By: Dr. Andrew J. Patton
This summer, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) digitized a fascinating but little-known manuscript of the Gospel of John—known to New Testament textual scholars as Gregory-Aland 87. This thousand-year-old book is not just a copy of John’s Gospel. It is also a window into how early Christians read, explained, and treasured the words of Scripture.
A Manuscript in the Mosel Valley
GA 87 is housed today at the Bibliothek des St. Nikolaus-Hospitals in Bernkastel-Kues, a small town along the Mosel River in western Germany. The library was founded in the fifteenth century by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), a scholar, theologian, and humanist who gathered manuscripts from across Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Among those volumes was this Gospel of John, written nearly five centuries before his birth.
The manuscript dates to the tenth century. It measures roughly 14 × 10 inches—about the size of a large coffee-table art book—and is written on parchment. It contains 231 folios (or about 460 pages), all written carefully by hand in a fine Greek script.
What the Book Contains
GA 87 transmits the Gospel of John, accompanied by a catena—a chain of commentary compiled from excerpts drawn from several earlier Christian writers. These commentaries were arranged alongside or around the biblical text to form a continuous explanation, one that weaves together the insights of many voices into a new single interpretive tradition. In modern times, this is similar to the Ancient Christian Commentary Series by InterVarsity Press.
The book opens with an introduction by the unnamed compiler, explaining the catena’s purpose and how to read it, followed by a series of prologues drawn from major theologians of the fourth and fifth centuries: John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and another from an unknown author. These set the context and overall message of the Gospel for readers. A chapter list for the Gospel follows.
A Note from Its Monastic Owners
On what was once a blank page before the beginning of the Gospel of John is a fascinating historical record. An owner recorded a short inscription identifying the book’s home:
ἡ βίβλος αὔτη τῆς μονῆς τοῦ Προδρόμου, τῆς κειμένης ἔγγιστα τῆς Ἀετίου· ἀρχαϊκὴ δὲ τῇ μονῇ κλῆσις Πέτρα.
“This book belongs to the Prodromou Monastery, which lies near Aetios; the ancient name of the monastery is Petra.”
The Monastery Prodromos Petra was named in honor of John the Baptist because the title “the forerunner” (Greek: ho Prodromos) is one of the titles ascribed to him. The monastery in Constantinople bearing this name and mentioned in this note is renowned for its wealth and manuscript collection, many of which have inscriptions identical to the one found in GA 87. While some scribes from this monastery also left their names, this artifact does not have a named scribe and has not been securely identified as the work of one of the known scribes. This simple inscription lets us glimpse its life before it ever reached western Europe—a life of reading, copying, and prayer in a Byzantine monastery or church at the heart of Eastern Christianity.
The Layout: A Scribe’s Balancing Act
The pages of GA 87 reveal a scribe adopting different layouts for arranging the biblical text and the commentary. Catena manuscripts of the New Testament were produced in two formats:
- In a frame format, the Scripture text appears in the center of the page, with the commentary written around the margins.
- In an alternating format, the scribe writes a small section of Scripture followed immediately by the corresponding commentary.
A few years ago, I wrote a blog for CSNTM about these types of formats, which you can read here.
Most catena manuscripts use one or the other, but GA 87 uses both—and sometimes blends them. One page shows a perfect frame layout; another shifts to alternating sections; still others create a “square” frame enclosing the text on all four sides. Moreover, in the ‘frame’ layout, the side of the frame is usually on the inside rather than the outside, unlike most other catena manusripts.
Why the inconsistency? We can’t be sure, but the mixture suggests the scribe was copying from a model written in frame format and adapting it to his own needs. The result is a manuscript that lets us watch the copying process in motion.
The Biblical Text
The text of John’s Gospel in GA 87 includes some intriguing features:
- John 1:1 (“In the beginning was the Word…”) is written eleven times on the first several folios. The repetition was not a mistake but a deliberate device: each repetition introduces a new section of commentary on this theologically rich verse. Other catena manuscripts do the same, including a ninth-century copy of the same catena (CSNTM digitized a portion of this fragmentary manuscript, GA 050, at the National Library of Greece), showing how much attention ancient readers gave to this opening line.
- The manuscript also omits the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11), known as the Pericope Adulterae. This passage appears in most later manuscripts but is missing from the oldest Greek witnesses. Since no early Greek commentators discuss the story, catenae often leave it out—perhaps simply because there were no commentaries to include rather than as a statement about its authenticity. Its absence in GA 87 thus tells us as much about the commentary tradition as it does about the biblical text itself.
The Voices in the Commentary
The commentary, or catena, draws on at least twenty-four named authors who are introduced to readers by their names written before comments attributed to them. Many are familiar names—John Chrysostom (4th century) and Cyril of Alexandria (4th/5th century)—and others are perhaps less well known, such as Ammonius the Presbyter (6th century). Some are surprising. The compiler quotes from Severus of Antioch (5th/6th century) and Apollinaris of Laodicea (4th century), both were condemned as heretics. Ancient compilers did not necessarily endorse every view they cited; they preserved what they found insightful or helpful for understanding Scripture. The explanation of the catena at the beginning of the manuscript rationalizes their practice:
“The person who encounters this book ought to know that sections are inserted not just from many works of holy and orthodox fathers, but also from exegetes who were discredited and met the fate of heretics. These sections emerge as there are teachings in them unharmonious with church tradition, which were spoken by the heretics. I did not do this of my own accord, but Ι followed our most holy father, Archbishop Cyril of the great and Christ-loving city of Alexandria, who says in his Letter to Eulogius: ‘One ought not to avoid and refuse everything which heretics say. For they grant many things which we also grant’” (transl. Houghton, Myshrall, and Manafis, 2020).
This open-handed approach reminds us that early Christian interpretation was often more diverse and dialogical than we might imagine—a chorus rather than a single voice.
A Long Afterlife
GA 87’s later history can be traced in part through ownership. At some point, it travelled west from the Byzantine world to Europe. It eventually came into the hands of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who bequeathed his collection to the library at Bernkastel-Kues.
In the seventeenth century, Balthasar Cordier (1592–1650), a Jesuit scholar from Belgium, used this very manuscript as the basis for his 1630 printed edition of the John catena. That publication made the commentary accessible to Western readers for the first time and ensured its preservation, even before the age of photography or digital imaging.
Why GA 87 Matters
For New Testament scholars, GA 87 is a rare witness—one of only a handful of manuscripts preserving this specific catena on John. Its mixture of biblical text and ancient commentary makes it valuable for studying both the transmission of the Gospel and the history of its interpretation.
GA 87 connects us across a millennium of faith and study. Every repeated verse, every exegetical note, every quirk of layout reminds us that Scripture has always been a living text, read and re-read, copied and commented on by generations seeking to understand the Word of God.
As a textual scholar and historian, I am deeply grateful for CSNTM’s ongoing efforts to digitize and preserve manuscripts like this one. Their work ensures that fragile treasures once accessible only to a few specialists can now be studied and appreciated by anyone, anywhere.
GA 87 may not be famous, but it stands as a testament to the care, creativity, and devotion with which Christians have passed down the biblical text and sought to understand its message through the centuries.
Author: Andrew J. Patton is a Research Associate at KU Leuven in Belgium, contributing to the Editio Critica Maior edition of 1 Corinthians. He completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2024, studying catena manuscripts of the Gospels, and also holds a ThM in New Testament Studies from Dallas Theological Seminary. Andy’s six years at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts sparked his fascination with textual criticism and biblical manuscripts.
(Images courtesy of the Bibliothek des St. Nikolaus-Hospitals, Bernkastel-Kues, and the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.)