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Ancient Bible Passages Found Hidden In Quran Head To Auction

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Ancient bible passages found hidden in a Quran are headed to auction Thursday in England.

A 1200-year-old Quran with faint outlines of a Bible allegedly used by Coptic Christians is set to auction in London, the Daily Mail reported. Scholars allege the Bible was written over and made into a Quran during the Holy War in the 8th century. Nine pieces of the Quran will be auctioned and are expected to go for $110,000-$170,000 at Christie’s auction house.

Eléonore Cellard, a French scholar from Collège de France, discovered the Bible passages. She noticed the faint outline of the religious text upon seeing the Quran up for auction. Scientists discovered that the text comes from Deuteronomy, which is also in the Torah.

“This is a very important discovery for the history of the Qur’an and early Islam,” Cellard told the Daily Mail. “We have here a witness of cultural interactions between different religious communities.”

Just noticed this, too: the Quran folio actually contains a ‘loose’ qur’anic quotation of Deuteronomy 19:21 (the same biblical book erased in the Coptic text) from Q. Māʾidah 5:45. Some discoveries have certain poetry to them 🙂 pic.twitter.com/mxTqMysvUV

Christie’s auction house specialist Romain Pingannaud praised Cellard’s discovery calling it “extraordinary.” “Once you know it’s there, you can only see it, it becomes so obvious. We missed it at the beginning. It’s fascinating, particularly because it’s the only example where you have an Arabic text on top of a non-Arabic text. And what’s even more fascinating is it is on top of passages from the Old Testament … It shows the contact between communities in the first centuries of Islam; it’s very relevant,” he told the Guardian.

The Quran is thought to be from Egypt.

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