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91

CHICAGO, JANUARY 5, 1908

Marvelous Story of the Discovery of an Authentic Manuscript of the Bible

An American Secures the Precious Relic of the Famous Alexandrian Library; Words of Christ, Lost 1,300 Years, Are Thus Recovered and Officially Declared

BARTERING FOR THE PRECIOUS BIBLICAL MANUSCRIPTS
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COMPLETE TRANSLATION MAY COMPEL REVISION OF PRESENT DAY BIBLE

Manuscripts to Be Placed in the Hands of the Archeologists of the University of Michigan Under Direction of Professor Sanders, Who Announced the First Discovery in Them, and the Work of Reclaiming the Words of Christ Will Be Pushed to Completion.

CHARLES L. FREER TELLS THE STORY OF HIS GREAT FINT IN EGYPT'S SANDS

How a Moslem Arab Who Mad the Wonderful Find Let Him Into the Secret and How the Purchase Was Completed After Secret Conferences and Tedious Negotiations--Manuscript Is More Valuable Than the One Held Sacred in British Museum.

BY SAM W. SMALL, Jr.

DETROIT, Mich., Jan. 4.-Locked up in a vault in this city and carefully tempered by an atmosphere artificially charged to represent the warm and dry climate of the plains of ancient Egypt, in whose sands it reposed for centuries, is what is believed to be the most precious set of manuscripts ever brought to this side of the world.

To every believer in the Christian faith in the world this manuscript has a personal and intimate value. To every Biblical student of the world its discovery is a new and precious miracle. In fact, the manuscript is one of the greatest of modern miracles, for in it the gentle Christ speaks again—speaks in words lost and forgotten for thirteen hundred years.

About the genuineness of the manuscript, there must be a doubt, even in the minds of devoted students, as there would be doubt concerning an modern miracle until the weight of testimony established its trueness.

But not a student nor archaeological authority who has been permitted to view and glance through the precious manuscript has any lingering doubt that he has been permitted to behold a Bible of Greek text, authentically copied within two or three centuries after the period of Christ, and miraculously preserved, not only from the fiery furnaces to which the Moslem hordes consigned the world's greatest collection of manuscripts when the wonderful library at Alexandria was stripped and its contents destroyed, but from the ravages of time itself in the treasure casket of Egypt's sand.

All Nations of World Interested.

Even the existence of this manuscript has not been hinted at three or four days ago.  But now from every country and every time where men worship the God of the Christians and his son, Jesus, inquiries are pouring in by letter, telegram and cable, asking that the light of its text be allowed to illume the world, and that it be allowed to stand forth and correct such errors as have at times been made the weapons of the enemies of the religion.

The discovery of the manuscript, combining the ideal romance of the archaeologist connected with its transfer from the hands of a Moslem, who scorned the book, but knew its value; the journey of the manuscripts from Egypt to Acadia in the middle of the United States, where a writing of its antiquity on the subject treated would never be sought, and its final discovery to the world, prematurely the plans of those most interested—all form one of the most marvelous stories of famous archaeological and Biblical discoveries the men began to trace back the steps of those who had gone before and dig in the ground for buried treasures.

At the present time the manuscript of the Bible owned by Charles L. Freer, a noted art collector and expert in Oriental potteries, lacquers. etc., of this city, is believed to be second to none existence. It appears to be more perfect in preservation and completeness than the famous Alexandrian manuscript, the true arch and body of the modern Bible. The latter manuscript is the most precious possession of the British Museum, and has been the text for the study of generations of the foremost Bible students.

May Cause Revision of the Bible.

It is not in its comparison and the observation of variants in the two texts that the Freer manuscripts find their greatest value, but in the fact that they will supplement the Alexandrian manuscripts, will supply missing words and even the fragments of text lost from the Alexandrian manuscripts. In this, with the genuineness of the Freer manuscripts established, they will demand, perhaps, a revision of the present day Bible.  If not they will at least furnish a text that cannot fail to interest every student and reader of the Bible as a comparative volume which exalts the Bible and adds to its wonderful history.

