When he walked into the Dresden library, Dr. David Trobisch, Throckmorton-Hayes Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Bangor Theological Seminary, had no idea that he was about to make what he calls a "once-in-a-lifetime find"—one that had been buried for at least 400 years. He and a German colleague, Matthias Klinghardt, a professor of New Testament at the University of Dresden, had gone to the library to examine a ninth-century edition of St. Paul's letters called the Codex Boernerianus. After they had done that work, Dr. Trobisch was given a box of what looked like waste paper, which had been discarded after rebinding a volume from the 16th century.
As he leafed through these sheets, he realized that some were pages from a Greek translation of the Christian Bible. What he had found was a version of the first eight psalms in the Bible, with a few words missing because of holes in the paper. There was also correspondence between the monks who had copied the manuscripts in European monasteries during the Middle Ages.
Why is this manuscript important? It sheds new light on the original texts of the Bible. Dr. Trobisch says: "This is a 14th-century manuscript, but its text is almost the same as the oldest manuscripts from the fourth century. And that means this Greek manuscript was copied either from a very old one or belongs to a tradition where they didn't revise the texts a lot. This is very unusual because Christians usually revise and revise in order to make the text clearer and more understandable.
