illegible by the centuries. The Louvre Museum organized a symposium on the subject in January.
In the art world, multispectral imagery has been used for years to study paintings. However, the methods used for painting are not suitable for manuscripts. “We have a support placed flat on a table and not something vertical on a wall”, explains Victor Gysembergh, researcher at the CNRS, specialist in philosophy and ancient sciences. The materials are also different. On one side, parchment and ink that may contain iron, on the other, canvas or wood with various pigments. The fact that the ink of the palimpsests is deliberately erased brings additional difficulties. “This leads to different choices in the design of the cameras, in their settings for the shots and in the image processing strategies.explains Victor Gysembergh. There are only two or three teams in the world specialized in multispectral imaging of ancient manuscripts. It’s really sharp.”
In addition, the method is costly and time-consuming. “About 50 images for a single page of manuscript, that’s about ten minutes per page. Then processing a page can take several working days”, details the researcher. But multispectral imaging has the advantage of being able to work on documents without damaging them. “In the 19th century, some used chemicals that worked. But they were very corrosive products that sometimes did serious damage”he says.
New advances in digital imaging enabled scientists in 2015 to achieve a feat: to decipher a 1,500-year-old biblical manuscript scroll (a version of Leviticus) written in Hebrew, so fragile that it was impossible to open it at the risk of smashing it into pieces. What looks like a piece of coal at first glance has been 3D scanned. It was then rolled out virtually, as reported by the Euronews channel.
Scientists are also working with artificial intelligence. They train algorithms to study manuscripts. Some computers become capable of advancing hypotheses on the content of texts, the time of writing or the geographical origin. Enough to make great leaps forward, thanks to the speed of execution of certain tasks: digitizing a large number of manuscripts, classifying them in a database… and thus helping researchers.
What implications can the discoveries have?
Current research has little chance of upsetting the Judeo-Christian world. “In the Greek manuscripts there are a great number of variants. For the New Testament we count perhaps 100,000”, explains David Pastorelli, CNRS researcher and specialist in ancient texts. “These are not variants that will disturb the faith of the faithful, it is not of this level.”
In a lecture given at the National Library of France in June 2022, lBiblical scholar Michael Langlois detailed the work carried out on a fragment of the Qumran manuscripts. In chapter 10 of the book of Joshua, the classic text tells that Joshua and his army “mounted” all night to take on five enemy armies and inflict a great defeat on them. In the Qumran version, the oldest, it is however not written “mounted” but “market”. Why this difference? Because of a 1,200 meter difference in altitude between Joshua’s starting camp and the place of the battle. Emphasize, with the verb “to climb”, that the road was difficult, but that it did not prevent his army from winning the battle “prove that it was God who gave them the victory, that it is even more prodigious, more miraculous”notes Michael Langlois.
For Katell Berthelot, all these discoveries call for moderation. “The very specialized research on the manuscripts resonates with contemporary issues, such as fundamentalism”, notes the expert. They “corroborate a non-literalist approach to the text”. And to insist: “There have always been, since antiquity, different, divergent interpretations.
According to the researcher, “fundamentalist readings are not based on the nature of biblical texts, which is to be plural and contradictory”. In this, the history of these texts makes it possible to “deconstructing fundamentalism”she analyzes.