Gospel of Mary · The Full Story of the Books the Ground Gave Back

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight, the books the ground gave back, and the people who were standing there when it did. For eight nights this season has been about books that were kept. Kept on a hill in Ethiopia within a continuing scriptural tradition. Kept in jars in a cliff above the lowest water on earth by people who swore an oath to keep them.

Kept in a jar in the Nile valley, perhaps by somebody who thought the safest library was a hole in the ground. Tonight is about a different kind of keeping, the kind nobody meant. A storeroom behind a synagogue wall that accumulated writing over centuries because you do not throw away the name of God. A grave in a cemetery in Upper Egypt with a small book laid in it beside the body, as if the man had loved it and somebody thought he should have it where he was going, though nobody wrote down why. A drawer in Berlin.

A rubbish heap, which you had last night, and which I am not going to name again, because it had its own night. A bank vault in a suburb of New York with a book in it that was slowly turning to dust while the men who owned it argued about the price. Some were put away on purpose and some survived by accident, and every one of them came back, and tonight I am going to walk you through how, slowly, in the order the ground gave them up, and then I am going to give you the two books out of all of them that carry the names you may have come for. A gospel with a woman's name on it, with the pages missing where you would most want them. And a gospel with the worst name in the story on it, which is not the book the newspapers said it was.

If you would rather listen with the screen off, this whole season is on the podcast, free, same night, and it is there whenever you need it. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the next night will be waiting for you when you need it. One thing at the door, and then we go in. The books tonight have very different places in different Bibles. Some of it was written by people who thought it should be, and some of it was written by people who did not care what the Bible said at all, and I will tell you which is which as we go, once, plainly, and then leave it.

The finding stories are true, as near as I can tell them. The books say what they say, and an authentic book is not the same as a true event. That has been the rule all season and it holds tonight, and tonight it holds more than usual, because the books the ground gave back are the strangest books we have, and the temptation to make them stranger is one I am going to resist for you, so that you can rest. Settle in. The lamp on the hill is lit.

The copyist has a column and a half left in the last gathering, the one that closes the book, and he will finish it tonight, and I will tell you when he does.

The room in Cairo, one clause and in, because you have been here twice and you know it. The tall halls, the wooden screens, the coloured glass, the cases. Tonight we do not stop at the case with the thirteen books in it. We walk past it, and out, into a city whose old storerooms have given books back, in a country where dry ground has preserved an extraordinary amount of writing. Here is the thing about Egypt that makes the whole of tonight possible, and I will say it once and then you will have it.

Paper rots. Parchment rots. Papyrus is made from strips of the pith inside a plant stem, laid across one another and pressed into a sheet. It decays in damp conditions, but the dry ground of the Egyptian desert can preserve it. And so a thing written on papyrus and dropped in the sand, or put in a jar, or laid in a grave, or thrown on a heap at the edge of a town, can lie there for eighteen hundred years and still be read by the first person who picks it up and turns it toward the light.

Much ancient writing elsewhere decayed. Egypt preserved an exceptional amount in its dry ground, the way a dry attic keeps a letter. And when the nineteenth century arrived, with its railways and its scholars and its collectors and its dealers, Egypt began, all at once and from every direction, to give the paper back. Why then, and not before. Because the market grew much larger.

There are old stories of papyri burned after a buyer would take only one, but the pleasant smell in those stories is not something I can confirm. Then the French came with an army and a library, and then the English, and then the museums of Europe began to compete for what the sand held, and a market grew up in every river town, and old writing could become something to sell, and the paper began to move. Out of graves, out of storerooms, out of walls, out of the ground under the fields, into the hands of dealers, and from the dealers, for a price, into the hands of the men and women you will meet tonight. It is not a clean story. Most of what came out in those decades came out without a record of where, and the where is the thing scholars want most, and it is gone.

But it came out, and the market helped move it, while also separating many pages from the record of where they had lain. The survival is real, and so is the damage to what we can know. Tonight is the story of that giving back, told through the books that matter most to this season, and there are three kinds of finder in it, and you will meet all three. The first kind is the digger, the scholar with a permit and a team and a season in the field, who knows where he is standing and writes down what he finds. The second kind is the dealer, who may not give a reliable finding place, because the place is worth more than the book, and who sells the book in pieces if the pieces will fetch more than the whole.

And the third kind is the person who was simply there. The person buried with a little book. The beadle of a synagogue who never emptied the storeroom. The woman with a leaf of an old book in her luggage who happened to show it to a scholar who could recognize its importance. All three kinds belong in the story, and their reasons for keeping or selling a page were not the reasons we now have for reading it.

