Three books are bound into one volume in the British Library, and only one of them was meant to be read. The volume is shelfmarked Add MS 17211 and its modern custodians call it the Codex Nitriensis, after the desert valley in Egypt where it was found. Open it and you will see a page of dense Syriac writing in a neat ninth-century hand, the work of a Syrian theologian arguing a case in the margins of late antique controversy. Hold the page to a raking light, or look at it through the filters of a multispectral imaging rig, and the older text rises up out of the fibres beneath: the Greek of the Gospel of Luke, in a sixth-century majuscule hand. And in the first leaves of the volume, in the same way, there is the Greek of Homer.<\/p>\n
Those two lower texts – Luke and the Iliad – are not simply older than the Syriac. They are older than the parchment was willing to be. They were written on skins that had already been used and then washed, scraped and ruled again, and on the oldest leaves the words of Homer were scraped off a second time so that a theologian could have the whole surface for himself. Everything in this manuscript is a story of surfaces: a biblical gospel laid down on a poet, an axiom of geometry laid down on a gospel, a theological polemic laid down on both, and beneath all of it the physical fact that monasteries ran out of clean skin and learned to make old skin new.<\/p>\n
The Codex Nitriensis is also, incidentally, one of the witnesses that the early church kept books. It is assigned the siglum R and the number 027 in the Gregory-Aland catalogue of Greek New Testament manuscripts, and von Soden gave it the number 22 in his shorter list. It is fragmentary: the text of Luke survives with many lacunae, from the opening of the first chapter down to the twenty-third. But it is a witness of a distinct kind, one of the small group of manuscripts that preserve a “Kephalaion” text with the Pseudo-Ammonian Sections and without the Eusebian Canons, and its peculiarities have made it disproportionately interesting to the scholars who work on how the Gospels were read and copied rather than only on what they say.<\/p>\n
The physical description of the object is short and strange. The British Library catalogues it as fifty-three folios of parchment, each leaf measuring 295 by 235 millimetres, written in two columns – twenty-five lines to the column for the biblical leaves, thirty-one for the mathematical ones – in a Greek majuscule hand without word separation or accents. The leaves were written in two separate original manuscripts and were later bound together: folios 1 to 48 carry the Gospel of Luke, folios 49 to 53 carry books X and XIII of Euclid’s Elements, and the earliest leaves have been identified as carrying portions of the Iliad. The present binding, in full goat leather, is modern. The volume has been in the Library’s keeping since the middle of the nineteenth century, and the single line in the catalogue that reads “Purchased from A. Pacho, 30 October 1847” is the entire documented history of its arrival in Europe.<\/p>\n
What sits on top of all that is a Syriac work. It is a treatise of Severus, patriarch of Antioch in the early sixth century, written against a man called John Grammaticus. The catalogue identifies it as chapters I to VIII and XX to XXI of the treatise, and dates the copying to the eighth or ninth century – some two hundred and fifty years after Severus wrote it and three hundred years after the leaves beneath it were ruled. So the volume is not simply a palimpsest in the ordinary sense. It is a palimpsest with an unusually deep stack: a text of the first half of the sixth century at the bottom, a text of the seventh or eighth century in the middle, and a text of the eighth or ninth century on top, all bound into one object that was then treated as a single book and carried from the Egyptian desert to the Nile, from the Nile to Europe, and from a London shelf to the reading room where it is now examined.<\/p>\n
The overlap is not complete, and that is part of the point. A note on the collation belongs here, because it governs how the manuscript is described and how it is cited. The fifty-three leaves now bound together are not one original codex. The British Library’s own catalogue records that they come from two separate original manuscripts, with the Gospel of Luke occupying the first forty-eight and the mathematical leaves the last five, and with the earliest leaves assigned to a third context altogether. The stitching together therefore happened at some unknown later date, possibly in the East, possibly in Europe, possibly in a binding shop that simply thought two smallish books would make one useful one. What survives is therefore a compound object whose seams are still visible, and the modern library has not tried to hide them. The leaves are numbered separately, the catalogue distinguishes the two original manuscripts, and the authorities for each are cited separately: the Gospel