A Christian manuscript dating back to the third century has been sold for just over £3m after going under the hammer at London auction house, Christie’s.
The Crosby-Schøyen Codex, believed to be Christianity’s oldest surviving book and one in all the oldest books on the planet, was auctioned off in London on Tuesday, with bidding finally closing at £3,065,000.
The codex was one in all the texts that formed a part of the Bodmer Papyri, a set of several texts discovered within the Nineteen Fifties that included Christian writings, Biblical extracts, and pagan literature, and altered hands several times before being acquired by Dr Martin Schøyen within the Nineteen Eighties.
Inscribed on papyrus by monks in an ancient Egyptian monastery, its remarkable preservation has been attributed to the region’s arid climate. Its 104 pages, or 52 leaves, at the moment are protected between double-sided plexiglass plates, and offer a novel window into the adolescence of the Christian faith.
The manuscript is written in Coptic, and its contents include the earliest complete versions of the First Epistle of Peter and the Book of Jonah ever found, in addition to an Easter homily. Experts imagine that it was written between 250 and 350 AD in one in all the primary Christian monasteries to be used in liturgical services.
“The earliest monks in Upper Egypt within the earliest Christian monastery were using this very book to have fun the earliest Easter celebrations, only just a few hundred years after Christ and only 100 or so years after the last Gospel was written,” Eugenio Donadoni, Christie’s senior specialist in books and manuscripts, told the BBC.
According to Mr Donadoni, the book possesses “monumental importance as a witness to the earliest spread of Christianity across the Mediterranean”, and Christie’s said Dr Schøyen, who began his collection of books as a youngster within the Nineteen Fifties, deserved to be “remembered among the many pantheon of great bibliophiles”.
Around 60 lots from Dr Schøyen’s collection were auctioned alongside the codex, with greater than £7.5 million being raised by the sale of things including ancient legal texts, decorated religious manuscripts, and historical chronicles.
