Older Than Lindisfarne, and Still at Home

Illuminated gospel books tend to become famous by leaving the place that made them. The Lindisfarne Gospels sit in the British Library. The Book of Kells sits behind glass at Trinity College Dublin, drawing long lines of tourists who never set foot in an actual church while viewing it. The Garima Gospels have taken the opposite path, and radiocarbon dating now suggests that path has lasted roughly two centuries longer than either of those better known books have existed.

What makes the comparison worth making is not competition over age for its own sake. It is what staying in place has meant for how the books are read. The Lindisfarne Gospels are studied today primarily as art objects and as evidence for early medieval Northumbrian craftsmanship. The Garima Gospels have never stopped being read as scripture, in the same building, by the same kind of community that first commissioned them, across however many centuries separate their creation from the present.

That continuity is also why testing them took so long to arrange. A monastery that has never let its own gospel books leave its walls, even for study, is not going to change that practice for a laboratory in Oxford. The 2013 sampling worked because the analysis could come to the manuscripts rather than the other way around, a small logistical fact that turned out to matter more than any single radiocarbon number it produced.