Paul’s Lost Words?

There is a story that continues to gain traction on Christian websites. This started with an article by the University of Glasgow announcing that researchers have been working with an ancient manuscript and, through modern imaging techniques, have been able to recover some text that hasn’t been seen for centuries.

This manuscript has a name! CODEX H!

What is that? Codex H is a sixth-century Greek manuscript of the letters of Paul that was actually taken apart in the Middle Ages — its pages somehow cleansed of the writings, then re-inked, and reused as binding material for other books at a monastery on Mount Athos (in NE Greece) — leaving the original form of Codex H broken up and scattered across libraries in several countries used as binding in books.

These researchers found some old books. They looked at the binding and somehow realized that the binding had actual pages of Codex H – lost copies of manuscripts of Paul’s letters! They used advanced multispectral imaging, and they were able to digitally reconstruct the nearly invisible “ghost texts,” the original writings on the pages of Codex H, and they have effectively been able to restore about 42 missing pages!

Now we can see what those manuscripts contained!

Hence all the traction on Christian news sites with clickbait titles like this one at Biblical Archeology Society that says Paul’s Lost Words Recovered! Really. Huh.

Did they discover new words Paul had written that were lost? Have missing sections of the Bible been recovered? Do we now have verses we never read before?

No.

The recovered text contains all the known portions of Paul’s epistles. The Glasgow article freely told us, “While the recovered text contains known portions of Paul’s Letters, the discovery offers a unique insight into how the New Testament has evolved and been understood through the centuries.”

But hey — that’s still incredible, I guess.

They’re not discovering anything new. They’re uncovering really old copies of the same Pauline verses that already exist in our Bibles right now, which is a very good thing, because they’re discovery reinforces the principles Pastors Jordan and Ross and Reid and others have taught about copies and preservation.

They’re not restoring lost Pauline verses from missing sections of the Bible — they’re studying wonderful copies of something God already preserved.

And that’s a pretty important distinction, wouldn’t you say?

Now the academic world is happy to engage in clickbait about missing words of the Apostle Paul to bring attention to themselves and perhaps get some funding as if they’re inching closer to giving us undiscovered truths from lost sections of the Bible.

The truth is — God never lost His Bible.

He preserved it.

He promised to preserve it (Psa. 12:6-7).

It is still here. We can hold His preserved words.

And what we hold in our hands in the KJV isn’t simply the best we can get because God’s old book has somehow been largely lost over time — what we hold in our hands is the result of divine preservation working through history.

You can actually hold that miracle in your hands.

That’s so cool we made a song about it.

* If you’d like to dig further into the subjects of preservation and translation, we would recommend the books of Pastor Bryan Ross, particularly his series called “From This Generation Forever” as well as his sundry of fantastic video playlists.

** We would also recommend the classic “Manuscript Evidence” courses (Part One and Part Two) by Pastor Richard Jordan as part of Grace School of the Bible.