Codex Sassoon Sells for $38m

We wrote earlier about the sale of Codex Sassoon which was billed, with some exaggeration, as the earliest, most complete copy of the Hebrew Bible. Less exaggerated, as it turns out, was the claim that it could be the most expensive book sold at auction. As of today, it can officially claim that title. 

JNS reports that it sold today for $38.1 million to the Tel Aviv ANU–Museum of the Jewish People. For comparison, the most expensive book sold at auction before today was da Vinci’s Codex Leicester which Bill Gates bought for almost $31m. I should note that this is at the short end of Sotheby’s original projection which put it at $30–50m.

From JNS:

Alfred H. Moses, a former U.S. ambassador to Romania and active member of the Georgetown Jewish community, and his family purchased the Hebrew manuscript on behalf of the American Friends of ANU and gifted it to the museum, according to a press release from the auction house. Moses is chair of the museum’s international board of governors.

“The hammer fell after a four-minute bidding battle between two determined bidders,” Sotheby’s stated.

Read the rest here. 

Update (5/18/23): JNS updated its story after I wrote this to correct the amount the codex sold for. They had originally said 33.5m but it was apparently 38.1.

Museum of the Bible and Repatriation (GA 2120)

Yesterday, the Museum of the Bible (MOTB) posted a Facebook Live video featuring Brian Hyland, Associate Curator of Medieval Manuscripts. Hyland introduces GA 2120, a 12th-century minuscule of the Gospels. The Greens acquired the manuscript in 2010, and it was donated to the MOTB in 2014. Since then, it came to light that the manuscript was “lost” (=stolen) from the University of Athens. Representatives from the University of Athens contacted the MOTB about it, and the manuscript will be repatriated later this year in October.

Hyland gives an overview of the modern history of the manuscript back to Spyridon Lampros, who owned it before his daughter Lina Tsaldari gave it to the University of Athens in the 1960s. He includes some of the more recent history as well, including an estimate of when it was taken from the University of Athens (between 1987 and 1991), when it resurfaced at Sotheby’s (3 December 1998), and evidence of the identity of one of its modern owners.

It’s really great to see the MOTB doing the right thing here. They realised that they have an item that was taken illegally from its former owner, and they are making it right as well as they can in the situation.

Ryrie’s Bible Collection Sells for $7.3m at Auction

Dan Wallace was apparently not at Sotheby’s for yesterday’s auction of Charles Ryrie’s amazing Bible collection but he reports:

A Coptic fragment with citations
from Matthew's Gospel (more)

Ryrie did not own junk. His printed books were in excellent condition. The selling price reflected this. The very first published Greek New Testament, Erasmus’s Novum Testamentum [sic; Instrumentum] (1516), sold for $24,000. The third edition (1522)—the first one to have the comma Johanneum in it—was a bargain at $5500. 

A second edition of Tyndale’s New Testament (Ryrie owned nearly a dozen of these!) sold for $75,000. There were also several copies of the Matthew’s Bible ($22,000), Coverdale Bible ($11,000–$21,000), Great Bible ($4,000–$28,000), Geneva New Testament ($30,000), Bishops Bible ($48,000), Douay-Rheims Bible ($18,000), a rare copy of the KJV ‘Wicked Bible’ (1631; so-called because the printer left out the ‘not’ in the seventh commandment; thus, “Thou shalt commit adultery”!) for $38,000.
The Luther vellum Bible sold for $260,000. It is probably the most beautiful book I’ve ever seen. This was more than double the expected sale price. 

A rare Complutensian Polyglot (only 600 were printed) came in under expectations at $70,000. This included actually the first printed Greek New Testament, though it was not published until six years after Erasmus’s work was out. The Textus Receptus—the Greek that stands behind the KJV—was essentially Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, with some wording from the CP as well as later editions of the Greek New Testament that were largely based on Erasmus.

It’s pretty amazing. Read the rest at Dan’s report here.

Sadly, I never got to see Ryrie’s collection when I was at Dallas.

