Recovering the Erased Gospels: Scholars Are Using High-Tech Methods to Study the Earliest Translation of Matthew, Mark, Luke, Ana John

In the fall of 1976, James Charlesworth was watching television when an idea struck him. He could use space-age techniques to read an almost unreadable ancient manuscript of the Gospels.

The flickering, fuzzy televised images of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969 had seemed so far away. But these images sent back by the Viking probes gave this Princeton Theological Seminary professor the impression that Mars was in his back yard. The successful application of computer-enhancement to space photography turned his thoughts to a 1,500-year-old pile of parchment in the Sinai desert—an ancient manuscript of the Gospels that had been erased by an unknown scribe in the eighth century and rewritten with The Lives of the Female Saints. Could the computer read what the scribe had erased?

“When a scribe wrote,” explains Charlesworth, “he would make tiny, virtually invisible lines on the leather. I thought that through this new technique, it would be possible to magnify and enhance the lines that we could see very faintly, but could not read.”

So Charlesworth began a project that would take him and two space-age scientists 7,000 miles to the ancient site where Moses heard the voice of God.

Long Before King James

What is the ancient document for which this scholar would take such pains? Four characteristics make it particularly intriguing.

First, the document is old. It is the oldest known copy of the earliest known translation of the four Gospels, and therefore a witness to early links in the transmission of the Gospels’ text. (The manuscript also contains fragments of several early apocryphal writings, including The Ascent of Mary and The Acts of Thomas.)

The Sinaitic Syriac (known in scholarly shorthand as Syrs) dates from the late fourth century or early fifth century. It contains a translation of the Gospels into Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the native tongue of Jesus. Scholars think the translation on which the manuscript is based may go back as far as A.D. 100, and was definitely complete before another century had passed. (The Old Syriac translation is available in one other major manuscript, but the Sinaitic Syriac is perhaps a hundred years closer to its source.)

The thought of being able to read the sayings of Jesus in words close to those he actually spoke, of hearing the cadences and rhythms of his speech, and of entering his ancient thought world by climbing inside his language, excited Charlesworth, a teacher of Syriac.

Second, the Sinaitic Syriac is intriguing because it was erased. It is a “palimpsest,” a scraped and reused parchment. The eighth-century scribe who erased this manuscript probably thought this Old Syriac translation out of date and felt free to use the parchment for something else.

Unlike papyrus (a paper made from reeds that grew along the banks of the Nile), parchment was durable. This writing material was made from animal skins, scraped, soaked in quicklime, and rubbed with chalk and pumice stone to produce a thin, but durable writing surface. Since leather writing material was expensive, a manuscript that was judged outdated would be scraped with pumice and treated with a liquid to remove the ink.

Often, palimpsests were so poorly erased that much of the lower writing was still legible. In the case of the Sinaitic Syriac, however, the ink of the lower writing had almost disappeared entirely. Fortunately for Charlesworth and his colleagues, the original ink’s components included an acid that had eaten a shallow track into the leather, creating a haven for a few particles of iron-sulfite-rich pigment. Today the lower writing looks like faint rust stains.

Third, the form of the document is intriguing. Unlike many ancient books, the document is a codex, sheets of parchment folded and fastened together, resembling our modern books. Literary productions were usually copied onto papyrus rolls or scrolls. However, early Christians seemed to favor the codex form for the Scriptures. Perhaps, some have suggested, this was because of their desire to compare Old Testament prophecies with New Testament fulfillments. Unrolling various scrolls to compare them was much more cumbersome than flipping back and forth among the pages of a codex.

This 364-page codex measures about six-to eight-inches high. The parchment leaves are so fragile, Charlesworth told the Princeton Seminary Alumni/ae News, that “the slightest jarring would have turned them into fragments like confetti.”

Fourth, the location of the Sinaitic Syriac heightens the intrigue: it is part of the venerable collection of over 3,000 ancient manuscripts housed in the fortresslike monastery of Saint Catherine, at the base of Mount Sinai’s steep slopes. Western scholars have long known that manuscript treasures including the Sinaitic Syriac were housed in this sixth-century monastery built by the Emperor Justinian. But although the treasures of Saint Catherine’s have been known or suspected, the monks often would not allow Western scholars to examine them. Sometimes they even denied that certain manuscripts existed. Thus the mystery and the lure of the Sinaitic Syriac were doubled.

