This coming June, one of the oldest Christian books still in existence will go up for auction. The Crosby-Shøyen Codex (codex is the term we use for ancient manuscripts that were written on separate sheets and bound like books, in contrast to scrolls) contains copies of Jonah, I Peter, and several other works. The manuscript is written in Coptic and was produced in an Egyptian monastery somewhere around 250-350 CE. You can read more of the story here, but I want to focus your attention on the fact that the manuscript comes from Egypt.

It is instructive to note that one of the oldest Christian books we have is not European, but Egyptian. The dry climate of Egypt (which is conducive for preserving papyrus manuscripts) is part of the story, but so is the non-Eurocentric character of the early Church.

We can also place this codex alongside the Garima Gospels, an Ethiopian manuscript dated between 350 and 650 CE.

The Garima Gospels are written in Ge’ez (an ancient Ethiopian language which remains the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church) and are most likely the oldest complete illuminated versions of the Gospels. The first few chapters of Judith S. McKenzie and Francis Watson’s handbook on the Garima Gospels is available here (with pictures!), and is well worth a look.

If you had been asked to guess the origins of the oldest Christian book and the oldest illuminated version of the Gospels, would have gone with Egypt and Ethiopia? If you had to guess what language they were in, would you have gone with Coptic and Ge’ez (rather than Latin or Greek)? These two artifacts force us to rethink the way we imagine (and tell) the story of early Christianity. They confront us with the fact that the West is not ‘home base’ for the Church and that Christianity is not a historically white phenomenon. They remind us that Vince Bantu is right to say that “Christianity is not becoming a global religion; it always been a global religion (A Multitude of All Peoples 2020: 2).

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