Update

The whole collection sold for over 7.3 million dollars! The list from Sotheby’s is incredible. The whole collection has 197 items in it which means an average of about $37,000 per item. I hope they found good homes.

Dr. Charles Caldwell Ryrie’s Bible Collection to be Auctioned

NEW YORK, 6 October 2016—Sotheby’s is honored to announce the sale of one of the greatest private collections of printed and manuscript Bibles formed since the 19th century, The Bible Collection of Dr. Charles Caldwell Ryrie, which will be held in New York on 5 December 2016. Dr. Ryrie (1925–2016) was best known for his eponymous Study Bible, which contains 10,000 concise and cogent explanatory notes and has sold more than 2,600,000 copies. But while the Study Bible was directed towards the general reader, Dr. Ryrie was a titan among theological and Biblical scholars, and the author of numerous academic books and articles. The leading proponent of dispensationalism of our times, Dr. Ryrie influenced generations of students, teaching at Calvary Bible College, Westmont College, Dallas Theological Seminary and Philadelphia College of Bible (now Cairn University).

The New York sale on 5 December will include some 200 lots of manuscript and printed Bibles, ranging from the tenth-century “Benton” Gospels in Greek (estimate $50/$80,000) to a beautifully illuminated thirteenth-century Italian manuscript Bible in Latin (estimate $150/250,000) to two leaves surviving from the Gutenberg Bible, printed in Mainz about 1454 (estimate $50/70,000 each). But the core of the Ryrie Collection is the remarkable run of early English translations of the Bible, including multiple very rare early editions of the versions prepared by Myles Coverdale and William Tyndale, the latter of whom was martyred. Most remarkably, the Ryrie Collection includes a manuscript of John Wycliffe’s New Testament, produced in England about 1430 (estimate $500/800,000). The Authorized, or King James version is also well represented, including the tallest copy known of the first edition, from the celebrated library of Louis Silver (estimate $400/600,000). First and other early editions in many other vernacular languages are represented as well, including German, Spanish, Italian, Irish, Welsh, and the Indian Massachusett language.

Following November exhibitions of selected highlights in London and Chicago, the New York exhibition of the full Ryrie Collection will open on 1 December 2016, alongside the seasonal offerings of Fine Books and Manuscripts.

Selby Kiffer, International Senior Specialist, Books & Manuscripts remarked: “It is a testament to Charles Ryrie’s personal modesty that, despite his myriad accomplishments, he was not widely known as a book collector. The wider world first learned of the remarkable collecting achievement of Dr. Ryrie through the 1998-99 exhibition, Formatting the Word of God, at the Bridwell Library of Southern Methodist University. But that exhibition, remarkable as it was, featured fewer than half of the volumes in Dr. Ryrie’s collection and none of his extraordinary letters and documents signed by theological figures such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John and Charles Wesley. When the full extent of his collection—astutely gathered over the course of more than five decades—is revealed, it will surely be acknowledged as a string of bibliographical pearls of great price.”

The family of Charles Ryrie has expressed their hope that his books and manuscripts will go to other collectors who will treasure them as much as he did: “While our father’s collecting was largely a private endeavor, he keenly enjoyed sharing his books and knowledge with a small group of collectors, libraries, and dealers. We are sure that he would be pleased to know that his collection will now go to other collectors just as dedicated and as passionate he was.”

The Bible Collection of Dr. Charles Caldwell Ryrie will offer collectors, both individual and institutional, the opportunity to compete for a great variety of Biblical treasures, many of which have not been available on the market for decades.