I will give you one of each kind before we start, so you know them when you meet them. A digger: the French mission at Akhmim, permit in hand, working in a cemetery during a winter season, who found the small book you will hear about and brought it into scholarly view. A dealer: the man in Cairo who sold a German a codex in January and would only say it came from somewhere up the river, and who may have had the missing pages in a drawer of his own and sold them separately, or lost them, or never had them. And the third kind: a beadle, an unnamed reader, two sisters. The finders who did not know they were finding.

Hold the three in mind and the night will sort itself as it goes. And here is how tonight is built, so you can put it down whenever sleep takes you and not lose your place. First the storeroom, which is the biggest find and the least famous. Then the grave, and the small book that was in it, which has three things in it and one of them is a friend of this season. Then the drawer in Berlin, and the book that waited sixty years in it, which is the book with the woman's name.

Then the warnings, which are two small books and one scrap, and the last of them is the book with the worst name. And then the hill. I said the room was one clause and in, and it was, and we are already out in the street, and it is 1896, and the street is in Old Cairo, and a man from Cambridge is walking down it with a letter of introduction in his pocket and no idea at all what he is about to be shown.

A genizah is a storeroom. The word is Hebrew, and it comes from a root that means to hide or to put away, and it is the name for a room, or a chest, or a space in a wall, where a synagogue puts the papers it may not destroy. The rule behind it is old and simple and it is the reason tonight has a first chapter at all. A page with the name of God written on it is not to be thrown away. Not a torn page from a scroll, not a worn out prayer book, not a letter that happens to open with a blessing, not a child's writing exercise with the name copied out in it.

They are put away, in the storeroom, until there are enough of them to bury with honour in the ground, the way you would bury a person. Burial was one way such writings could be disposed of with respect. The storeroom filled, and was emptied into a grave, and filled again, and the paper rotted in the wet ground as organic writing material can do in damp conditions. There was a synagogue in Old Cairo, a synagogue called Ben Ezra, old already when the Crusaders were in the Holy Land, and it had a storeroom. Its genizah accumulated an extraordinary quantity of writing over centuries.

Later accounts describe a difficult space to enter, at an upper level, reached by a ladder. We should not turn the surviving pile into a record of nine hundred years in which nobody ever removed a page or decided what to keep. What matters is what remained. Documents and books survived together, in conditions that protected a great deal of writing from decay. By the time scholars and collectors began moving large groups of leaves into libraries, the room contained evidence of lives far beyond the history of one congregation.

A store of old writing had become an archive, though it had not been assembled as a modern archive, with a catalogue and a plan for future researchers. Now the people. There were two sisters from Scotland, twins, Agnes and Margaret, whose surnames I will not trouble you with because they had married and the names were long, and who had taught themselves the languages of the old east, Hebrew and Syriac and Arabic, at an age when most people are learning to sit still in church. They travelled. They went to Sinai and found things there that other people had walked past.

Four years before tonight's story, in the monastery at the foot of the mountain, one of them had noticed that a very old book of saints' lives had been written over something older, the way parchment was reused when it was scarce, and had gone back the next year with a chemical to bring up the under writing, and the under writing was the four gospels in Syriac, in one of the oldest surviving Syriac Gospel manuscripts. That is the kind of women they were. They did not wait to be shown things. They looked at the pages other people had already looked at, and saw what was underneath. And in the spring of 1896 they came back from Egypt with a bundle of leaves they had bought from a dealer, and one of the leaves was in Hebrew, and they were not sure what it was, and they showed it to a friend in Cambridge who was a reader in rabbinic literature and had been born in Romania and had the kind of memory for texts that you only get from having learned them as a child by heart.

His name was Solomon Schechter. And he looked at the leaf and he saw at once what it was, and I want to tell you what it was, because it explains everything he did next. It was a leaf of a book called the Wisdom of Ben Sira, which is in the Greek Bible and in the Catholic Bible and not in the Hebrew Bible, a book of proverbs and counsel written by a teacher in Jerusalem about two hundred years before Christ, and which had circulated in translation, while much of its Hebrew text was beyond the reach of later readers. Not lost the way a book is lost when it is banned. Lost the way a coat is lost, put down somewhere and never picked up, until the available evidence was incomplete.

