In 2023, the Oslo Katedralskole (Oslo Cathedral School), originally founded in 1153 and regarded as one of the country’s most prestigious schools, received a massive collection of ancient documents, including 1,105 manuscript volumes from the Papal, Cardinal and Napoleonic libraries (Italy, France, England, Spain 1300-1800).
The collection, known among scholars as the “Schøyen Collection,” contains many New Testament manuscripts. This source material to European history and culture is almost entirely unstudied and unpublished, and has until now been kept together as a whole in the Phillipps and Schøyen collections for about 190 years. The donation has therefore been made on the condition that the Phillipps-Schøyen manuscripts will be kept together for the future and made available for research and publication on “Open Access” principles.
CSNTM proposes to send two staff members for at least three weeks on site to digitize their New Testament manuscripts using both conventional digital photography and multispectral imaging.
Objective One
Digitize 21 New Testament and early Christian documents in Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Latin, Armenian, and Georgian languages. The collection includes more than 2,000 parchment and papyrus pages.
Objective Two
Capture multispectral images of several parchment and papyrus fragments that show signs of underlying (palimpsest) text, revealing content that has not been viewed in hundreds of years.