For more than a century, five parchment leaves preserved in the Austrian National Library in Vienna (P. Vindob. G 2324) have been regarded as one of the oldest surviving Greek Gospel lectionaries. In the Gregory-Aland list of Greek New Testament manuscripts, they feature as Lectionary 1043.

In a new article published in Novum Testamentum, I argue that this common assumption is mistaken. By reconstructing the original manuscript from scattered fragments now preserved in libraries across the world, I demonstrate that the Vienna leaves belonged to a codex from the famous White Monastery in Upper Egypt. The codicological reconstruction reveals that the Greek passages were copied by the same scribe at the end of a manuscript containing the four gospels in Sahidic.

This discovery alters the presumed character of the Vienna leaves entirely. What had been considered one of the earliest Greek lectionaries turns out instead to be the work of a bilingual Egyptian scribe active in the seventh century.

My investigation also led to several other unexpected discoveries. I identified previously unknown fragments of the same codex, currently held in collections in Paris, Oslo, Vienna, and among the tiny parchment scraps excavated in 2011 at the White Monastery. I was also able to find another Sahidic New Testament manuscript – containing the Acts of the Apostles and the Catholic Epistles – copied by the same scribe.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the manuscript I pieced together is its sophistication. The scribe employed a series of scholarly tools borrowed from the Greek biblical tradition, such as the Ammonian-Eusebian apparatus, Gospel chapter cross-references, and stichometric counts. These features are unattested elsewhere in Sahidic manuscripts of the gospels, which demonstrates that the White Monastery was a significant learning center during the Coptic period.

The remaining puzzle is why these Gospel extracts in Greek were added at the end of a Coptic manuscript. My study argues that the scribe sought both to avoid wasting valuable parchment and to preserve a selection of important Gospel readings in Greek. Thus, this bilingual manuscript offers a rare glimpse into a period when Greek still retained a privileged status in the Coptic Church.

But beyond recovering the purpose of the manuscript to which the Vienna leaves originally belonged, I hope my study contributes to a broader methodological perspective. Greek and Coptic manuscripts from Egypt are often studied separately, as if they belonged to different worlds. My article implicitly argues that they should instead be approached together. Only by viewing them within the same bilingual scribal culture can we properly understand how manuscripts were produced and used in late antique Egypt.