COLLECTION HIGHLIGHTS

• New Testament in English. Manuscript on vellum, England, ca. 1430, of the version inspired by and traditionally attributed to John Wycliffe (ca. 1330-1384).
  Estimate $500/800,000
• Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God Naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament. Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1661-63. The first Bible printed in America, translated into the Massachusett Indian language by John Eliot.
  Estimate $200/300,000
• The Holy Bible, conteyning the Old Testament, and the New. London: Robert Barker, 1611. The largest known copy of the first edition of the King James Bible, “the only literary masterpiece ever to have been produced by a committee.”
  Estimate $400/600,000
• The Holy Bible. London: Robert Barker, 1631. A detail from the “Wicked Bible,” which, due to error or mischief, omitted the “not” from the Seventh Commandment (Exodus 20:14).
  Estimate $15/20,000

HT: Fine Books Magazine

Update: Codex Climaci Rescriptus For Sale at Sotheby's

One of our readers found the relevant webpage at Sotheby's with description and images of Codex Climaci Rescriptus.













Cited from the description:

LOT 14

SOLD FOR THE BENEFIT OF WESTMINSTER COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
THE CODEX CLIMACI RESCRIPTUS, PALIMPSEST MANUSCRIPT ON VELLUM, IN CHRISTIAN PALESTINIAN ARAMAIC, GREEK AND SYRIAC

400,000—600,000 GBP

DESCRIPTION

[Judea (probably Jerusalem), sixth century AD. and Egypt (probably St. Catherine's, Sinai), early ninth century AD.]


137 leaves (including 52 bifolia), approximately 230mm. by 185mm., with foliation according to the overtext in the hand of Agnes Lewis, written space of underscript 210mm. by 160mm., double column, 18 lines of faded brown ink in Christian Palestinian Aramaic uncials (a script most probably created from Estrangelo script for this Biblical translation, reflecting in its square monumental characters the Greek uncials in the manuscript that the translator worked from), written space of overscript 175mm. by 135mm., single column, 19 lines of black ink in Syriac Estrangelo script, underscript in varying states of fading, some slight water damage and crumbling to edges of some leaves, else in outstanding condition for age, each gathering of leaves within folders, the whole within three archival cloth-covered drop-back boxes, with the picnic basket in which Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson themselves kept it

PROVENANCE

The celebrated Codex Climaci Rescriptus is a valuable witness to the Old and New Testament, made within an Aramaic tradition one and a half millennia ago, and most probably surviving the centuries in the library of St. Catherine's, Sinai; it contains substantial parts of the New Testament in the closest surviving dialect to that spoken by Jesus Christ

1. The main body of this volume is written in Christian Palestinian Aramaic, almost certainly in Judea the mountainous southern region of modern Israel, in the sixth century. The quality of the uncial script as well as the size and grandeur of the original volume indicate that it was created by an experienced scriptorium within a wealthy centre, and this appears to rule out all those outside Jerusalem.

2. Subsequently, the manuscript appears to have passed to one of the early monasteries of the Sinai Peninsula or the north-west of mainland Egypt, most probably that of St. Catherine's, Sinai (built by the Emperor Justinian I between 527 and 565). Moir states in his edition of the Greek section of the palimpsest states, "I feel certain that this manuscript was there [St. Catherine's] in the course of its travels" (1956, p. 4). It may have been carried by Christian refugees fleeing from the Arab advance in the seventh century. The ancient and venerable library of St. Catherine's has preserved a significant amount of Christian Palestinian Aramaic material, including the only other sixth-century manuscript in the language to survive, the Codex sinaiticus Zosimi rescriptus (a palimpsest manuscript whose colophon identifies its copyist as a monk of Sinai and dates his work to 979; it is now scattered and divided in ownership between The National Library of Russia, St. Petersberg; the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universtätsbibliothek, Göttingen; and the Schøyen collection, London & Oslo), as well as some further small fragments of Christian Palestinian Aramaic, which are also mostly palimpsest (see Müller-Kessler & Sokoloff, 1998, p. 3 & S. Brock, Catalogue of Syriac Fragments (new finds) in the library of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai, 1995). It appears that at some time in the distant past St. Catherine's took into their library a sizeable parcel of books written in that language, which some centuries later, having become outdated and perhaps unreadable, were set aside and their vellum reused.

