Seminary scholar finds copy of Psalms Discovery made in German library

David Trobisch is no ordinary detective.

He’s one of the few scholars in the world who study the centuries-old handwritten manuscripts of the Bible.

Now, his recent discovery of a copy of eight Psalms most likely transcribed in the 14th century has transformed him into the Sam Spade of biblical scholarship.

Just as medieval monks meticulously copied the intricate letters and illuminated the pages of the early Bibles with decorative borders, Trobisch pores over ancient parchments and manuscripts.

That’s what the Bangor Theological Seminary professor, on sabbatical leave, was doing in Dresden, Germany, last month as he worked to document the changes made over the centuries to the letters of St. Paul.

Trobisch, along with his friend and colleague Matthias Klinghardt, professor of New Testament at the University of Dresden, went to a Dresden library to examine the famed Codex Boernerianus. Written during the ninth century, it is one of four existing copies of that particular edition of the Christian New Testament.

Once Trobisch had completed preliminary work on that manuscript, the librarian brought over a manuscript written on paper instead of parchment, along with a folder of discarded sheets.

It was among this waste paper that Trobisch found copies of the first eight Psalms.

“I only had a few minutes to look at them because I found them 10 minutes before the library closed,” he said Tuesday. “I could read just the very first lines that day.”

He returned to examine the manuscripts more closely and photograph them with a digital camera. Flash photography is forbidden because the light might damage the manuscripts.

There were eight leaves, or pages, with Psalms written on both sides. Those he found are the first eight Psalms, with only a few words missing because of small holes in the paper or other slight damage. The manuscript ends abruptly at the end of the eighth Psalm.

Bookbinders in the Middle Ages sometimes used a pile of sheets recycled from discarded books, which they wrapped with leather to form book covers, the professor explained Tuesday during an interview at his seminary office in Bangor.

When the book was newly bound centuries ago, the bookbinder most likely hesitated to throw away those pieces of paper.

The bookbinder probably put them in a folder and stored the folder next to the manuscript, he suspects.

Trobisch immediately recognized the papers as pages from a Christian Bible because of the lines drawn over words used to designate holy names in Greek texts. He also recognized them as Psalms.

By carefully examining the letters and artwork, Trobisch, with the help of other scholars, was able to determine that it was copied in the 14th century, almost certainly in Greece and perhaps on the island of Crete.

“The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew,” he said. “But when the first Christian Bibles were published in the second century, it was translated into Greek.

“The first translation of the Psalms was done about 300 B.C., then edited by early Christians about 450 years later. The oldest copies of the Psalms that survived are from the fourth century. These pages I found represent almost dot-to-dot that text from the fourth century.”

The codex, a Latin word for book, that the Psalms were found with was thoroughly examined and photographed in 1915 by a scholar who did not go to the library in Dresden. The scholar received the manuscript through the mail. Later scholars worked from his photographs. Trobisch believes that the earlier scholar was sent just the codex but not the separate folder.

The other paper Trobisch found in the folder turned out to be correspondence between the monks who copied the manuscripts in European monasteries during the Middle Ages.

This is not Trobisch’s first discovery. As a graduate student he found small pieces of paper that were identified as sections from a Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.

Two years ago in New York, he found two pages from an ancient lectionary, a compilation of Scripture readings for each day of the year.

“There are so many Psalms, but to have a copy of them as we have them in the Bible – that doesn’t happen all the time,” he said Tuesday. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime find.”

For Trobisch, however, the discovery was a detour from his sabbatical work on St. Paul’s letters, which has been funded by the Lily Foundation.

Once Trobisch writes an article on his discovery of the Psalms for a scholarly journal, a detailed study of the Trobisch Psalms most likely will be done by German scholars working on a new translation of the Book of Psalms.