As yet the manuscripts here in Detroit have only been scanned. Placed in the hands of Professor H. A. Sanders, a noted archaeologist, paleographist and student of the Bible, he quickly searched in the best preserved of the tomes for a passage on St. Mark's Gospel, which has been a subject of interest for hundreds of years to Biblical students, to find if missing paragraphs spoken of by St. Jerome were there. To his amazement and delight he found them, and he burned to make his discovery known to fellow archaeologists and Bible students without investigating further.  He readily gained Mr. Freer's consent to give what is believed to be an authentic record of a saying of Christ, new because it had been lost more than thirteen hundred years, to the Archaeological Society, and this it was that the existence of this very remarkable manuscript became known to the world.

It will be months, and probably years, before the manuscript in its entirety will be given to the world. To Bible students that period of time seems as but a day, when it is recalled that it was two centuries after the Alexandrian manuscript had passed into the hands of the English King before its entire version was put into print, and even then it was criticised as faulty. The five other versions, manuscripts used in formulating the Bible, and not so complete as the Alexandrian manuscripts, are all highly prized and carefully preserved. It is well possible that the Freer manuscripts may displace them all in taking the highest rank as the oldest and most complete text of the Bible.

So far as the manuscripts have been examined it has been discovered that the text of the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are complete. The Alexandrian manuscripts, which, like the Freer manuscripts, and believed to have been saved from the Alexandria library before its books were given out to be destroyed, are wanting in the whole of Matthew's Gospel up to chapter xxv., 6, and from John vi., 50, to viii., 52.

These deficiencies are supplied in the Bibles of to-day, but the Freer manuscripts will be able to supply with undoubted authenticity and in the same text these missing portions of the Alexandrian manuscripts, and perhaps all other missing or doubtful portions of that great manuscript, and give to the world for the first time the Bible as it was collected and edited at the world's greatest seat of learning at the beginning of the Christian era—at Alexandria, where the Greeks had their greatest universities and libraries.

Will Trace Psalms in Ful.

The Septuagint, in Alexandrian version of the Old Testament, has been regarded as doubtful in the form in which it has been preserved as to the Psalms. The Septuagint of the Freer manuscript, containing the Psalms, is in not such a good state of preservation as much of the rest of the manuscripts, but it is believed that with care every line of the Psalms may be traced.

The history of the finding and purchase of the manuscripts is not second to their value as a discovery. How far Mr. Freer went to obtain the manuscripts, and exactly what measures he took or what price he paid, he himself is not prepared to say at this time, but he tells enough to make it one of the most thrilling adventures of a collector's life.

Even after he had obtained the manuscripts, he could not call them his own until they were locked up in his home in this city, and now that they are here, he declares that they are the property of the United States Government and nothing short of an international incident can take them from him.

In his search for potteries and Oriental antiques and valuables Mr. Freer, a man who devotes his money and spare time to the following of his bent as a collector of art objects, has often visited and explored the shops and bazaars of Egypt, those wonderful treasure houses of the real and imitations, the greatest finds or the greatest sells.

His visits have brought him into personal contact with the biggest dealers in such things as he sought, and also of the biggest rogues, and with some of them he has become well acquainted and even friendly.

At Gizeh, about six miles out of Cairo, lives Ali Arabe. Ali Arabe has become old and rich, having passed some sixty birthdays, but he still loves a precious find, and loves a bargain better than he does the hairs of his gray beard. Ali Arabe is an Arab and a Moslem, and he believes that he should take Christian money for the glory of Allah, for the glory of Ali and his family and for the pleasure of driving a bargain and having something really worth while to sell.

In the shops and bazaars of Cairo Ali is a familiar figure. He knows the true from the false, for he was once a digger in the ruins, and it is believed that Ali knows where many things are hidden from his digging in the ruins a score of years ago, and that to uphold his reputation as the most expert of collectors he occasionally goes out and digs himself all alone that he may spring some new sensation on the archaeological world.