Suspicious Characters

The monks had good reason to be suspicious of Western visitors. In 1844, the ambitious German scholar Constantin Tischendorf returned from Saint Catherine’s with 43 leaves of parchment obtained under false pretenses. And in 1859, he “borrowed” the trusting monks’ most precious manuscript, Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the only existing complete Greek New Testament in uncial (an early rounded capital script) along with parts of the Old Testament and some early Christian books.

Tischendorf promised to return the codex within a month and a half. After two months of copying the manuscript, Tischendorf suggested to the monks that he take it to Russia and offer it to Tsar Alexander II as a gift of appreciation. They would not agree, but reluctantly allowed him to take it on loan to Russia in order to produce a photographic facsimile. That was the last they saw of their beloved codex, for in a desperate effort to raise money in the 1930s, the Soviet government sold the codex to the British Museum. The monks still have Tischendorf’s letter promising the return of Codex Sinaiticus—framed and hanging on Saint Catherine’s library wall.

The monastic community has a long memory. So it took several visits by Professor Charlesworth before he fully gained the monks’ trust. Unlike visitors of earlier centuries, who scorned the monastery’s culture and liturgy, Charlesworth entered into the life of the community, worshiping with them every morning from 3 to 7. How did he persuade them to let him work with the Old Syriac codex, one of their most important remaining treasures? “I am able to show them how these precious manuscripts can be of benefit to others who are interested in understanding the origins of Christianity,” says Charlesworth. “And I’ve emphatically said that neither I nor any member of my team will ever profit financially from studying Syrus Sinaiticus.”

Facing The Unknown

Once Professor Charlesworth gained the monks’ confidence, he knew he would need top-flight technical help to insure the best possible results. Previous attempts to read the manuscript using chemical agents and photography (in the 1890s and the 1920s) had yielded inferior results. And Charlesworth had to succeed the first time: His agreement with the monks stipulated that after his team photographed the codex, it would be locked away and inaccessible to scholars from that time forward.

Bruce Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California (use), was recruited to do the photography and to participate in the scholarly analysis of the text. Considered by experts the best manuscript photographer in the world, Zuckerman is more than a technically expert photographer. He holds the Ph.D. from Yale in Near Eastern Languages and is an expert epigrapher, a specialist in reading ancient inscriptions.

Zuckerman faced several unknowns in accepting the assignment. “At the time,” he says, “Jim could not tell me the precise dimensions of the manuscript or whether we would have electricity or running water at the monastery. We had no idea what we were facing.”

So Bruce Zuckerman took two steps. First, he decided to take enough equipment to face any contingency—four different types of cameras and a wide assortment of films, lenses, and filters. He also decided to bring along his brother Ken, a remarkably resourceful technician and photographic expert whose achievements include photographing individual particles of moon dust while he was a graduate student at CalTech.

When the adventurous party reached Cairo, they filled a rented van with luggage and equipment, and strapped even more on top. Bruce Zuckerman had brought only one suitcase, but that was half-filled with film, and he had 11 cases of camera equipment in addition. Because of all the equipment, he rode the seven hours across the desert crammed into a tiny corner at the back of the van. It was worth it, for when they arrived he had what he needed.

Films And Filters

Their first day at the monastery, the team experimented. They began with infrared film. When they processed that, they discovered that it made the upper writing beautifully clear, but it obscured the lower writing entirely. Next, the Zuckermans tried ultraviolet light.

Hauling a large blacklight into the monastery (with its limited electrical resources) was out of the question. So Ken Zuckerman had located a company that produced ultraviolet-passing filters about the size of an open hand. By mounting these filters on their battery-powered electronic flash units, they were able to achieve their goal—partially. When the Zuckermans made some test shots with Polaroid film, they saw that the lower writing appeared much darker. But it looked fuzzy.

