Bible that may or may not be really really old.

Turkish Cypriot police have seized what they believe to be a “an ancient version of the Bible written in Syriac, a dialect of the native language of Jesus,” according to a Reuters wire report by Sarah Kristi and Simon Bahceli. The Bible was found during a raid on antiques smugglers, and is believed to be between 2,000 and 1,000 years old — the actual date of its age is in dispute. “The manuscript carries excerpts of the Bible written in gold lettering on vellum,” according to the report. “Experts said the use of gold lettering on the manuscript was likely to date it later than 2,000 years,” but not all experts agree:  “I’d suspect that it is most likely to be less than 1,000 years old,” said Peter Williams, Warden of Tyndale House, University of Cambridge.

Apparently, reports of the antiquity of manuscripts in Turkey are regularly greatly exaggerated — this one has aroused the doubts of one J.F. Coakley, manuscript specialist at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Wolfson College. He told Reuters: “The Syriac writing seems to be in the East Syriac script with vowel points, and you do not find such manuscripts before about the 15th century. On the basis of the one photo…if I’m not mistaken some words at least seem to be in modern Syriac, a language that was not written down until the mid-19th century.”