On February 23, 2009, a team of four people from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (www.csntm.org) embarked on a trip to Greece. The primary mission was to take digital photographs of the Greek NT manuscripts at the Benaki Museum in Athens. Dr. Pitsa Tsakona, the director of Benaki’s extensive library, has been incredibly helpful to us as we have sought to photograph these ancient scriptures for the sake of preservation and scholarship.
According to Kurt Aland’s Kurzgefasste Liste, second edition (1994), the Benaki has thirty Greek NT MSS in its possession. The Internet update of the K-Liste does not list any others.
As we were examining the MSS, preparing them for photography, Dr. Tsakona began to bring us others that were not to be found in the K-Liste. We also perused three catalogs—the official catalog of Benaki Museum, Καταλογος Ελληνικων Χειρογραφων του Μουσειου Μπανακη (10oV–16 ος αι.) Athens: 1991, and two in-house catalogs. And we discovered a couple of palimpsests within the MSS that we were photographing (one biblical, one yet to be determined). Altogether, there are as many as eight Greek NT MSS at the Benaki that apparently do not have Gregory-Aland numbers.
You can see the description of these MSS here.
4 replies to "Eight Uncatalogued NT Manuscripts at the Benaki Museum"
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Well, if it isn’t the manuscript junkie……. 8)
Can we visualize these at the csntm site?
What are you photographing now?
Susan, we have been given permission to post the images, but we have to watermark them first. I can’t tell you what we’re shooting now, but I can say that we have discovered more MSS in Athens at another location. More info coming later!