Bible Hype

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A friend recently sent me an ad that had been prominently displayed in the April 7th issue of the New York Times Book Review. It proclaimed that the book Eyewitness to Jesus: Amazing New Manuscript Evidence About the Origin of the Gospels (New York: Doubleday, 1996) held “material proof…of a discovery that rivals that of the Dead Sea Scrolls”—that three small papyrus fragments had been redated, proving that “the Gospel of Matthew may have been written as early as A.D. 40.” “Proof of Jesus’ life was there all along but no one noticed…until now,” it declared in large type.

These extravagant claims had already been thoroughly undermined in a BR article by the distinguished British scholar Graham Stanton.^a In my review of the book, which appeared in the August 1996 issue of BR (see Bible Books, BR 12:04), I concluded that the book’s authors were guilty of “slack scholarship” and “journalistic special pleading.”

I doubt that our scholarly condemnation, however, will have the slightest effect on the book’s appeal to the general public or that Doubleday’s reputation will be tarnished for publishing it.

Reading the ad and writing the review, however, did bring to mind an episode I was peripherally involved in 40 years ago that also concerned grossly inflated claims—this time over the age and importance of a manuscript of the Syriac New Testament, which was touted as a copy of the original New Testament in Aramaic.

The Yonan Codex, as it is called, went on exhibit in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress on April 5, 1955. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles unveiled the booth in which the codex was enclosed.

Two weeks earlier the precious manuscript had been transferred from a bank vault to the White House by a procession of police and armed guards. President Eisenhower viewed it before it was taken to the Library of Congress. The manuscript was insured for $1.5 million for the half-hour trip from the bank to the library.

Later that year the manuscript began a tour, again under armed guard, through the Bible Belt in an attempt to raise $3 million. Half of those funds were to be used by the Library of Congress to purchase the manuscript from its owner, a Washington-based businessman born in Iran, Mr. Norman Malek Yonan.

The manuscript traveled in a special glass-domed bus with a built-in deposit box. Written on the sides of the bus, in large gold letters, was “Christendom’s Most Precious Possession.” The Bible’s first stop was at the chapel of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. After being displayed at a political function involving Governor A.B. “Happy” Chandler of Kentucky, the manuscript traveled on to Little Rock, Arkansas, and from there to Dallas, Texas. In Texas it was exhibited, again under suitable armed guard, in a Neiman Marcus department store.

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My role in the whole affair began in June 1954, a year before the theatrics got underway. Mr. Yonan had been trying to interest the Library of Congress in acquiring the manuscript. The assistant chief librarian, Dr. Verner Clapp, called me in as an expert to estimate the age and importance of the document.

When I arrived in Washington, I was taken by Mr. Yonan to his lawyer’s office, where I waited until Mr. Yonan brought out a box containing the manuscript from the office vault. He explained that the manuscript was a precious heirloom that had been in his family since about the fourth century.

Inside the box lay a leather-bound book 7 by 9 inches, with 227 parchment pages. Opening it, I discovered it was a Syriac (eastern Aramaic) manuscript of the New Testament beginning with Matthew 9:35 and ending with Hebrews 12:9. The missing portions of Matthew and Hebrews were written on additional pages of paper in a totally different hand.

I had brought with me a printed copy of the American Bible Society’s Syriac New Testament. In the passages that I collated in the lawyer’s office, the text of the Yonan Codex was identical to that of the standard Peshitta Syriac version. There appeared to be nothing new in the Yonan Codex. But the manuscript was old. The Peshitta Syriac version of the New Testament was translated from Greek into Syriac in the fifth century A.D. This copy, based on the style of its handwriting, dated to about the seventh century at the earliest.

On balance, I recommended that the Library of Congress acquire it. As chair of the American Committee on Versions of the International Greek New Testament Project, I was—and still am— 029interested in having the library increase its very modest collection of biblical manuscripts. This would have been an interesting addition to its collection. I did not suggest a price or value for the codex in my recommendation.

By the time the Yonan Codex went on tour, an organization known as the Aramaic Bible Foundation had been incorporated, presumably to raise funds to acquire the codex. They prepared a brochure that described the codex as “one of Christendom’s most precious documents, written in the language spoken by Jesus and his disciples.” In fact, Jesus spoke Palestinian Aramaic, not the eastern Aramaic known as Syriac, which is a related but different Aramaic dialect.

