It's All Greek to Me...

Have you ever wondered just how much Greek culture was lost to the mists of time? We know a lot about this classical culture that molded the Romans, formed the linguistic backbone of the gospels, and essentially molded the way that Western Civilization thinks. But we may suddenly be about to learn a whole lot more.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed. In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament. The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye - decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence.

Very interesting. I'd be interested in what the Seminarians (and one expert in New Testament Greek whom I know reads this site) would have to say about this one. Comment, please!