What’s believed to be the oldest surviving Christian book in the world has been sold by London auction house Christie’s for A$6 million to an anonymous phone bidder.
The Crosby-Schoyen Codex dates back to the fourth century, and possibly even the third century around 250 AD. It’s the world’s oldest book in a private collection and one of the earliest books in existence, previously owned by the Norwegian businessman and rare book collector Martin Schoyen.
The book was part of a huge collection of texts discovered by farmers near Dishna in Egypt in the 1950s. Its 104 pages are written in Coptic script on 52 double-sided leaves of papyrus which are now preserved between plexiglass plates. It features Christian writings and Biblical excerpts including the earliest complete copies of two texts from the Bible — the book of Jonah and Peter’s first epistle.
News agency AFP reports the ancient Biblical text represents advances in written technology at a time when single-sided scrolls were more commonplace. It was originally copied by a monk in one of the world’s first Christian monasteries over a period of 40 years around the fourth century, making it considerably older than more renowned ancient texts such as the Gutenberg Bible which dates from the 1450s.
“It’s right at that period, that transitional period, when papyrus scroll starts turning into codex form,” said Eugenio Donadoni, Christie’s Senior Specialist, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. “So, books as we know them today.”
He attributed the preservation of the codex and the entire Dishna Collection to Egypt’s arid climate, pointing out that only a handful of books from the 3rd and 4th centuries have survived to the present day.
Mr. Donadoni told the BBC the Crosby-Schoyen Codex is “a cornerstone of early faith and a witness to the earliest spread of Christianity around the Mediterranean. It’s one of the three major discoveries of the 20th century that revolutionised the study of Christianity.”
Last year, the Codex Sassoon, a Hebrew Bible more than 1,000-years-old, sold for A$58 million at Sotheby’s in New York in a new record. That surpassed the A$47 million that Microsoft founder Bill Gates paid in 1994 for Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester manuscript.
The most expensive historical document remains one of the first prints of the US Constitution, which Sotheby’s sold for A$65 million in November 2021.
Image: Christies