of Luke is cited under the siglum of a Greek New Testament manuscript and the Euclid under the siglum of a witness to ancient mathematics, and the same physical object therefore appears in two scholarly bibliographies under two quite different headings. That is unusual, and it is a direct consequence of the palimpsest condition. A codex that has been rewritten on top of a Gospel and a poem and a theorem does not have a single identity, and the catalogue has to say so. Most collections have spent the last century trying to make their manuscripts look tidier than they are, and this one has been left with all of its complications visible. The codex is a palimpsest and a miscellany at the same time, and the only way to write about it honestly is to hold both facts at once: its two halves have been read together for so long that the distinction between them has begun to blur. The Syriac writer did not take every leaf. The Euclid occupies the last five leaves of the current binding, and the leaves were rebound so that the mathematical text comes last; the arrangement suggests that at some stage the Euclid was regarded as the principal content and the Syriac as something written on what was to hand. Reverse the assumption and you get a different history: a codex of Euclid whose stray leaves had been reused for a theological treatise by a scribe with access to a monastic library. Both readings are consistent with the evidence. The codex has no title page, no colophon, no index and no reader’s note, and it is precisely this anonymity that makes it so revealing about the economics of the medieval book.<\/p>\n
There is a note, though, and it is the most human thing in the object. On folio 53 there is a record that the Syriac text was copied by Simeon, a recluse of the convent of Mar Simeon of Kartamin, for Daniel, the periodeutes – the visiting overseer – of the district of Amid. Kartamin is the Greek name for Mar Saba, the great monastery in the Judean Desert; Amid is the city the Greeks called Amida and the Arabic world calls Diyarbakir. So the manuscript travelled, at least in part, through the hands of a monastic recluse in Palestine and a church administrator in upper Mesopotamia. That note is the only firm anchor the object has, and it tells us that a palimpsest with Homer and Luke beneath it was still being written on, and still being given away, somewhere in the eighth or ninth century, by people who knew exactly what they were doing and left no further word about it.<\/p>\n
The name in the shelfmark is a piece of geography. The Nitrian Desert – the Wadi al-Natrun in modern Egypt – was the home of a concentration of monasteries so unusual that the early Christian writers used the word desert as a shorthand for a whole school of civilisation. It was there that the sayings of the Desert Fathers were recorded, that a monastic rule was forged, that the catalogue of the “Sayings of the Elders” was compiled, and that the monks of Egypt built a body of scholarship – biblical, medical, mathematical – that would shape the next thousand years. The great monastery of Saint Mary Deipara in the Nitrian Desert was one of the largest and richest libraries in the ancient world, and when its library was broken up in the nineteenth century, the manuscripts went everywhere: to Paris, to Rome, to Munich, to St Petersburg, to London.<\/p>\n
The British Museum’s share arrived through an unusual route. The manuscripts from Nitria came to Europe in a series of purchases rather than a single acquisition, and the man who brokered much of the 1847 business was Antun Pacho, the Austrian vice-consul at Alexandria, who acted as agent for the British Museum in the Egyptian market. These were not manuscripts bought at a fair or found in a cave. It is worth being clear about what that transaction was, because the paperwork survives and the circumstances did not. Pacho was an Austrian diplomat stationed in Alexandria who acted, for years, as the British Museum’s purchasing agent in Egypt, and the acquisition of the Nitrian manuscripts was the result of a relationship between two institutions rather than a single purchase. The manuscripts were identified, described and shipped; the monasteries of the Wadi al-Natrun were selling off their libraries piecemeal, through local dealers, often without any clear idea of what a given manuscript contained. Some were acquired for the collection; some were bought by private dealers and offered to the Museum later; and some went abroad by other routes entirely, to Paris, Berlin, Rome and St Petersburg, where they entered libraries that were themselves building modern collections out of the same dissolution. The single most important consequence for this manuscript is simply that it came to London, because London had the resources, the imaging equipment and the scholarly attention to work on a damaged palimpsest, and because the alternative to the British Museum in the 1840s was not more careful treatment but no treatment at all. They were bought, item by item, from the monks and the dealers who were liquidating the libraries of the desert. The price was often trivial; the monks generally had no idea what they had, or did not wish to know. The Pacho sale of 30 October 1847 is the documented moment at which the Codex Nitriensis entered the collection that would become the British Library.<\/p>\n
