Two Greek New Testament Manuscripts Sold for $20 — Rediscovered

Last month, an unusual post appeared in the Facebook group Greek Palaeography. It would lead to the identification of two Greek New Testament manuscript leaves that had been missing for over sixty years.

Bryan Blakemore of Springfield, Illinois, shared images of two framed Greek manuscript folios. The leaves had been given to him by two former students—an elderly couple who reported purchasing them at a local auction gallery in 2008 for around $20. They had remained in his office, framed under glass, for nearly two decades. Over the years, he had consulted a number of scholars to try and identify them, but without success.

Blakemore asked whether anyone could help him to identify the text.

A response came quickly. Georgi Parpulov identified one leaf as belonging to a 13^th century illuminated Gospel minuscule manuscript (GA 1498) and the other as part of a 12^th/13^th century Gospel lectionary (GA L 1675).

Although these two folios appear unrelated, they share a common history: both had been thought missing for over 60 years and once belonged to the private collection of Harold R. Willoughby. This post describes these leaves, traces their story and connection to a dispersed 20th century collection, and recounts their rediscovery. It concludes by considering what their reappearance reveals about the wider challenges involved in keeping track of Greek New Testament manuscripts.

A Dispersed Collection

Harold Willoughby (1890–1962), Professor of Early Christian Origins at the University of Chicago was an avid manuscript collector. From the 1920s–1940s, he worked closely with Edgar J. Goodspeed to develop a major collection of New Testament manuscripts. Drawing on a wide network of antiquities dealers and private collectors, they assembled what was described back then as “one of the largest collections of its kind at any American university.”

At the same time, Willoughby amassed a substantial private library of approximately 3,500 rare books, many of them Bibles. After his death in 1962, numerous items were acquired by North Park College and Theological Seminary.¹ Others, however, including Willoughby’s portions of GA 1498 and L 1675, were scattered and their location was unknown for decades, until Blakemore posted photos of them online.

Such dispersal is not unusual, especially for manuscripts in private collections. Nor is this the first time that material from Willoughby’s private collection has surfaced in unexpected places.

A Rare New Testament Papyrus on eBay

Many will recall the stir caused in early 2015 when a previously unknown Greek papyrus with John 1:49–2:1 showed up on eBay with an opening bid of $99.99—a case first brought to wider attention by Brice Jones on his blog.²

The seller claimed the fragment came from the collection of Harold Willoughby and provided a handwritten inventory of his collection (discussed below). 

The listing quickly drew interest from scholars around the world. Geoffrey Smith contacted the seller, who claimed to be a relative of Willoughby and reported discovering the papyrus by happenstance after it had fallen from a stack of papers in his attic. Smith arranged for its purchase through the donation of an alumnus. Now catalogued as P134, the “Willoughby Papyrus” is housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.³

Taken together, these cases offer a glimpse into the afterlife of Willoughby’s private collection: in one instance, a previously unknown papyrus; in another, catalogued but long-missing manuscript leaves turning up in unexpected places.

Two Leaves, Found Again

One of the newly rediscovered leaves belongs to GA 1498, a 13^th century illuminated Gospel manuscript. The main portion of the codex—217 parchment folios written in a single column of 25 lines—is preserved at the Great Lavra Monastery on Mount Athos (shelfmark A’ 76). The original manuscript included miniatures, wash drawings, canon tables, and ornate double arches with Gospel hypotheses and kephalaia.

Additional leaves from this manuscript are now dispersed across four locations: 

These removed leaves can be partially reconstructed, allowing the position of the fragment from Blakemore to be identified within the original codex. 

The 8 leaves in St. Petersburg preserve 2 miniatures and the Eusebian canon tables originally located at the beginning of the codex. The first 2 leaves are shown here; the full set is available via the National Library of Russia.⁴

One leaf at the Walters has an illumination of Luke on the verso (its recto is blank), which would have originally been located between folios 108 and 109 of the Athos portion.

