If you have ever watched “Antiques Roadshow,” you may know that family Bibles from the 18th and 19th century, while beautiful and priceless to the family to which it belongs, aren’t going to be a big payday. The experts on the show say that unless a Bible predates 1550, it isn’t worth much monetarily.
However, the police in Cyprus may have found a Bible that would make the “Antique Roadshow” experts quake in their boots. The police in northern Cyprus raided the hideout of suspected antiquity smugglers and found a Bible that has excerpts written in gold lettering on vellum. One page shows the drawing of a tree and one page shows eight lines of Syriac script. The Bible is loosely strung together.
The police testified that they believe the Bible could be 2,000 years old. The clue was the Syriac script, a native language used during the time of Jesus. However, Syriac is still used by Syrian Christians and in the Syrian Orthodox Church in India.
Now the real question – is it real, fake, or less antique than it appears? If real, the Bible could be priceless (although I am sure someone would be happy to put a price on it), but if fake, it is not worth the paper it is printed on. However, it might be real, just not “real” old.
In fact, experts are torn over exactly how old the Bible is. The gold lettering leads many experts to believe that it is less than 2,000 years old, including Peter Williams, an expert and warden of Tyndale House, University of Cambridge, who think it is less than 1,000 years old.
Charlotte Roueche, professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King’s College in London, believes the Bible is from the Tur-Abdin area of Turkey, where the people still speak Syrian, so the Syriac script doesn’t necessarily date it back to the time of Jesus.
Another expert, JF Coakley of the University of Cambridge library, thinks that some of the words appear to be modern Syriac, which was not written down until the mid-19th century.
It is normal for experts to be suspicious. Other “priceless manuscripts” have been passed off as being older than they actually were. Thankfully, carbon dating can help experts detect the age of an item.