Writings from the Nitrian Desert also reached Constantinople and the East, and the earliest owner of the older books inside this volume was presumably in that world rather than in Egypt. The Monastery of Mar Saba was a well-connected house, and the books of Nitria and the books of the Judean Desert moved between them for centuries. Whether the Gospel of Luke was ever at Nitria, or whether it came from Palestine and was carried to Egypt with the Severus manuscript, or the other way round, cannot now be established. The layering makes such questions genuinely unanswerable in a way that is frustrating and instructive: once a skin has been scraped, its history is not in the skin any more, only in the sequence of events that led to the scraping.<\/p>\n
The discovery of the undertext is a modern achievement and belongs in the story. When the Syriac upper text of the Codex Nitriensis was being catalogued in the nineteenth century, scholars noticed that the parchment carried writing beneath. Konstantin von Tischendorf, who had made his name by identifying the Codex Sinaiticus, published the Luke fragments in 1857 in the second volume of his Monumenta sacra inedita<\/em>, and in the 1880s the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg established that the last leaves carried a Euclid. But recovery by scraping, staining and skilled photography was slow, and it is only since the late twentieth century, with ultraviolet photography, multispectral imaging and the careful use of raking light, that the full extent of the lower texts has become readable.<\/p>\n That recovery changed how the object is understood. What was once a minor palimpsest, valued chiefly as a secondary witness for the Gospel of Luke, is now also a significant witness to the text of the Iliad and one of the earliest decorated witnesses to books X and XIII of Euclid. Every layer is now doing work. The manuscript is not one text with two ghosts; it is four texts that happen to occupy one object, and the object has been studied as such – as an artefact of monastic economics, of the survival of Homer in a culture that no longer wanted him, and of the strange afterlife of a single sheet of animal skin.<\/p>\n Palimpsesting is a craft, and the craft is worth describing precisely, because the resulting books look effortless and are anything but. A scribe who wanted new parchment from old had first to remove the old text. The usual method was mechanical: the skin was wet, and the writing was rubbed or scraped away with a knife or a pumice, sometimes with an alkaline solution of lime and water that loosened the ink. The scraping was vigorous enough to take the skin with it. What remained was a surface thinned and roughened, with the ghost of the old letters still visible to anyone who looked at the right angle, and with the fibre structure partly destroyed.<\/p>\n Some of the damage in this volume is severe. The vellum has been scraped so hard in places that the parchment is now thin enough to read through, and the modern binding in full goat leather, with its strong sewing, exists to hold together leaves that have been reduced to a shadow of their original substance. Where the original hand was elegant and the erasure negligent, the upper text shows every stroke of the knife in reverse, a set of furrows that catches the light like corduroy. Manuscripts in this condition are not damaged by accident. They are damaged on purpose, by someone who had decided that what was written there was no longer worth keeping and that the skin was.<\/p>\n Then came the new ruling. The chemistry of the erasure deserves a word as well, because the substances involved explain why some texts survive and others do not. Scrubbing with a knife removes the ink but leaves the damaged skin. Washing with a solution of quicklime or alkaline lye attacks the ink itself, loosening it from the fibres so that it can be wiped away, and it does this more thoroughly and more evenly than a knife can, at the cost of further weakening the parchment. The two methods were combined, and the choices made were not neutral: a scribe in a hurry, or a scribe with a poor knife, would take off less and leave more of the old text in place. That is one reason the recoveries in this manuscript are so uneven, with some passages coming back complete and others reduced to a handful of legible letters. It is also why the palimpsest tradition did not simply produce a supply of usable parchment. Every reuse destroyed a little more of what was underneath, and there were never enough clean skins in the first place. The monastery library did not choose to write on Homer because it thought Homer was contemptible. It did it because the alternative was to have fewer books. The new text was laid out in two columns, and the ruled lines of the upper text cut across the ghost of the lower one at an angle, so that any reader can see the two writing systems and their directions at the same time. The scribes of the desert were not hiding what they had done. The evidence of the erasure is simply part of the page, like the joins in a repaired bowl, and it tells the story more honestly than a clean copy would.