YOU NEVER KNOW JUST WHAT YOU MIGHT FIND IN THE MARGINS

Stephen Carlson

This spring I traveled to Paris for field work in their famous National Library on a Templeton Religion Trust funded project entitled “Paratexts Seeking Understanding,” and I discovered something I was not looking for. It was a page from a previously unregistered New Testament manuscript.

The “Paratexts Seeking Understanding” project is about how “paratexts” contribute to understanding the main text of a book. The term “paratexts” may look fancy, but it basically refers to all the pieces of content in a book other than the book’s main text. Things like titles, tables of contents, and prefaces. My work for this project looks at the paratextual annotations written in the margins of manuscripts of a famous mystical theologian who wrote under the name of Dionysios the Areopagite. My field work involved personally inspecting medieval manuscripts for all the written bits outside of the main text, and that’s what I did in Paris.

In one of the manuscripts I looked at, I noticed that the first flyleaf of the book contained some faded writing on it. It was hard to read at first but I was could quickly tell it came from the Gospel of Mark, starting at Mark 10:26. I checked the official list of New Testament manuscripts maintained by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research (INTF) and discovered that this manuscript was not registered and unknown to New Testament textual critics. I submitted a registration request to the INTF and after some weeks they confirmed that it was a page from an eleventh-century Gospel Lectionary and they assigned it the number L2557.

I never expected to make this discovery, but the thing about looking for things in unusual places is that you never know what you’re going find.