This time we tell you which researchers carried out a new discovery of more than a thousand years old that could reveal the origin of the Bible. Yes, it is the fragment of an old New Testament book that would completely change the history of the Christian religion.
Discovery could reveal the origin of the Bible
According to information from DWwas Grigory Kessel, researcher at the Austrian Academy of Scienceswho made this new discovery with which the origin of the Bible could be revealed.
yes, the find is a fragment of a New Testament book published approximately 1,750 years agoone of the oldest editions so far found.
How did you find the fragment? Well, this expert used ultraviolet photography on scanned images of manuscripts kept in the Vatican Library, then he found a small fragment of a Syriac translation that was written around the third century AD.which had been erased and covered by other manuscripts.
It should be noted that Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic which, along with Greek, it was the most important language of religious literature in the first centuries of the Christian era.
What did the researcher say about the fragment he found?
For starters, Kessel told DW that the Syriac translations of the Bible are the oldest in existence: “The oldest that contains the complete text dates from the fifth century AD”.
And it was precisely this that he used to compare it with the fragment he found in the Vatican Library. “The differences were clear: there are different phrases and words that indicate that it is an older translation”he commented to the German medium.
He further explained that the fragment was most likely written in what is now northern Iraqbut before it was part of Persia, an empire that had Zoroastrianism as its religion.
Just at that time, says the researcher, Christianity was professed by a minority that was tolerated and another persecuted. Syriac Christianity was the main form of Christianity in the Middle East, Kessel adds.
What relationship does the fragment have with the origin of the Bible?
According to Christoph Markschies, Professor of Ancient Christianity at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Gospels of the New Testament date to around AD 70: “The oldest transcriptions we have are papyri from the first half of the second century, which were found in present-day Egypt”.
And finally he points out that these manuscripts were originally in Greek, because it was the main language of the eastern part of the Roman empire; behold the importance of the new discovery, the fragment from 1,750 years ago and written in Syriac, since the oldest version of the New Testament that exists so far is the Sinaitic Codex, dating from the year 400 AD.