If at first you don’t succeed.…

The Zuckermans knew that ultraviolet light might stimulate the molecules in the ink, causing them to fluoresce. However, determining exactly where in the light spectrum this fluorescence might occur was the problem. After further testing, they discovered that the fluorescence they were looking for only occured in the visible-light spectrum. So they decided the best results could be obtained if they filtered out the ultraviolet light before it reached the camera, leaving only the visible-light fluorescence to expose on the film.

Because the double filtering of the flash and the camera cut down significantly on the light intensity, they had to double the battery power that fed the electronic flash equipment. This drained their batteries so rapidly that they had to use every outlet in the monastery during the three hours each day that the generators were operated.

Although the ultraviolet light filter combination gave the best view of the lower writing, the team made multiple exposures of each page in order to record as much information as possible. For example, the ultraviolet light made any water-spotted portion of a page appear as a black blotch, so visible light black-and-white photographs were taken as well. And color photographs of the page were taken to provide a key with which all other photographs could be correlated. The entire process was tremendously wearing. All told, each of the pages containing the Gospels was photographed 13 times. Each cycle of 13 exposures took 20 minutes. And each workday lasted 8 to 11 hours.

Realizing The Dream

Charlesworth’s dream of seeing the Sinaitic Syriac as clearly as he saw Viking’s pictures of Mars on his television set is only beginning to come into focus. Working with computer experts Philip Borden and his team from Micro Expert Systems, Charlesworth and the Zuckermans are using an ITEX/PC’s image-processing functions to clarify and clean up the images on the first few pages of the codex.

The first step in computer enhancement of a photograph is to digitize it. The computer divides the image up into very tiny squares like the squares on graph paper. For a black-and-white photograph, each square is assigned a number representing how dark or how light it is, where, say, 0 is pure white and 10 is solid black. (For a color photograph, the image must be digitized three times, once each for red, green, and blue.)

Once each picture is in the form of numbers, a technician can begin to enhance the picture. If, for example, the upper writing is very black with numbers in the range of 9 and 10, the computer can suppress the upper writing by changing every square with those numerical values to 0. And if the lower writing is of a medium density, say in the range of 5 or 6, that writing can be darkened by changing the value of all those squares to 10.

Since each of the 13 photographs of each page shows some letters better than others, the team will have to pick up pieces of the under writing from the various photographs. The computer can then create a composite of the best parts of all the photographs.

Nevertheless, wherever the ink in the upper writing obscures the ink in the lower writing, there will be a “hole” in the composite photograph. Thanks to the ancient scribe, however, our intrepid scientists are not at a loss. The scribe who wrote the Sinaitic Syriac had a very regular handwriting. Every aleph is very much like every other aleph. Every beth like every other beth.

By creating a template program, the scientists will be able to teach the computer to recognize not only the letters in the lower writing, but also characteristic parts of letters. Thus the computer will be able to fill in the blanks created by the dense upper writing.

Next month, Charlesworth, the Zuckermans, and their computer team will be working to develop a formula that will allow the computer to do at high speed what now requires careful and cautious human judgment. Once that formula is developed, things will proceed rapidly toward publication. In spite of full academic teaching and administrative loads, the researchers should be able to clarify and reproduce all the photographs within a year. Then if all goes well (and the necessary grants are received), the Gospel of Mark, the first of four volumes containing photographs, transcription, and translation, should be ready to go to press within two to three years.

The Meaning Of It All

Although the project is still at the technical stage, scholars (including Professor Charlesworth) are beginning to speculate about the potential significance of a restored Old Syriac New Testament and of computer-enhanced manuscript photography.

One of the first places Charlesworth looked in the new photographs of the Sinaitic Syriac was the end of the Gospel of Mark. Previous work with this manuscript had made it clear that it ended with Mark 16:8—omitting, like many other ancient manuscripts, verses 9–19, which include “Mark’s” account of Jesus’ postresurrection appearances.

Charlesworth wanted to see if 16:8 fell at the bottom of a page, suggesting perhaps that the missing traditional verses were on a missing leaf of the codex. He also wanted to see if the ancient scribe had left space between the end of Mark and the beginning of Luke, perhaps suggesting at the very least that the scribe knew of the existence of verses 9–19.

