Science and Future Magazine talks about the sensational discovery of a hidden chapter of the Gospel in the Vatican library.

You can read about it here (PDF archive).

I want to thank Marine Benoit for the interview.

As I explained to her, the passage in question (Matthew 11,30–12,26) is not absent from our Bible, nor was it intentionally hidden.

It’s just a common case of recycling old parchment leaves (what we call a palimpsest), which we can now read thanks to multispectral imaging.

The discovery is quite interesting, however, as the text preserves the Old Syriac version of the Gospel, and not the standard Peshitta Syriac Bible.

There are very few manuscripts of this Old Syriac version, so this discovery is a welcome addition!

For more information, go ahead and read Grigory Kessel’s article here.