Have you ever gone into a shop and come out with two items for the price of one in a sale? When we come across a “two for one deal” it puts a smile on our face. We Christians have secured a number of two for one deals in terms of the documents of the Bible from antiquity. They are called palimpsest.
The example in the photograph above is a palimpsest. If you examine it carefully you can see that there are two documents written on the one parchment. This is an example of a biblical “buy one get one free deal”. This document is called Ephraemi. Codex Ephraemi is a manuscript from the 5th Century which had been scraped clean and replaced with 38 sermons or homilies from Ephraim, a Syrian Church Father from the 4th Century. This wiping and replacement process took place in the 12th Century. Incredible! Were they crazy? Someone in the 12th Century dared to wipe a precious New Testament document from the 5th Century and replace it with sermons from a Church Father of the 4th Century. What were they thinking? Were they thinking at all?
Before we judge them, let me say they were not crazy. They couldn’t go to PaperPlus or Whitcoulls and buy a new ream of paper or a pack of 500 A4 sheets of paper. At that time in history paper or parchment was precious and very hard to get hold of. If there were an abundance of copies of the books of the New Testament and you had no paper to write on then you simply sacrificed one of the multiple copies of a book of the New Testament to make room for the sermons. After all there were so many of them. So you took the parchment with the text of the book of the New Testament and “cleaned” it by washing it and scrapping it and then drying it. When that was done you wrote on top of the older text the new text you wanted to record. That is what is called a palimpsest. A parchment which has been washed and reused, on which there are actually two documents.
A careful look at the photo will show you there are two blocks of writing on this one sheet of parchment. The most recent is written in darker script and the parchment has been utilized in what we 21st Century people call portrait format. In other words the paper is turned vertical and what we want to write is written vertically. But in this case notice that there is another document that has been written below the heavier, darker script in landscape format. The “paper” or parchment has been turned horizontally (Landscape format) and written on in that position. The darker and clearer script on the top of the fainter script was added in the 12th Century.
Approximately 20% of the documents of the New Testament are palimpsests. The wonder of this is that we have two documents for the price of one. We can utilise modern infra red technology to enable us to read both documents. So we have two documents for the price of one. In some instances the additional texts added to an ancient manuscript yield a bonus of wonderful insights as to how the ancients thought and wrote about the New Testament text. While we haven’t lost anything by their actions because with computer enhancement and modern methods we can read both scripts.