3. Acquired by the pioneering Biblical scholars and twins, Agnes Smith Lewis (1843-1926) and Margaret Dunlop Gibson (1843-1920) in three stages between 1895 and 1906 (all in the vicinity of Cairo, the manuscript having presumably been 'liberated' from its monastic home in order to supply leaves for the antiquity trade there). They were staunch Scottish Presbyterians with a consuming interest in the early versions of the Bible, and a profound belief in female-education, in an age when it practically did not exist. They used their own fortune to become celebrated scholars in the fields of Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Syriac, and, thrilled by Tischendorf's discoveries at Sinai, they set off to St. Catherine's on a 'manuscript-hunting' expedition in 1892. They won over the difficult patriarch, partly through their insistence that nothing was to be abstracted from the library there, but only photographs taken; and on that expedition they returned with pictures of the Syriac manuscript which would make them famous, the fourth-century Syriac Sinaiticus (their lives and its discovery are the subject of a recent book, J. Soskice, Sisters of Sinai, 2009, which was adapted for BBC Radio 4 this April). Having returned home to Cambridge they were tipped off by a mysterious informant that spectacular manuscripts were to be had through various dealers in Cairo. This was quite different from the questionable removal of manuscripts from ancient libraries, and the twins regarded it as a rescue mission, returning to Egypt and acquiring a single leaf of the present codex (now fol. 24; published by them in Studia Sinaitica 6, p. cxxxix) in 1895. They acquired a further 89 leaves from the present manuscript in October 1905, and in April of the following year, while passing through Port Tewfik, Agnes Lewis bought two palimpsest-manuscripts on a whim. Upon returning home she discovered that one contained another 48 leaves of the present manuscript, and that the two portions were separated by only a single leaf – that which the twins had acquired first in 1895. They published the entire text in 1909. Only one other leaf of this scattered manuscript has emerged in the last century: in a collection of palimpsest fragments sold by Eric von Scherling to the collector Dr. A. Mingana, now in Selly Oak, Birmingham: his Syriac MS. 637 (the fragment contains Acts 21:14-26 in its underscript, and should attach to fol. 131 here; Rotulus 5, 1949; Catalogue of the Mingana Collection of Manuscripts, 1939, III: xxv & Bulletin John Rylands Libr. 23 April 1939, pp. 201-14). On the death of the twins the manuscript was left to Westminster College, Cambridge.

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

A. Smith Lewis, Codex Climaci rescriptus, Horae Semiticae 8 (Cambridge, 1909)

A. Smith Lewis, A Palestinian Syriac Lectionary containing Lessons from the Pentateuch, Job, Proverbs, Prophets, Acts and Epistles, Studia Sinaitica 6 (1895), p. cxxxix

A. Mingana, A Catalogue of the Mingana Collection of Manuscripts (1939)


M. Black, 'A Palestinian Syriac Palimpsest leaf of Acts XXI (14-26), Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 23 April 1939, pp. 201-14


A. Moir, Codex Climaci rescriptus (Ms. Gregory 1561, L) (1956)

K. Aland and B. Aland, The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism (1995), p. 126

K. Aland, Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum. Locis parallelis evangeliorum apocryphorum et patrum adhibitis edidit (1996), p. xxvi

C. Müller-Kressler, 'Christian Palestinian Aramaic and its significance to the Western Aramaic dialect group', Journal of the American Oriental Society 119 (1999), pp. 631-6


C. Müller-Kressler, 'Die Frühe Christlich-Palästinisch-Aramäische Evangelienhandschrift CCR1 übersetzt durch einen Ostaramäischen (Syrischen) Schreiber?', Journal for the Aramaic Bible 1 (1999), pp. 79-86


C. Müller-Kressler and M. Sokoloff, The Christian Palestinian Aramaic Old Testament and Apocrypha, Corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic 1 (1999)


C. Müller-Kressler and M. Sokoloff, The Christian Palestinian Aramaic New Testament version from the early period Gospels, Corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic 2 (1998)


J. Soskice, Sisters of Sinai, 2009, p. 236