EWTN News reports that an international team led by Professor Garrick V. Allen of the University of Glasgow has recovered 42 lost pages of Codex H, a sixth-century manuscript of St. Paul’s epistles, using multispectral imaging. The article celebrates this as a “monumental” breakthrough, emphasizing that the recovered texts reveal ancient chapter divisions differing from current ones, how scribes corrected sacred texts, and medieval manuscript reuse practices. The project was funded by the Templeton Religion Trust and the U.K.’s Arts and Humanities Research Council in collaboration with the Great Lavra Monastery on Mount Athos — a center of Eastern Orthodox schismatics outside the unity of the Catholic Church. While the article presents this as an unqualified triumph for biblical scholarship, a deeper examination reveals the profoundly naturalistic and rationalist framework underlying such “discoveries,” which ultimately serve to undermine the supernatural certitude of divine revelation and the Church’s infallible custodianship of Sacred Scripture.
The Rationalist Framework Masquerading as Devotion
The article’s language is saturated with the vocabulary of modern biblical criticism — a discipline condemned repeatedly by the pre-conciliar Magisterium. Professor Allen speaks of understanding “how the New Testament was transmitted and understood in antiquity,” of “new clues” regarding its transmission, and of “the living history of the transmission of the Bible throughout the centuries.” This framing is not innocent. It presupposes that Sacred Scripture is a merely human document subject to historical evolution, corruption, and reconstruction — a reductio ad absurdum of the supernatural character of divine inspiration.
Consider the contrast with Catholic doctrine. Pope Leo XIII, in the encyclical Providentissimus Deus (1893), taught with the full weight of the Magisterium that “the sacred writings, as having been written by the inspiration of God the Holy Ghost, have God for their author” (Denz. 1952). The same encyclical condemned the rationalist error that would treat Holy Scripture like “any other merely human document” — precisely the error embedded in the article’s framing. The 1907 decree Lamentabili sane exitu, issued under St. Pius X and the Holy Office, explicitly condemned Proposition 12: “An exegete who wishes to fruitfully engage in biblical studies should especially reject any preconceived opinion about the supernatural origin of Holy Scripture, which he should interpret just like other purely human documents.” Yet this is exactly the operative assumption of the entire enterprise described in the article.
The article’s reference to “how sixth-century scribes corrected and annotated sacred texts” is particularly revealing. The implication that sacred texts required “correction” by fallible human hands introduces an element of doubt regarding the integrity of the transmitted text — a doubt that the Magisterium has consistently rejected. As the same Lamentabili condemned Proposition 11: “Divine inspiration does not extend to the whole of Holy Scripture to such extent that all and individual parts of it are protected from every error.” The Catholic position is that God, as the principal Author of Sacred Scripture, providentially ensured the faithful transmission of His Word through the Church, which is “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15).
The Idolatry of “Science” Over Faith
The article’s breathless celebration of multispectral imaging and radiocarbon dating as tools that “retrieve multiple pages of information from every single physical page” exposes the modern idolatry of technology — the belief that human ingenuity can recover what divine providence has permitted to be lost. This is not faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum), but science displacing faith. The Catholic position is clear: the deposit of faith was entrusted not to manuscripts but to the living Magisterium of the Church. As the Council of Trent solemnly declared, the truth and discipline of the Gospel are contained “in the written books and in the unwritten traditions” (Denz. 783).
St. Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907), identified this very tendency as a hallmark of Modernism: the subordination of faith to science, the treatment of sacred texts as objects of historical-critical analysis rather than as the inspired Word of God. The article’s framing — presenting the recovery of manuscript pages as more significant than the unchanging truth those pages contain — is a textbook example of what St. Pius X called the “agnosticism” of the modernist method, which “reduces everything to the study of phenomena” and denies the supernatural origin of revelation (cf. Pascendi, §6).
