British Library buys St Cuthbert Gospel from Jesuits.
The British Library has paid £9 million to acquire the St Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest fully intact European book.
The palm-sized book (above), a manuscript copy of the Gospel of John in Latin, was bought from the British branch of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), the library said today.
So much for the Catholic Church suppressing the Bible in the 7th century.
Interesting how it’s only one gospel, as opposed to a whole 73-book anthology we are used to nowadays.
Even so, it’s pretty thick for just John, but the nearly 200 pages are made from scraped calfskin, and the writing is done by hand in quarter-inch-tall letters
So when people say early Bibles lacked “the apocrypha”, the rest of the story is that a whole canon would have been too big and too expensive.
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