In his time Ali has dug for the governments, and given them what he thought their share.  So successful was he in supplying the German Government with Egyptian antiquities that he wears proudly in his sash a gold watch presented to him by the German Government, containing a suitable inscription and a picture of the Emperor.

Friend of British Archaeologists.

Dr. Granfell and Dr. Hogarth, who represent the British Museum in Egypt, well know the value of Ali as an expert and as being able to bring to light wonderful things that have long been missing from the tombs and catacombs according to inscriptions which they contain. They are frequent visitors to him at Gizeh, where the old Arab and his personal household occupy six houses facing on a square. In each of these houses, tucked away in boxes and stored in chests, or covered with rugs so that they will not be observed, are fragments of marble, mummies and mummy cases, jewelry, stone carvings and every conceivable thing of value.

One of the reasons that the collectors and experts like to visit Ali is that they can never tell what they will see, and are always hoping that they will see something they were intended not to see. But Ali has seldom been caught.

In the Spring of 1907 Mr. Freer met Ali Arabe in the bazaars of Cairo and was asked to visit him. Mr. Freer readily accepted, for he had heard that Ali has something very valuable and he wanted to have first chance at it. It happened that the old dealer, carelessly opening cases and chests about his house one day to find a missing article, had disclosed to the astonished sight of a collector, a very wealthy and well-known American collector, a quantity of manuscripts. This collector was at the time visiting Ali in company with Dr. Granfell and Dr. Hogarth of the British Museum, but they were not present when the manuscripts were disclosed.

Now Ali, as a rule, did not deal in books or manuscripts, although all knew that he would buy or sell anything possessing either a value or a market. So the collector was very much interested and questioned Ali, but not with very great success. Collectors do not as a rule tell other collectors of their discoveries, and so when the British Museum men came in the room the American collector did not ask any more questions.

While the collectors may not tell one another of discoveries, there are others around Cairo and all the shops and bazaars who will keep each collector fairly well posted about the movements of all the others. So Mr. Freer had learned of the existence of some wonderful manuscripts at the house of Ali and had a great desire to see them when the old man met him and asked him as a friend and customer to call on him.

Mr. Freer, after almost exhausting his stock of diplomacy and American persistence won Ali over to show him the manuscripts, and when he saw them he wished to possess them because of their beauty. Ali was very uncommunicative about them, merely saying that he believed that they were copies of the Bible.
There were four of the manuscripts. They contained from about 125 pages in the smallest to 325 or 350 in the largest of the four volumes. They were of vellum, or parchment, and were beautifully engraved in a penmanship that had all the beauty and grace of painting and at the same time the exactness and alignment of print.

Manuscripts Well Preserved.

The edges of the volumes, sewn together in the ancient style of bookbinding, were all burned by the hot sand and some of the pages were yellowed and seared. Most of them, however, were in a beautiful state of preservation. It was not possible for Mr. Freer, who was not an authority on books nor an expert Greek scholar, to tell how old the manuscripts were, how complete they were and of how much value they might be. Still he wished to possess them, and especially the one tome, so well preserved and with its original binding of two board covers, one of them illuminated with figures. This book also had fragments of chain attached to the wooden covers, as though it had hung at a desk or an altar.

It was useless to try and talk of an exchange with All at this time. But Mr. Freer, after his visit, had but one idea, and that was the possession of the manuscripts. He consulted some friends who knew more about Greek and books and manuscripts than he did, and obtained for them a view of the manuscripts. All the time Ali was inferring that Mr. Freer was stretching their friendship by bothering about the manuscripts and that they were not for sale.

His friends told Mr. Freer that the manuscripts appeared to be valuable and gave him an idea of what they were. But it was still the beauty of the writing and the perfect state of their preservation that attracted Mr. Freer and he determined to have them at any price. Ali proposed what he considered insurmountable terms, but Mr. Freer surmounted them. Then Ali delayed. It was a question of midnight meeting, lonesome rides and visits to all sorts of queer places where they could be alone before All would make new terms. It was like the induction into some secret order. All held Mr. Freer's pledge of secrecy from the start of the negotiations.

