Posted on 06/02/2015 10:45:22 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
A Syriac scholar at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, Dr. Kessel was sitting in the library of the manuscript's owner, a wealthy collector of rare scientific material in Baltimore. At that moment, Dr. Kessel realized that just three weeks earlier, in a library at Harvard University, he had seen a single orphaned page that was too similar to these pages to be coincidence.
The manuscript he held contained a hidden translation of an ancient, influential medical text by Galen of Pergamon, a Greco-Roman physician and philosopher who died in 200 A.D. It was missing pages and Dr. Kessel was suddenly convinced one of them was in Boston...
Scholars are just beginning to pore over the text, the oldest known copy of Galen's "On the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs." It may well provide new insights into medicine's roots and into the spread of this new science across the ancient world...
The manuscript held by Dr. Kessel that day was a palimpsest: older text covered up by newer writing. It was a common practice centuries ago, a medieval form of recycling. In this case, 11th-century Syrian scribes had scraped away Galen's medical text and had overwritten hymns on the parchment...
He found one missing page in a catalog from the Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai. It is known more commonly as St. Catherine's in the Sinai Desert in Egypt, which has the world's oldest continuously operating library.
Another leaf turned up at the National Library of France in Paris. And at the Vatican's vast library in Rome, he was able to identify the other three missing leaves, bringing the total to six.
The seventh missing page is believed to have been blank and was probably discarded.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Update to this 2015 article.
Conservators at Stanford University Libraries removed the pages from the leather-bound cover of the book of hymns, and mounted each leaf in an individually fitted, archival mat. The individual mats were placed in an aluminum frame to secure the pages while examining the underlying text with X-rays at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource. Credit: Farrin Abbott / SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
True, but the leprosy of Leviticus was not the modern disease we call leprosy, which has different symptoms.
How do these symptoms differ? As was pointed out above, washing in the Nile may have preserved health better than having very little water in more desert areas. ONe reason for the success of Islam was the rule about washing hands 5 times a day before prayer. Also the rule about using the right hand for eating from the communal cookpot, and the left hand for cleaning human waste.
About whether it has been translated.....IN fact I hope not. Scholars or anyone need to learn Greek...read it in the original, the authentic.
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