And here was a leaf of it, in Hebrew, in a Cambridge sitting room, in the hand of a scribe who had copied it out somewhere in the Middle Ages, and Schechter recognised its importance, sent an excited message to the sisters, and later went to Egypt. He got there in December of that year, with letters of introduction and the permission of the chief rabbi of Cairo, and he climbed the ladder into the storeroom of Ben Ezra, and I am going to give you what he found the way he described it himself, as nearly as I can without quoting him, because he was a good writer and he was overwhelmed. A battlefield of books, he called it. Leaves and scraps and whole pages and half pages, in Hebrew and Aramaic and Arabic written in Hebrew letters, prayer books and Bibles and marriage contracts and letters and bills and lists and children's exercises and poems and charms and the pages of books that nobody knew had ever existed, all of it lying in heaps in the dark, the way it had been dropped, some of it a thousand years old, much of it preserved despite the centuries. He worked in that room, in the dust, for weeks, with the rabbi's leave and a great many boxes, and he took to Cambridge, in the end, something like a hundred and ninety thousand pieces of writing, which gives some sense of the scale, without making each small piece a whole book.

Other people had taken pieces before him, and other people took pieces after him, and the storeroom's contents are scattered now through libraries in half the cities of the world. But the great body of it went to one library, and the reading of it has taken every year since, and is not finished, and still gives readers work to do. The money for the boxes and the journey came from a friend of Schechter's in Cambridge, the master of a college, a mathematician who did not make the journey and paid for it anyway, and the collection carries both their names now, and the mathematician's name comes first, which is how these things go. What was in it. I will give you three things, and then we leave the storeroom, because the storeroom is not a book, it is the place books came out of.

The first is the Hebrew Ben Sira, the book the sisters' leaf had come from, about two thirds of it, in several copies, so that much more of the work could be studied in the language in which it was composed. The second is a thing I will only point at, because it belongs to another night and you have already had it there. Among the leaves were two copies of a book of rules for a community, written in Hebrew, that spoke of a teacher and a new covenant and a land of Damascus, and Schechter published them in 1910 under a careful title, and their ancient setting was debated, and forty years later the same book came out of a cave above the Dead Sea, and that is the book found twice from the second night of this season, and this is the storeroom half of the story, and I leave it there. And the third thing is the one I want you to carry down toward sleep, because it is the storeroom itself. Ordinary people.

Letters from wives to husbands away on business. A shopping list. A merchant's accounts. A child's alphabet, the letters getting worse toward the bottom of the page. A doctor's prescriptions.

Somebody's poem. The storeroom had no idea what was important, because the rule did not ask what was important, only whether the name was on it, and so it kept everything, and because it kept everything it preserved something easily lost, which is what an ordinary Tuesday looked like, in Old Cairo, in the year eleven hundred, for people who thought nobody would ever read what they wrote. That is the storeroom. Centuries of paper nobody threw away, and a leaf in a sitting room, and a man who recognised it and then went to Egypt. Now the grave.

Go south. Up the river, past the old capitals, to a town called Akhmim, an ancient town known to the Greeks as Panopolis, with Christian communities in later centuries, with a cemetery on the desert edge where the dead of a great many centuries lie in the dry ground in their wrappings, quite well, because of the dryness, which is the whole of tonight. In the winter that ran from 1886 into 1887, a French mission was digging in that cemetery. Digging is the right word and the wrong one. They were opening graves, with a permit, and recording what was in them, and taking what was worth taking to Cairo, which is what archaeology was in that decade and I will not make it prettier than it was.

And in one grave, whose occupant is often described as a Christian monk, though neither that identity nor the date of the burial is certain, they found, laid with the body, a small book. I want you to see it, because it is one of the strangest objects in the season and it is small enough to hold in one hand. Parchment, not papyrus. Thirty three leaves, or thereabouts, bound as a little codex, the size of a hand, written in Greek in several different hands, which reflects the work of several scribes and stages in making the codex. And it had been placed in the grave with the dead person.

Not thrown in. Placed. We can imagine a reader who loved it, or someone who wanted the dead person to have it. That is an image, not a name or a biography the grave has given us. Akhmim, I should tell you, was a great town of weavers.

The Greeks called it Panopolis, the city of the god Pan, and its looms were known for linen and other woven cloth, and the dead of Akhmim went into the ground wrapped in it, and the cloth kept as well as the paper did, so that the museums of the world are full of Akhmim linen with birds and vines and riders woven into it with colours still visible. A town of makers, with a Christian quarter and monasteries in the cliffs above, and an old cemetery on the desert edge. The person buried with the small book lay among other dead in that ground, and the mission opened the grave because it was there, as far as anyone knows, and for no other reason that was ever written down. And the sand had kept it, badly in places, the edges gone, the ink faded, but kept, for perhaps a thousand years, a little more or a little less, until a Frenchman with a permit lifted it out into the light. Here is what was in it, and I will give you all three, because two of them are tonight's and the third is an old friend, and there was a scrap of a fourth thing, a martyr's story, stuck inside the cover, which I only mention.