Folio 170v marks the end of Luke. Immediately following is a gap into which the Paris leaf fits: its recto depicts Christ’s baptism, and its verso contains the beginning of the hypothesis to John within decorative arches.

Next in the reconstructed codex comes the recently relocated Willoughby leaf in Blakemore’s possession. Its recto concludes the hypothesis to John and lists the Gospel’s kephalaia;⁵ its verso features a wash drawing of John the Baptist preaching.

Until now, no images of this leaf were known to survive. Through a facsimile of the wash drawing in Weitzmann (1963), however, it was possible to confirm that Blakemore’s folio once belonged to Willoughby.⁶

The second Walters leaf fills the remaining gap before the beginning of John, depicting Christ appearing to his disciples through closed doors; on its verso is an illumination of John the Evangelist.

The text of the parent manuscript on Athos then resumes at folio 171. The illumination of Matthew and several wash drawings are still preserved in the Athos part, but the illumination of Mark seems to be missing without a trace. 

When and how were these leaves removed? The codex was consulted by von Soden in 1899 and by Gregory in 1902, who both described it as containing 217 folios, suggesting that portions had already been removed from Athos before modern cataloguing.⁷

One possible clue may lie in the St. Petersburg leaves, which can be securely traced to the collection of Bishop Porphyrius Uspensky (1804–1885).⁸ A well-known figure in the history of manuscript collecting, Uspensky traveled extensively through monasteries on Athos, as well as in Jerusalem and Sinai, between 1843 and 1861, acquiring hundreds of manuscripts and fragments (e.g., GA 461 and famously a few pieces of Codex Sinaiticus) and bringing them to St. Petersburg.⁹ Given this connection, it is tempting to hypothesize that at least some of the other dispersed leaves also passed through his hands, though this remains unverified. 

Only two leaves of GA L 1675, a 12/13th century Gospel lectionary, are currently known, and the parent manuscript has not been identified. One leaf is held at the Bodleian Library (MS Gr. Bib. d.9). The other is the leaf formerly in Willoughby’s collection, currently owned by Blakemore.¹⁰

The Bodleian leaf preserves the following readings:

The former Willoughby leaf, which would have come two folios later in the codex,¹¹ contains:

Little is known about the provenance of this manuscript. The Willoughby leaf was purchased from J. Tregaskis in London in 1935, but no earlier history has been identified.

The Bodleian microfilm, also available through the NTVMR, includes the verso of the Willoughby leaf; however, no image of its recto had been known until Blakemore provided these.

Outstanding Questions

The rediscovery of these two folios leaves us with several unresolved questions. How did they come to be sold at a local auction house in Springfield, Illinois, in 2008, 46 years after Willoughby’s death? And might other artifacts from Willoughby’s collection also have passed through the same location? 

One possibility—though unconfirmed—is that they were dispersed by the same relative who later listed the papyrus on eBay in 2015.

Willoughby left behind a handwritten inventory of his collection, which records four Greek New Testament artifacts. Notably, only two of these—Ms. 2 (GA 1498) and Ms. 3 (L 1675)—were ever catalogued during his lifetime. By contrast, the papyrus (Ms. 4) in his collection remained unknown to the scholarly community until 2015.

Interestingly, an additional item in his list, Ms. 7 (containing Matthew 22:30–23:9), cannot be identified with any known manuscript in the Liste. Its whereabouts may yet be determined. If items from Willoughby’s collection can turn up at a small auction house in the American Midwest or on eBay, there is reason to hope that other pieces from his collection may yet come to light. 

Keeping Track of Manuscripts: Challenges and Opportunities

While the circumstances of this story are extraordinary, they reflect broader challenges in working with Greek New Testament manuscripts. Much of this effort involves locating and verifying manuscripts that are already catalogued, and this task becomes especially difficult when manuscripts are dispersed across multiple locations, as in the case of GA 1498, or when fragments enter private collections.

At the same time, such cases can offer a measure of cautious optimism: even long-untraced items can reappear. The Liste should therefore be updated to reflect the current location of these two fragments, even if that location proves to be temporary. Mr. Blakemore has said he is open to his leaves being acquired by an institution where they may be preserved and made accessible, and he is currently exploring such possibilities.