Finally, Ali said that the manuscripts had been dug from the ruins of Ahnmin, or Panopolis, on the right bank of the Nile, in the upper part of Egypt. It was formerly a city of 10,000 inhabitants and in early Christian times the city became an important religious center and many converts congregated in the vicinity. It was here that Naztorious, whose heresy was condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 421, died in banishment. 

Ali said that he knew that the copy was very old: that it has been in the sands for hundreds of years, but had only been brought to the surface in recent years. It is believed to have been the result of shrewd digging on the part of All Arabe himself.

Finally, before a council pledged to secrecy, and also to carry out with the utmost secrecy the plans that had been agreed upon for getting the manuscripts swiftly and safely out of the country, the manuscripts were turned over. It was late at night when Mr. Freer and his friends were led into Ali Arabe's house. No one else was in that house, and the old man, leading the way with a lantern, finally stopped at an ancient chest and brought out the manuscripts one by one, and thought loath to part with them at the last moment when every demand that he had made had been complied with.

Once the manuscripts were in his keeping, Mr. Freer did not delay upon his going, and it is secret how he got the manuscripts unobserved out of Egypt and to his home in this country.


Tomes Viewed by Experts.

   The manuscripts reposed in his vaults until a few weeks ago, when he invited some of the members of the faculty of the University of Michigan to his home. He showed them the manuscripts. Some of them were Greek and biblical students, and if Mr. Freer did not know the value of his find before-and it is rather to be expected that he did-he had no room to doubt after the faculty members from Ann Arbor had viewed the four tomes.

Then Mr. Freer said he would turn the work of transcribing, comparing and translating of the manuscripts over to the learned men of the University of Michigan and to all the rest of the learned men of the worlds, as he was very anxious himself to know what he got from Ali Arabe. He welcomes controversy. If the manuscripts are really what Professor Sanders and others believe them to be Mr. Freer wants to give them to the world for their real worth, and if they are not there is no use to pursue the inquiry any further.

"If these manuscripts prove to be what I am told by experts that they are, their value to be biblical students and the world at large cannot be doubted," said Mr. Freer to-day. "In that case I wish to give them to the world as an American publication. The work will be done as rapidly as possible and at the same time be absolutely accurate. But even those who are most interested in the manuscripts do not know what they may contain at the present time.

"We have simply scanned them, without even 'cutting the pages,' as it were. Wait until we sift into these pages so that each one is given its weight and value, and then we will tell the world what we have got, and they are welcome to make such disposition of it as it may deserve."

Professor Sanders Enthusiastic.

Professor Sanders is too enthusiastic in the work before him to even take time to discuss whether or not the manuscripts are genuine and antedate the Moslem invasion of Egypt, which occurred in the upper part in 639 A. D. It is the belief of Professor Sanders that some of the manuscripts date back to 300 or 400 A. D. this manuscript Bible was a very ambitious work and each of the volumes are copied in a different hand. It is believed that the work was intended for some church or library, and that all the volumes were bound with wooden boards and hung by chains to the desks or altars where they could be used for reference.

Perhaps Professor Sanders does not believe the popular version that all the books and manuscripts of the great library at Alexander were used for fuel in the bathhouses of the city, keeping them supplied for six months and destroying all writing, under the orders of the Caliph Omar. It is not disproven that the Alexandrian manuscripts were saved from the wreckage of the library, and the similarity of the Freer manuscripts makes it appear more plausible that both manuscripts were saved by those who recognized their future value to the world, or, as is the case at present in Egypt, believed that they would bring a handsome profit.

New Testament Is Preserved.

The similarity between the two manuscripts is that both appear as four volumes in the texts all capital letters are used, without punctuations and breathings, and the words are not spaces, but run together until the end of a paragraph. The new testament, the smallest of the volumes, was the best preserved in both the Alexandrian and the Freer manuscripts, except that in the latter the original board covers, with full length and decorated drawings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, with the colors almost completely faded away, were found intact on the volume. The vellum, or parchment, is said to be almost identical. The Freer manuscripts are a little larger in the size of the pages, the volumes are averaging in size about 11 1/2 by 13 inches.

