oldest book in the world for sale

[billy rubin]

damn near

Share Message - Oldest Christian book goes on sale
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68734783

Quote
"The earliest monks in Upper Egypt in the earliest Christian monastery were using this very book to celebrate the earliest Easter celebrations, only a few hundred years after Christ and only a hundred or so years after the last Gospel was written."

out of the bodmer papyri

[Dark Lightning]

  Not interested in xtian fiction. I'll bet it sells for megabucks. 

[Asmodean]

That would have been a neat thing to own.

Way outside my price bracket's masturbatory fantasies, I suspect, but still...

[billy rubin]

dunno its history, but anything made of paper that survived that long has to have one

[zorkan]

Thread refers to oldest book in world, then to oldest christian book, according to auction house Christie's.
Well they would argue it's the oldest.

"The oldest surviving literary work is The Epic of Gilgamesh. It was composed nearly 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia (roughly equivalent to where Iraq and eastern Syria are now). No one knows who wrote it, or why, or what readership or audience it was intended."

It was probably written to find the secret of eternal life (youth).
A plant held the answer, but was eaten by a snake.

Oldest Coptic christian text might be the Bruce Codex which is hidden away in the Bodleian in Oxford.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_Jeu#:~:text=The%20date%20of%20the%20Bruce,in%20the%20early%203rd%20century.

[billy rubin]

the bruce codex is possibly older than this one.

lots of history there

[zorkan]

Epic of Gilgamesh tells what is possibly the earliest flood story and a quest for eternal life, eventually finding its way into holy scripture.

"The flood story is included in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is one of three Mesopotamian Flood Myths. Many scholars believe that the flood myth was added to Tablet XI in the "standard version" of the Gilgamesh Epic by an editor who used the flood story from the Epic of Atra-Hasis1. In the Gilgamesh Epic, the story of the flood is related as part of the tale of Gilgamesh's quest for immortality".

You won't hear a reference like that in church.

[billy rubin]

yep.

either the story is made up and everybody copied it from somebody else

or its true and everybody knew about it

[zorkan]

A simple and natural answer is available.
Tigris and Euphrates flooded annually by meltwater from Anatolia.
Nile flooded from monsoon rains in Ethiopian Highlands.
Crops had to be carefully cultivated and harvested to avoid being destroyed by the waters.
Religious and superstitious folk put it all down to divine retribution.

[billy rubin]

yes.

the next step is to see whether there is any way to test that hypothesis.