<\/p>\n There is a further consequence, and it is where the loss is worst. A scribe who scrapes a manuscript knows that the old text is still legible under strong light, and the scholarly literature records the rare case in which the upper text was carefully chosen to render the lower one hard to read – the same “scriptio oblitterans” technique used in later times to conceal one legal document under another. It is not documented for this volume, and the upper text here reads quite freely across the lower. But the possibility should be held in mind: the most intimate relationship between two texts on the same skin, the one written to be read and the one written to be erased, is also the most fragile. A well-worn fold, a reader’s thumb, a wet finger, or the passage of a few centuries in a damp climate can take a text that has survived five centuries of neglect and destroy it in an afternoon.<\/p>\n Which is exactly what nearly happened here. The leaves of the Nitrian books were used, reused, rebound and carried through climates that are nothing like the dry desert they came from, and by the time the Codex Nitriensis reached a European shelf, much of the lower text had been abraded to the point of illegibility by handling alone. The Euclid survives only in books X and XIII, on five leaves, with many lacunae, and even those leaves are badly damaged. The Iliad survives in fragments. Luke survives in the longest run of all, and even Luke is broken by lacunae. The text has been recovered from a damaged and degraded surface, by inference and patience, rather than read off an intact page. The palimpsest is not a hidden book waiting to be opened. It is a damaged book that had to be reconstructed.<\/p>\n The methods used to recover such texts are worth understanding, because they determine how much confidence any published reading deserves. Under ultraviolet light, iron-gall ink fluoresces: the letters of the older text appear as bright shapes against a dark ground, and even ink that has been scraped nearly to nothing can be photographed because the iron that made it is still in the skin. Infrared photography works differently, bringing out the ink that absorbs infrared light while the parchment shows through, which is useful where the erasure has left the ink chemically altered. Raking light, with the page lit from the side, makes the grooves of the pen and the furrows of the knife stand out as shadows. Reflectance transformation imaging, which photographs the page from a dozen different angles, reconstructs the three-dimensional surface, so that a letter’s depth can be read even when its colour has gone.<\/p>\n None of this is magic, and none of it is infallible. The scale of what has been achieved in the last twenty years is worth stating, because the standard view of this manuscript for most of the twentieth century was that the undertexts were beyond recovery. The British Library has digitised the volume leaf by leaf, and its imaging work, together with scholarship on the undertexts from across Europe, has turned a curiosity into a working text for several disciplines at once. The Luke fragments are now quoted in textual criticism with confidence. The Euclid is cited in the history of ancient mathematics as one of the earliest witnesses to the passage in question. The Iliad passages are used in discussions of Homeric transmission. And the images are public: the volume can be examined at high magnification on a screen, which means that a scholar can check the evidence for a reading rather than take it on trust. This is the ordinary, unglamorous revolution that digital imaging has made in the study of manuscripts, and it is the reason that a palimpsest which spent the nineteenth century in a strongbox can now be studied by anyone with a connection and an argument. A reading has to be made letter by letter, and each doubtful letter has to be argued from the shape of the damage, the behaviour of the ink, the sense of the Greek and the syntax of the passage. Where the scribe of the upper text has written over the middle of a lower letter, the lower letter may simply not be recoverable. Editions of palimpsest texts therefore print brackets and daggers in quantity, and the count of certainties is a fair measure of how much of the manuscript survives. Any responsible summary of the Codex Nitriensis has to keep that fragility in view: what we have is a partial witness, recovered by the most demanding kind of reading.