>>57501416As a wannabe biblical/patristics scholar, this is all too true. There are so many incredible works that we know existed because writers that we do have quote from them or mention their existence, even if only to refute them, but alas, the manuscript copies either didn't survive to the printing press or, in the most tragic of cases, they did survive into the time of the printing press, or even into the modern age, but succumbed to natural disaster or war before we could make even facsimiles of them, let alone fully edited, printed copies. One of the most tragic cases off the top of my head was Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350–428), where the one work that could finally settle the question of whether he was actually orthodox or a Nestorian heretic was discovered, complete and in its original language, in 1905, and placed in the episcopal library of a Chaldean Catholic archbishop... only to be destroyed in the Armenian Genocide a decade later when the Ottomans burned the library down, all before a photograph or facsimile copy could be made of it.
Anyway, enough of my rambling. Here's a May.
