Posted on 08/24/2022 3:54:04 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. returned a more than 1,000-year-old handwritten gospel to the Greek Orthodox Church on Tuesday. It was transferred to an Eastern Orthodox Church during a private ceremony in New York.
The manuscript, which had been looted from a Greek Monastery in World War I and was acquired by the museum at a Christie’s auction in 2011, is expected to be repatriated next month to the Kosinitza Monastery in northern Greece. There, for hundreds of years, it had been used in religious services, along with more than 400 volumes, before being taken by Bulgarian forces in 1917.
The manuscript’s history and chain of ownership is traced on the Museum of the Bible’s website, including its creation in the late 10th- or early 11th-century through various sales after the end of the war.
Related Articles A carved sandstone relief will be Scotland's Glasgow Museums Signs Historic Repatriation Agreement with India Texas Museum Sends Stolen Sculpture of the Patron Saint of Lost Things Back to Mexico This gospel is among the latest artifacts in the museum’s collection to be returned in an ongoing effort to regain credibility. The museum has been investigating the provenance of the whole collection in recent years. Early acquisitions by its founders, the owners of the craft store chain Hobby Lobby, included thousands of items looted from the Middle East. In 2017, the company paid $3 million to settle claims with the U.S. government for failing to conduct proper due diligence before buying a number of antiquities in 2009.
“Certainly the marketplace has its challenges,” Museum of the Bible’s chief curatorial officer Jeffrey Kloha told the New York Times Tuesday. “Things have been moving in the market for some time, and in some cases decades, that have origins that are not legal.”
While the Museum of the Bible has never publicly displayed the manuscript, it was included in a traveling exhibition at the Vatican in 2012.
“The procedures in place now are very, very tight,” said Kloha of the Museum of the Bible’s more rigorous acquisition process. “If we don’t have every detail filled in, it’s simply not considered. The process is very different than it was 10 years ago.”
According to the Greek Orthodox Church, several other U.S. institutions still have artifacts among their holdings that were looted from the same monastery. In 2016, after the church asked for other looted manuscripts from the same monastery to be returned, the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago obliged.
This is the latest among a number of ancient looted objects to be repatriated, with a number of the Benin Bronzes being returned in recent months and a possible deal over the Parthenon Marbles between the British Museum and Greece.
My missing sock has a patron saint?
Greek to Me,,,
Handwritten manuscript. I am getting writer’s cramp just looking at it...
Good...
I visited the Museum of the Bible a few years ago. It was interesting, but I was annoyed that they use BCE/CE (before the Communist era/Communist era) for dates.
Is it ‘LOST THINGS’?
Or the book of JONAH?
Dear Saint Anthony please come around.
Something’s been lost and must be found.
Joan Wilder: [voiceover] That was the end of Grogan... the man who killed my father, raped and murdered my sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog, and stole my Bible! But if there was one law of the west: Bastards had brothers, who seemed to ride forever.
It is only a thousand years old... But no matter what... All finds like this belong to where they originated.
As a historian like you, I am sick of self righteous “stewards” taking possession and stashing away stuff that belongs to others. It is Religious censorship.
No matter who it is or who it actually belongs to...
https://biblehub.com/beza/john/1.htm
ΚΑΤΑ ΙΩΑΝΝΗΝ
1ἘΝ ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.
2Οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν Θεόν· 3Πάντα δἰ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο· καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἓν ὃ γέγονεν.
4Ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων·
5Καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτίᾳ αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν.
6Ἐγένετο ἄνθρωπος ἀπεσταλμένος παρὰ Θεοῦ, ὄνομα αὐτῷ Ἰωάννης·
7Οὗτος ἦλθεν εἰς μαρτυρίαν, ἵνα μαρτυρήσῃ περὶ τοῦ φωτός, ἵνα πάντες πιστεύσωσιν δἰ αὐτοῦ.
8Οὐκ ἦν ἐκεῖνος τὸ φῶς, ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα μαρτυρήσῃ περὶ τοῦ φωτός.
The Gospel according to John
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, the the Word was God;
He was in the beginning with God; Through Him all things were made, and apart from him nothing came into being
In Him was life, and the life was the light of man;
And the light shown in the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it
There was a man sent from God named John
He came in order to bear witness, in order to bear witness to the light that all men might believe in him
He was not the light, but came in order to bear witness concerning the light.
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