Secret library in Egypt provided ‘treasure trove’ of early Biblical texts
Egypt is greatest identified for its historical historical past that spanned hundreds of years and is full of tales of mighty pharaohs like Tutankhamun.
What is much less identified is the nation’s robust ties to early Christianity.
The faith got here to Egypt lots of of years earlier than it arrived in Britain, in round AD 33.
From that time onwards, Alexandria turned one of many nice Christian centres, attracting students and apologists from close by.
Soon, Egypt had amassed lots of, if not hundreds of Biblical texts full of writings from Christianity’s beginnings.
Robert Curzon, a Nineteenth-century aristocrat and traveller knew all of this very effectively and set out on a journey to the North African nation searching for spiritual texts.
His journey was explored throughout the Smithsonian Channel’s documentary, ‘Bible Hunters: Search for Truth’.
After three years of travelling, Curzon arrived in Alexandria with the hope of discovering somebody to point out him one of many nation’s historical monasteries.
Dr Jeff Rose, an archaeologist who offered the present, travelled to Egypt to comply with in Curzon’s footsteps and defined how the monastic motion started in Egypt.
“Monks who had gone out to the desert to live in solitude banded together in self-sufficient communities and those became the first monasteries,” he stated.
“One of the oldest monasteries in Egypt, and the world, is the Syrian monastery 90 miles west of Cairo.
“In 1834, it took Curzon practically two days to succeed in it by boat and camel, as we speak it is lower than two hours away by [motor]bike.
“Founded in the sixth century AD, the monastery was known for its wall paintings in its library of precious manuscripts.
“When Curzon visited the library, he discovered the place in full disarray with manuscripts simply littering the ground.”
Many of the books had been burned by the time Curzon had reached the monastery by poor people desperate to keep warm in the long winter nights.
But some of the books had been salvaged and kept under lock and key.
The story goes that Curzon got a blind monk drunk and persuaded him to show him a secret library within the monastery, and he soon found himself surrounded by many ancient scripts.
“Inside the room, Curzon discovered a treasure trove, the dusty pages of a few of the earliest dated Bible texts in existence,” said Dr Rose.
There, he found fully bound Christian manuscripts and several gospel fragments, all written in ancient Syriac, similar to the language Jesus would have spoken.
Dating back to the fourth century AD, the texts he found included the Acts of Peter and Paul, stories that were never included in the Bible.
Dr Rose said: “At the time, questions on why this Christian textual content was omitted led to hypothesis amongst students in regards to the accuracy of the Bible.”
Curzon went house, and 5 years later, set out on one other journey looking for historical manuscripts, this time to Mount Athos in Greece, a centre of Eastern Orthodox monasticism.
He later travelled extensively within the historic Levant area, an space as we speak contained inside the Middle East, and wrote a e book based mostly on his journeys, ‘Visit to the Monasteries within the Levant’.
It gained large traction, and by 1881, Curzon had accomplished an additional six expeditions to the Levant and the encompassing area.