“Finally the photograph was before my eyes,” Charlesworth recounts, “and I read the ending of Mark. I came down the right column to the bottom; and then I went over to the left column. (You read from right to left in Aramaic.) Half-way down the left column, Mark ended. Mark 16:8 was in the middle of the left column. Then there were nine little circles that the scribe had written from right to left, then a space and the statement, ‘The Beginning of the Gospel of Luke.’ So it was clear that a page hadn’t been lost.”

Scholars have long known that Mark 16:9–19 is a later addition to the Gospel. But scholars have also long debated how Mark should end, since somehow, “And [the women] said nothing to any one, for they were afraid,” does not sound like the conclusion to the Book—especially in its Greek form. The Sinaitic Syriac does not solve the mystery of Mark’s ending. It does, however, strengthen a long-standing scholarly judgment.

While the general public may expect an ancient manuscript like this to contain some big surprises, most scholars do not think it will. Because there are so many manuscripts of the New Testament, many of them fragmentary, and because those manuscripts are in very substantial agreement, the Sinaitic Syriac is unlikely to shake the scholarly world.

Says D. A. Carson, professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, “The more wild the text actually appears, the less credible it will seem in the light of all the other textual evidence. The more conservative or mainstream the text appears, the less change it will effect.” Either way, says Carson, the manuscript will not have a profound impact.

But Carson suspects that scholars will inherit a dozen or two dozen interesting readings that they will then have to weigh with the other evidence in order to assess their value. The Sinaitic Syriac can be used to judge the value of including or excluding a particular word or phrase from the text. However, since it is a translation of the Gospels, it cannot easily be used to judge which of two Greek synonyms is the original reading (unless the translator very consistently translated one Greek synonym with one Syriac word and the other synonym with another Syriac word).

Most New Testament scholars study Greek. A few study Aramaic. Still fewer specialize in Syriac—James Charlesworth is among them. As a result, he is understandably enthusiastic about reading the sayings of Jesus in a close cousin to our Lord’s native tongue. In this he joins the venerable scholar Joachim Jeremias, who advocated using the Old Syriac version to reconstruct the Palestinian Aramaic words of Jesus.

Notwithstanding the lack of enthusiasm exhibited by Greek-oriented New Testament scholars, Charlesworth believes that reading Jesus in a Semitic language will help resolve some common questions. For example, did Jesus think that the kingdom of God was entirely future (as Albert Schweitzer taught)? Or did he believe it was fully realized in the present (as C. H. Dodd thought)?

Charlesworth points out that to the speaker of Aramaic or Hebrew, such a question is beside the point. For, unlike Greek and English, those Semitic languages lack any clear way of expressing past, present, or future. And people do not think in categories their languages lack. Through an understanding of the Hebrew mind, scholars have already concluded that neither Schweitzer nor Dodd was right. Perhaps, says Charlesworth, other false tensions will be resolved when more scholars read the Gospels in a Semitic tongue.

Whatever the theological and textual value of the Sinaitic Syriac, the technical value of this experiment is undeniable. Ancient manuscripts and inscriptions are located in museums and libraries all over the world, making it difficult for most scholars to study them firsthand.

Bruce Zuckerman, whose West Semitic Research Project at USC has already amassed 10,000 negatives and transparencies of such inscriptions, plans to apply computer-enhanced photography to the hardest-to-read. And the technology will be especially useful in carrying out the project Bruce Zuckerman and James Charlesworth began this summer: a comprehensive photographic edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of which have heretofore been illegible. Whether the manuscripts are famous or obscure, the work of Charlesworth and the Zuckermans will offer scholars the next best thing to being there.

Their story is one of striking contrasts. James Charlesworth’s dream has taken him from the 1,500-year-old monastery of Saint Catherine (built on the traditional site of Moses’ encounter with the burning bush) to the high-tech world of Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has worshiped in the age-old liturgy of the Greek-speaking monks and worked cheek-by-jowl with a man who photographs moon dust. The primitive and the state-of-the-art are combined: the old, old story meets tomorrow’s newspaper.

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