Amid all of the preparations to show Paris right into a venue for the Olympic Games that begin in lower than 100 days, one small corner of the French capital is preparing for an additional modern type of competition based in antiquity: Christie’s auction of early Christian texts from North Africa.
Some of a very powerful religious artifacts to come back up on the market lately, the manuscripts from the privately owned Schoyen Collection, including the oldest complete version of the First Epistle of Peter and the Book of Jonah, were displayed in New York earlier this month and have arrived in Paris for inspection by prospective bidders. The auction sale of the works, written on papyrus within the Coptic language, will happen at Christie’s in London in June.
The viewings of the Schoyen Collection have drawn representatives from museums all over the world in addition to private collectors. To some they represent beauty, to others links to the past, and to others a reference to faith.
“This is one of the vital sales Christie’s has ever held on this field,” said Eugenio Donadoni, senior specialist in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at Christie’s. “They are touchstones, helping us understand the history of Christianity.”
The Schoyen Collection is the work of Martin Schoyen, constructing on the collections of his father, and now comprises 20,000 manuscripts, including 400 linked to the Bible. Now in his 80s, Schoyen has decided to sell a part of it, including a very powerful artifacts.
According to Donadoni, the Crosby-Schoyen Codex — valued at £3 million or about $3.7 million — is considered the world’s oldest book in private hands, comprising, besides Peter’s epistle and the story of Jonah, a part of the Book of Maccabees and an Easter homily.
It is very significant within the history of writing, said Donadoni, since it “marks a pivotal moment — it’s the transition from scrolls to codicils as Christianity spreads across the Mediterranean.”
But the codex also shows the religious pivot happening on the time. It is assumed that the codex was utilized by a monastery in upper Egypt across the middle of the third century CE, before the Council of Nicaea in 325, which tried to secure consensus on problems with Christian belief, resembling the connection between God the Father and God the Son, and the latter’s divine nature.
“You can see from the codex that they’re finding their feet as Christians,” said Donadoni. “They are still steeped in Jewish tradition and are shaping the brand new religion.”
The book is so old that it calls the text now referred to as the First Epistle of Peter the letter of Peter, as in the event that they aren’t aware that an additional letter exists.
Another major manuscript going up on the market on June 11 is the Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus, which is in effect an ancient effort at recycling. In the tenth century, John Zosimos, a monk at a monastery near Jerusalem, acquired a document written on expensive vellum, which he packed up and took to St. Catherine’s monastery within the Sinai Desert to reuse for his own writing. The original writing, itself the earliest surviving piece of the Gospels to be written in Aramaic, dating from the fifth or sixth century, continues to be visible.
“The underlying text was not scrubbed out thoroughly, so under fluorescent lighting you possibly can still see it, written within the language that Jesus himself would have spoken,” said Donadoni.
The document, valued at £1.5 million, or $1.85 million, is a bargain, as the customer gets the 2 texts for the value of 1.
Also a part of the Schoyen Collection is the Holkham Hebrew Bible, a Sephardic manuscript in Hebrew from the thirteenth century, the Geraardsbergen Bible from late Twelfth-century Flanders, and a commentary on the Gospels by the Venerable Bede from the eleventh century.
Last 12 months the Codex Sassoon, a Hebrew Bible greater than 1,000 years old, became the most precious manuscript sold at auction when it went for $38.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York, confirming New York because the leading marketplace for Hebraic religious texts, while London stays the capital for sales of illuminated Christian texts. But each centres attract buyers, including museums, from all over the world.
Prices are believed to have been pushed higher by the intervention of 1 major player: the Green family, U.S. evangelical Christians who’ve used their fortune created by the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores to buy illuminated, or decorated, manuscripts, Torahs, papyri and other works value $20 million to $40 million from auction houses, dealers, private collectors and institutions.
Items from the Green collection were donated to the Museum of the Bible in Washington, a family project that opened in 2017 with a mission to “encourage confidence in absolutely the authority and reliability of the Bible.” It has since stepped back from this evangelical purpose and says that it’s an “institution whose purpose is to ask all people to interact with the transformative power of the Bible.”
Meanwhile, the Faith and Liberty Discovery Center, a Bible museum created by the American Bible Society in Philadelphia, announced that it should shut its doors after fewer than three years of operation and an investment of $60 million. Opened within the wake of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, it did not draw anywhere near its projected 250,000 annual visitors.
The British and Foreign Bible Society, which has the largest collection of Bibles and other religious books and documents on the earth, has shied away from opening a museum, even though it does open its collection, based at Cambridge University, to scholars and researchers. While it still expands through legacies and donations and is committed to good stewardship of its existing treasures, the BFBS doesn’t acquire items with its own funds, preferring, it says, to disseminate the Bible and be involved in mission reasonably than convey the message that the Bible is a museum piece.
In recent times there have been concerns that some items held by Biblical manuscript collectors have been acquired through the black market, especially from people in trouble spots within the Middle East. According to Christie’s Donadoni, all of the items from the Schoyen Collection which are up for auction in June have had their provenance vetted and have been checked extensively by its legal department.
© Religion Network News