By the winter of 1955, the Society of Biblical Literature, the premiere American organization of Bible scholars, adopted the following resolution:

The Society of Biblical Literature at its annual meeting in New York City on December 28–30, 1955, wishes to go on record as opposing some of the publicity attending the efforts currently being made to raise by popular subscription $1,500,000 for the purchase of the so-called Yonan Codex. This codex is a manuscript of the Syriac New Testament which is reported to be “the oldest surviving complete New Testament written in Syriac-Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus” (Washington Evening Star, March 25, 1955).

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According to members of our Society who have examined the manuscript, the Yonan Codex is a copy of the Syriac Peshitta, a version which was made from the Greek New Testament at about the beginning of the fifth century and which contains 22 of the 27 books of the New Testament. Edessene Syriac, the language of this version, differs considerably from the Palestine Aramaic used by Jesus more than four centuries earlier. About 300 manuscripts of the Peshitta version are known to exist in the libraries of this country and Europe. Several of these are older than the Yonan Codex, which some of our members who are expert in Syriac paleography date to the seventh or eighth century. According to certain members of the Society who have frequently arranged for the purchase of Biblical manuscripts, a fair estimate of the value of a manuscript like the Yonan Codex is about $5,000.¹

The Aramaic Bible Foundation threatened to sue. To protect the Society’s modest financial resources, the president of the Society of Biblical Literature, J. Philip Hyatt, with the concurrence of the other officers and the Society’s advisory council, wrote a letter expressing “regret” at the resolution and explaining that the Society had “not intended to discredit the Aramaic Bible Foundation or the owner of the Yonan Codex.”

Hyatt’s letter went on:

The resolution did not intend to give the impression that Syriac, the language of the Codex, was an entirely different language from that spoken by Jesus. Qualified scholars know that Syriac is an Aramaic dialect and is related to that dialect of Aramaic spoken by Jesus…As to the date of the Codex we recognize the possibility of honest difference of scholarly opinion; we have been informed that at least two qualified scholars, who are members of the Society, had subscribed to a fifth-century date.

I wrote an article in Christian Century (“Is the Yonan Codex Unique?” February 22, 1956) pointing 056out that several hundred other manuscript copies of the Peshitta New Testament had been catalogued in libraries and museums around the world. Some of those are dated even earlier than the Yonan copy.

I did not hear about the codex again for nearly 20 years. I do not know how much money was collected on its bus tour. But in about 1976, at a meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Dr. Paul L. Garber, professor of Bible at Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia, casually asked me whether I had ever heard of the Yonan Codex. The manuscript, Garber told me, was in the possession of the Emotional Maturity Instruction Center in Decatur. The center had transliterated the Beatitudes of Christ from the Syriac text of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3–12) and was selling copies for four dollars, assuring readers that by concentrating each day on these sentences in Syriac, their personalities would become adjusted and more mature! According to Garber, the center had even persuaded magistrates in Atlanta to buy copies of the transliteration for use in attempting to quell obstreperous prisoners!

For several years thereafter I again heard nothing more concerning the Yonan Codex. Then in the autumn of 1994 it surfaced once more. During a visit to the Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, I was taken to a newly established museum near Grand Haven, Michigan. The museum, called The Scriptorium: Center for Christian Antiquities, contains early printed Bibles and other treasures. Dr. Scott Carroll, the director, showed me some of its treasures, including several manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Coptic and Hebrew. Imagine my surprise when he took from a shelf a parchment codex of about 7 by 9 inches that he identified as the Yonan Codex!

Of course I asked how it had come into the possession of the Scriptorium. I was told they had bought it for about $25,000 at an auction at Sotheby’s.

Memories flooded me as I held in my hands the same manuscript that I had examined 40 years earlier.² The serpentine saga of the Yonan Codex Affair had at last come to a conclusion; the manuscript was finally ensconced in a suitable environment and available for scholarly examination and research.

A friend recently sent me an ad that had been prominently displayed in the April 7th issue of the New York Times Book Review. It proclaimed that the book Eyewitness to Jesus: Amazing New Manuscript Evidence About the Origin of the Gospels (New York: Doubleday, 1996) held “material proof…of a discovery that rivals that of the Dead Sea Scrolls”—that three small papyrus fragments had been redated, proving that “the Gospel of Matthew may have been written as early as A.D. 40.” “Proof of Jesus’ life was there all along but no one noticed…until now,” it declared in large […]