Moreover, the article’s reference to “ancient lists of chapters considered the oldest known for St. Paul’s epistles, which differ notably from the current division of these texts” implicitly suggests that the Church’s received text is merely one historical variant among many — a relativization of the canonical text that echoes the condemned Proposition 61 of Lamentabili: “It can be proclaimed without contradiction that no chapter of Holy Scripture (from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of the Apocalypse) contains doctrine fully consistent with the doctrine of the Church on the same matters.”
The Ecumenical Collaboration with Schismatics
The article notes that the project was conducted “in collaboration with the Great Lavra Monastery” on Mount Athos — a monastery of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which has been in formal schism from Rome since 1054. The Catholic Church has consistently taught that the Eastern Orthodox are schismatics, separated from the true Church of Christ. Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned Proposition 18: “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church.” By parity of reasoning, the implication that Orthodox collaboration in biblical scholarship is spiritually beneficial or neutral is an expression of the false ecumenism condemned by Pope Pius XI in Mortalium Animos (1928), which rejected “congresses, meetings, and addresses” with non-Catholics for the purpose of promoting a false unity.
The funding sources are equally revealing: the Templeton Religion Trust, known for promoting the reconciliation of science and religion on modernist terms, and the U.K.’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, a secular government body. The Catholic Church has repeatedly warned against the subordination of sacred learning to secular and non-Catholic agendas. Pope Leo XIII, in Officiorum ac Munerum (1897), and St. Pius X, in the Motu Proprio Sacrorum Antistitum (1910), imposed strict controls on Catholic engagement with secular biblical scholarship precisely to prevent the contamination of faith with rationalism.
The Omission of Supernatural Reality
Perhaps the most damning critique of the article is what it omits entirely: any reference to the supernatural character of Sacred Scripture, the role of the Church as the divinely appointed custodian and interpreter of the Bible, the infallibility of the Magisterium in matters of faith and morals, or the reality that the deposit of faith is preserved not in parchment and ink but in the living Tradition of the Church. The article treats the Bible as a historical artifact to be recovered by technology, not as the inspired, inerrant Word of God entrusted to His Church.
This silence is itself a theological statement — and a heretical one. It reflects the naturalist mentality that Pope Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus of Errors, Proposition 3: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself, and suffices, by its natural force, to secure the welfare of men and of nations.” It is the same mentality that leads the conciliar sect to treat the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as a “meal” and the sacraments as “symbols” — stripping the supernatural from the life of the faith and reducing Christianity to a merely human enterprise of historical research and cultural preservation.
The Living Transmission vs. the Archaeological Illusion
The article’s claim that this discovery provides “a better understanding of the living history of the transmission of the Bible throughout the centuries” is a half-truth concealing a fundamental error. Yes, the Bible has a “living history” — but that history is not the history of manuscript fragments scattered across European libraries. It is the history of the Church’s living Tradition, guided by the Holy Ghost, which has preserved, transmitted, and interpreted the Word of God infallibly through the centuries. The true “living history” of the Bible is written in the liturgy, the Fathers, the councils, the papal magisterium, and the lives of the saints — not in multispectral imaging of palimpsests.
As St. Augustine taught: “I would not believe the Gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church” (Contra Epistulam Manichaei Quam Vocant Fundamenti, c. 5). The article’s implicit message — that the authority of the biblical text rests on archaeological recovery and scholarly reconstruction rather than on the authority of the Church — is a denial of this foundational principle. It is, in the final analysis, an expression of the very Modernism that St. Pius X called “the synthesis of all heresies” (Pascendi, §39).
The recovery of ancient manuscript pages, however technologically impressive, cannot recover what the modern world has lost: faith in the supernatural origin, divine inspiration, and infallible transmission of Sacred Scripture by the one true Church of Jesus Christ. Until that faith is restored, no amount of multispectral imaging will illuminate the darkness of a civilization that has rejected its Creator and replaced His eternal Word with the shifting sands of human scholarship.
Source:
Advanced technology recovers 42 lost pages of ancient New Testament manuscript (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 30.04.2026