<\/p>\n There is also the question of what counts as the same book. Two leaves belong to the same original manuscript only if the text runs on, the ruling continues, the hand matches, the fibre and the holes correspond and the scribal habits agree. The Codex Nitriensis passes some of these tests and fails others, which is why its leaves are described as coming from two separate original manuscripts and why the Iliad has been assigned to a third context. A physical object can be a palimpsest and a collated object at once: the question “what is this book?” can have more than one answer depending on whether you mean the manuscript of 1847 or the manuscript of the sixth century.<\/p>\n What the recovery of the undertexts has made possible is a new kind of comparison. Luke can now be set against the other Greek witnesses of the sixth century, including the great uncial codices, and its peculiarities can be examined as the choices of a copyist rather than the errors of a damaged page. The same is true of the Euclid and of the Iliad. The palimpsest has moved from the category of damaged curiosity to the category of evidence, and it has done so through imaging, chemistry and the patient comparison of the forms of letters.<\/p>\n Within the history of the Greek text of the Gospels, the Codex Nitriensis occupies a specific and slightly awkward position, and it is worth being precise about that position rather than simply calling the manuscript “important”. It is a witness to the Gospel of Luke alone. It carries the tables of contents known as the kephalaia<\/em>, the chapter lists that precede the text, and it carries the so-called Pseudo-Ammonian Sections – a set of divisions and summaries of the Gospel’s content that are associated in the manuscripts with Ammonius of Alexandria, though the association is traditional rather than historical. What it does not carry is the Eusebian Canons, the elaborate cross-referencing tables that allow a reader to find every passage of the Old Testament quoted in the New Testament.<\/p>\n That combination is diagnostic. In the first millennium, the Greek Gospel manuscripts fall into recognisable families. Some carry the Eusebian Canons; some carry the Ammonian Sections; some carry both; some carry neither. The manuscripts that carry the chapter lists and the Ammonian divisions but not the Eusebian Canons form a group that has sometimes been treated as a distinct textual family, and Codex Nitriensis belongs to it. The group is associated with a particular type of text – sometimes called the “Cephalon” or “Kephalaion” text – and its members have been the subject of sustained argument about how Luke’s Gospel was read and edited in the early centuries, and about how much weight can be placed on a witness that stands apart from the main uncial tradition.<\/p>\n The argument about the Latin manuscripts of the Gospels, and the “Western” text, has occupied scholars for a century and a half, and the Codex Nitriensis has appeared in it as a complicating factor, because its text sits close to the Latin tradition in places. Whether the Ammonian Sections represent a different recension of Luke or merely a different way of dividing the same text is still debated. The kephalaia<\/em> themselves are a kind of exegesis in structural form: a list of the subjects treated in order, so that a reader can see the shape of the Gospel before reading it. To preserve them is to preserve an argument about the order and the logic of Luke’s narrative, not just the words of it.<\/p>\n The fragmentary condition of the manuscript complicates every one of these debates, and the undertext’s condition complicates them further. Reading a text that is itself reconstructed from a damaged surface, whose lacunae may be lacunae in the original and not merely losses, requires a special discipline. And the discovery that the same leaves carry the Iliad and Euclid invites a comparison with the other great Luke manuscripts in this family, several of which are also palimpsests – which is either a striking pattern or a reminder that the survival of any Greek manuscript depends on accident, and that the most valuable copies are often the ones that nobody valued enough to keep intact.