This 1,700-Year-Old Book Could Fetch Up to $3.8 Million at Auction

Tori Latham
·2 min read

Some people love to collect old books. Others prefer to spend their money on old, old books.

If you’re the latter kind of collector, you’re in luck: Christie’s will offer in June one of the oldest books ever, the Crosby-Schøyen Codex, Reuters reported on Tuesday. The tome, which was written sometime around 250 to 350 A.D., is expected to hit the auction block for $2.6 million to $3.8 million.

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“It’s right at that period, that transitional period, when papyrus scroll starts turning into codex form,” Eugenio Donadoni, Christie’s senior specialist in Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, told Reuters. “So, books as we know them today. And what we have in this book is the earliest known texts of two books of the Bible.”

The 104-page codex was written in Coptic on papyrus over the course of 40 years, Reuters noted. One scribe worked on the project at a monastery in upper Egypt, putting down such texts as the First Epistle of Peter and the Book of Jonah. Discovered in Egypt in the 1950s, Donadoni said it was so well preserved because of the dry climate in Egypt.

“All the major finds of Christian manuscripts that we had in the 20th century and at the end of the 19th century are all concentrated in Egypt for those very precise climactic conditions,” he explained.

After the Crosby-Schøyen Codex was found, it went to the University of Mississippi, which held on to it until 1981. In 1988, it was acquired by the Norwegian manuscript collector Martin Schøyen, who is now auctioning it off via Christie’s. Alongside, he’s included other items from his Schøyen Collection, one of the largest private manuscript collections on the planet, according to Reuters.

Preserved behind plexiglass, the Crosby-Schøyen Codex is on view at the Christie’s office in New York. It will soon travel to London, where it’ll be auctioned off on June 11. And while its expected $3.8 million price tag is impressive, it’s nothing compared to what Sotheby’s received for the Codex Sassoon last year: The 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible hammered down for a whopping $38.1 million.

Even still, the Crosby-Schøyen Codex is an extraordinary piece of history, with an extraordinary sum to match.

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