This case also underscores the importance of active engagement with social media, which made this identification possible. Platforms like Facebook and scholarly blogs have become integral to keeping track of manuscripts. These networks connect scholars, curators, librarians, and collectors across institutional and geographic boundaries in ways that would have been unimaginable only a few decades ago.

In recent years, a large proportion of manuscript discoveries, revisions, and new digital images have circulated through these channels, contributing significantly to the growing number of new additions to the Liste. At the same time, this case highlights the enduring value of traditional scholarly cataloguing, which helped make the identification of the Willoughby leaves possible once they resurfaced. Together, this story demonstrates how digital platforms and established methods now operate in tandem, opening new possibilities for bringing to light witnesses of the Greek New Testament that might otherwise have remained unknown or lost.

I thank Bryan Blakemore for providing images of the fragments and details of their acquisition, reproduced here with his permission.

1. Geoffrey Smith, “The Willoughby Papyrus: A New Fragment of John 1:49–2:1 (P134) and an Unidentified Christian Text,” JBL 137, no. 4 (2018), 97 n. 4 ↩︎
2. For an excellent summary see also Tommy Wasserman “A New Papyrus of the Gospel of John,” Evangelical Textual Criticism blog, November 2015.  ↩︎
3. Geoffrey Smith, “A Greek Fragment Is the First Known New Testament Papyrus Written on the Front Side of a Scroll,” Harry Ransom Center Magazine, November 16, 2022. ↩︎
4. In the 1994 Liste, these leaves with canon tables were listed as unidentified (p. 373). Although identified by Georgi Parpulov in 2004, they have not yet been incorporated into the NTVMR as part of this manuscript. Georgi R. Parpulov, “A Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum,” Journal of the Walters Art Museum 62 (2004): 70–187. ↩︎
5. This leaf was previously described in Kenneth W. Clark, A Descriptive Catalogue of Greek New Testament Manuscripts in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), 372. ↩︎
6. Kurt Weitzmann, “A Fourteenth-Century Greek Gospel Book with Washdrawings,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, 62 (1963): 93. ↩︎
7. As noted in J. Duplacy, “Manuscrits grecs du Nouveau Testament émigrés de la Grande Laure de l’Athos,” in Studia Codicologica, ed. K. Treu, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 124 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1977), 162–63. The removal of leaves from Athonite monasteries and elsewhere belongs to a period of largely unregulated collecting, in which visiting scholars, collectors, and clergy often “acquired” materials under conditions that we recognize as highly problematic today. While these activities predate modern legal and ethical frameworks, including the UNESCO 1970 Convention, they nonetheless raise a range of complex ethical issues that continue to shape discussion in the field—particularly in relation to provenance, stewardship of cultural heritage, and, in some cases, repatriation. ↩︎
8. I. N. Lebedeva, compiler, Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts of the Russian National Library, ed. Zh. L. Levshina (St. Petersburg, 2014), 135. ↩︎
9. On Uspensky’s collection, see O. V. Vasilieva, Christian Oriental Manuscripts in the Russian National Library, 525–26; O. Vasilieva, Christian Manuscripts of the East in the National Library of Russia, 28; National Library of Russia, “Porphyry Uspensky,” and “Collection of Porphyry Uspensky.” For those who have noticed the apparent gap in the Liste between GA 2149–2158 and 2161–2170, the explanation lies with manuscripts acquired by Uspensky: although they were initially assigned GA numbers, they were later identified as belonging to previously catalogued codices at Athos and were accordingly reassigned. ↩︎
10. This leaf was also described in Kenneth W. Clark, A Descriptive Catalogue of Greek New Testament Manuscripts in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937). 373. ↩︎
11. In between the Bodleian leaf and the Willoughby leaf is missing readings for the 4th Sunday of Matthew, Saturday of the 5th week, and the 5th Sunday of Matthew. ↩︎