<\/p>\n Set the manuscript back into the longer history of the book and it becomes the kind of object that the history of the Bible is made of. The broader pattern makes the manuscript’s particular career look less like bad fortune and more like the ordinary condition of ancient books. Of the great Greek uncial codices of the fourth and fifth centuries, some were destroyed, some were scraped, some were used as bindings and some were simply lost, and the ones that survived did so because they were wanted, or because nobody could reach them, or because they were too firmly bound to be taken apart. The palimpsests are the largest surviving category of such reuse: more than a hundred Greek and Latin palimpsests are known from the early medieval period, and the Codex Nitriensis is among the most complex of them. Their survival has revised the history of ancient literature in ways nobody intended. Texts that were believed to be lost, because every known copy had been destroyed, have turned up in the recycled surfaces of books that were being used for something else entirely – works of Archimedes, of the Greek mathematicians, of lost poetry. The palimpsest is not a degraded version of the book. It is a second book that happens to have been written on the first one, and the two are now, for the first time since the scraping, both legible at once. A sixth-century copy of Luke, copied by a scribe who valued its contents enough to rule two columns of careful majuscule across it. A seventh- or eighth-century copy of Euclid, valued enough to be gathered together and kept. A ninth-century copy of a theological treatise, valued enough to be written over both. Three decisions about value, made by three different communities at three different moments, all recorded in one object that came out of the desert, crossed three continents, and ended up in a modern binding in London.<\/p>\n Nothing about the Codex Nitriensis suggests it was ever thought to be important. There is a final irony in the fact that the manuscript has been read so carefully now. A book that combines a Gospel, an epic, a theorem and a polemic, and that carries four centuries of use in the binding of its own covers, has been taken apart in the laboratory and reassembled in the mind. The Luke fragments that were reduced to a few legible letters in the 1880s are now quoted in the standard critical apparatus with a confidence that would have astonished the first cataloguers. The Euclid has been read as a witness to a stage in the history of mathematics that was previously represented by a single tradition. And the point of the object, which is perhaps the most striking thing about it, has not changed at all: what it records is not a text but an economy. Somebody in the eighth century decided that the surface of a book was worth more than the book, and that decision is the reason that we can still read the Gospel of Luke in one of the hands that wrote it. There is no colophon boasting of its contents, no list of its donors, no indication that anyone would one day want to read what was underneath. It survived because it was useful, and then it survived because it was too awkward to throw away. The Gospel of Luke is in it because a scribe had parchment. The Iliad is in it because someone else had a different kind of parchment. The treatise of Severus is on top because that was the text the monastery wanted. What we read today in the digital images – Luke at one wavelength, Homer at another, the whole thing recovered from the shadow of a knife – is an accident of layering that no one intended and that, five centuries later, no one could have predicted.<\/p>\n Three books are bound into one volume in the British Library, and only one of them was meant to be read. The volume is shelfmarked Add MS 17211 and its modern custodians…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":908,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[755,815,813,53,816,155,814],"class_list":["post-907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-text-transmission","tag-british-library","tag-codex-nitriensis","tag-gospel-of-luke","tag-greek-new-testament","tag-nitrian-desert","tag-palimpsest","tag-syriac-manuscripts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":912,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions\/912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How a Scribe Wipes Out Homer<\/h2>\n
Reading the Ghosts<\/h2>\n
A Gospel Among the Kephalaia<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
\n
![Codex Nitriensis, Luke 9,23<\/a> \u2014 Wikimedia Commons, image file, accessed 31 October 2026<\/li>\nPalimpsest<\/a> \u2014 Wikipedia, Wikipedia, accessed 31 October 2026<\/li>\nList of New Testament uncials<\/a> \u2014 Wikipedia, Wikipedia, accessed 31 October 2026<\/li>\nSeverus of Antioch<\/a> \u2014 Wikipedia, Wikipedia, accessed 31 October 2026<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three books are bound into one volume in the British Library, and only one of them was meant to be read. The volume is shelfmarked Add MS 17211 and its modern custodians…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":908,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[755,815,813,53,816,155,814],"class_list":["post-907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-text-transmission","tag-british-library","tag-codex-nitriensis","tag-gospel-of-luke","tag-greek-new-testament","tag-nitrian-desert","tag-palimpsest","tag-syriac-manuscripts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":912,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions\/912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Codex_Nitriensis,_Luke_9,23.jpg\"){kind=link}