The Alexandrian manuscripts were presented to King Charles I, of England in the year 1628 through his ambassador at the Porte, Sir Thomas Rowe, who received them as a present for his King from Cyrillus Lucaris, Patriarch of Constantinople. He is believed to have brought the manuscript from Alexandria, where he held the office of Patriarch. The omissions and evident errors in these manuscripts, which the Freer manuscripts promise to correct, are well known. In the Freer manuscripts, so far as the work of examination has gone forward, the following discoveries have been made: They do not contain any mark of a second hand, even, which can be placed at a later date than Moslem invasion.

Written in Different Hands.

Two of the manuscripts are in a large uncial hand, two in small, and there are other variations sufficient to make it certain that the individual manuscripts were written at different dates, ranging from the third to the sixth centuries.

The manuscripts are referred to by the Roman numerals, I., I., III, and IV.

Manuscript I. now contains Deuteronomy and Joshua. Genesis to Numbers, which it once contained, are missing. It is next to oldest of the four manuscripts and presents an exceptionally accurate text of this portion of the Septuagint.

Manuscript II. contains the Psalms.  It is the oldest of the four and is badly decayed. Nevertheless large portions of every Psalm will prove recoverable.  A comparison of a portion of the text shows that is one of the best manuscripts of the Psalms in existence; in the large portion, where the Vaticanus fails, it is probably the very best.

Manuscript III. contains the four gospels entire. It was probably written in the fifth or sixth century and contains many interesting variant readings. It is most important, however, because it contains the following extra paragraph which is introduced to fit in the modern present day Bible as Mark, xvi., 14 A:

"And they answered, saying that his age of unrighteousness and unbelief is under the power of Satan, who does not permit the things which are made impure by the (evil) spirits to comprehend the truth of God (and) His power. For this reason, 'Reveal thy righteousness now,' they said to Christ, and Christ said to them: "The limit of the years of the power of Satan has been fulfilled, but other terrible things are at hand and I was delivered unto death on behalf of those who sinned in order that they may return to the truth and sin no more, to the end that they inherit the spiritual, indestructible glory of righteousness (which) is in heaven."

This new paragraph was known to St. Jerome, and the first few lines of it are cited by him in Latin translation.

It has long been claimed that Mark, xvi., 8-20, was a later addition to the gospel, thought to have been borrowed from some other unknown gospel near the end of the second century.  This newly found manuscript probably is the original form of that part of the lost gospel, which, mutilated, was added to Mark. The reasons for the omission, say Professor Sanders, is quite apparent, as the new verse contains the statement that the destruction of sin in the world is near at hand. This idea is found in the Epistles of Peter and Paul, but the FOUR GOSPELS do not have it, and it is avoided by the later church writers.

Manuscript IV. is a badly decayed fragment. It once contained Acts and the Epistles, but not Revelation. It is an older and better manuscript than the four gospels, and its reading will be of great value in the text wherever they can be deciphered.

When Prof. Hupt, the noted Orientalist, said he didn't believe a merchant was capable of pronouncing on the ancient vellum fragment, did he mean Ali Arabi or Mr. Freer?

Now the venerable Freer manuscript is found to be a "codex." If this thing keep on, it will be pronounced the original "double-header" score card.

Now, if someone can produce a fragment in which Jesus is reported to have defended the money-changers, J. Pierpont Morgan might be induced to buy it.

Those classicists and archaeologists of the eastern colleges seem to think that Mr. Freer found that Biblical fragment in Michigan.  But it was in Egypt.

Transcription Notes:
The transcription is completed at the end, but there are some words have not transcribe yet, as faded. The word may be Akinmin, but it's difficult to tell. 'Finally, Ali said that the manuscripts had been dug from the ruins of [??]. - It's Ahnmin ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-03-30 16:02:59 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-03-31 08:35:56