Historians from the Austrian Academy of Sciences used ultraviolet light to find a previously unknown part of the Bible that was hidden under another part of the text more than 1,500 years ago. The results of the research scientists, published in New Testament Studies.
Researchers examined one of the first manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew, written 1500 years ago. The book is stored in the Vatican Library. This Bible is the first book of the New Testament and the first of the four canonical gospels.
The text found by the scholars is the first version of chapter 12. According to the authors, the discovery provides new opportunities for understanding the early stages of Bible text development and shows some differences from modern translations of the Scriptures.
For example, the original Greek version of Matthew in chapter 12 says: “At that time, Jesus was passing through cultivated fields on the Sabbath; His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck and eat. However, a recently discovered Syriac translation is somewhat different: “They began to gather ears of corn, grind it in their hands, and eat it.”
The scientists used ultraviolet photographs of all the emanations of the book for their work. So they can see an older text written on a palimpsest (a kind of ancient manuscript). Previously, people would overwrite the old text as if they were painting over the previous one. But with ultraviolet light you can see all the layers of the text. In this particular case, the first original text was hidden under three layers.