WASHINGTON, Aug. 10, 2018—Seemingly pulled from the pages of an international thriller, Museum of the Bible and the University of Athens in Greece have collaborated to solve the mystery of a medieval manuscript missing since 1991. The important text will be returned this fall to the university—its rightful owner. In the meantime, it will be exhibited at the Washington, D.C., museum to educate the public about the complexities and challenges of properly caring for cultural heritage, the importance of knowing an object’s history of ownership and location from its genesis to the present (known as its “provenance” in the scholarly world), and Museum of the Bible’s commitment to ethical collections management.
In 2014 the private Green Collection donated “Manuscript 18,” a Greek manuscript of the four canonical gospels copied by a monk in the 1100s, to Museum of the Bible. The manuscript had been sold at public auction in London in 1998 and was owned by a handful of private collectors prior to the donation. In 2015, Museum of the Bible notified the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Germany about the manuscript’s new location. This information was then posted to the institute’s public online database of New Testament manuscripts, the Virtual Manuscript Room.
The next year Professor Theodora Antonopoulou of the University of Athens discovered this particular manuscript had been mysteriously missing from her university’s library since 1991. After finding information about the manuscript on the German institute’s online database, she contacted Museum of the Bible in March 2018 and began a joint research project with the museum to determine if this manuscript was the missing text. Their findings confirmed it was indeed the manuscript removed from her university without permission. In keeping with cultural heritage preservation practices and best practices as prescribed by the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums, the museum will return the manuscript to the university.
“For several years, Museum of the Bible has been undergoing an intensive review of all holdings in its collection and items on loan from more than 40 lending institutions and collectors from around the world,” said Museum of the Bible Chief Curatorial Officer Jeffrey Kloha, Ph.D. “With the assistance of Thomas R. Kline, an attorney with Cultural Heritage Partners whom we engaged in 2017, our staff have painstakingly researched some 3,200 objects and artifacts in our collection and on exhibit at the museum. Our intent has been to verify the provenance of these items and confirm they meet our acquisition policies and museum association guidelines. If not, we follow cultural heritage practices and, in a case like this, return them to the owner so they can be cared for and studied in their original setting.”
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