The first was a piece of a gospel. Not one of the four. A gospel that begins in the middle of a sentence, because the copyist began copying in the middle of his source, or because the beginning was already gone, and that ends in the middle of another sentence for the same reason. It tells the trial and the death and the burial and the rising, and it tells them differently, and it has a name in it, a man writing in the first person who calls himself Simon Peter. That is the Gospel of Peter, and it has its own chapter tonight, next, because the rising in it is the most extraordinary thing in any book the ground gave back and I am going to tell it to you gently.

The second was a piece of a book of visions. The same Peter, on a mountain, shown the place of the blessed and the place of the punished. That is the Apocalypse of Peter, and it also has its own chapter, but the chapter is short, by the house rule, one image and then away, and I will tell you why when we get there. And the third thing in the small book in the grave, and I want you to hear this because it ties tonight to the first night of the season, was the Book of Enoch. In Greek.

The first thirty two chapters of it, the Watchers coming down and the judgment on them, the whole of the first night of this season, in a language in which some earlier Christian readers had known it. Greek extracts had remained available, while the new codex gave scholars a much longer witness. The whole book had lived on in Ge'ez, through Ethiopian copying. Greek extracts had also survived. And here it was, in a grave in Upper Egypt, in Greek, bound into the same little book as a gospel and a vision that the church had also stopped copying, and all three were bound together in the book found in that grave.

Whoever was buried there, we do not have a name or a life to put beside the pages. The desert kept the book, and that is the small book in the grave, and it was published in Paris five years later, and scholars across Europe began to read and debate it. The grave is filled in again now. The book is in Alexandria, in the antiquities museum of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and the person buried with it has no recorded name, and I would like to give him one but I will not invent it. He has the book instead.

And I should say what the publication did, because it did a great deal. It was printed in Paris in 1892, in the reports of the mission, with the Greek set in type, and photographs of the pages the year after, and it went out to every university that had a Greek reader, and for the next ten years the journals were full of it. The Gospel of Peter, which had been a name in a bishop's letter, was a text. The Apocalypse of Peter, which had been a name in a list, was a text. And the Book of Enoch in Greek, which had been a handful of quotations, was thirty two chapters, and the men who had been reading it in Ge'ez for seventy years, since it was first put into English, and for more than a hundred since the Scotsman brought it down from the hill, could at last lay the Greek beside the Ethiopian and compare the readings across the two languages.

The comparison gave scholars another way to test the readings. The Ge'ez copyists had preserved a whole book where the surviving Greek gave only part.

Now the gospel from the grave, and I am going to tell you the one thing in it that everybody remembers, and I am going to tell it plainly, because it is not frightening if it is told plainly, and it is the most remarkable image in any lost gospel. The Gospel of Peter, what we have of it, begins in the middle of the trial. It tells the mocking and the crucifixion and the darkness at noon, and the burial in a garden by a man named Joseph, and it tells the guard, the soldiers set by the authorities to watch the tomb, with a centurion over them whose name the book gives and which I will not, because it is one of those names that later books fill in and this book may have invented. And then it tells the rising, which the four gospels do not tell. Not one of the four describes the moment.

They describe the empty tomb, and the women, and what was said. The rising itself happens off the page, before dawn, unseen. This book puts it on the page, and this is how, in my own words, as nearly as I can give it. The soldiers are watching, two by two, through the night. And in the night there is a great voice from heaven, and the heavens open, and two men come down from the sky in a great light and go to the tomb.

And the stone that had been set against the door of the tomb rolls away by itself and stands to one side, and the two go in. And the soldiers, seeing this, wake the centurion and the elders who are keeping watch with them, and they all see it. Three men come out of the tomb. Two of them are holding up the third, and behind the three of them comes a cross. Walking.

Following them out. And the heads of the two men reach up to the sky, and the head of the one they are holding up reaches higher than the sky. And there is a voice from heaven, and the voice asks a question, whether the one who slept has preached to those who are asleep. And the cross answers. Yes.

That is the whole of it, and I have told it to you the way the book tells it, and I want to say two things about it and then we can rest in it. The first is that nobody knows what the writer meant. A cross that walks and speaks. Some scholars think the writer meant it as it reads, a sign, a thing of light, alive because everything in that moment was alive. Some think it is a copying mistake and that the word was never cross at all.

Some think the writer was picturing the cross as a person, the way some early Christians did in their hymns, where the cross is addressed and praised as if it could hear. I am not going to choose for you. I am going to leave the cross walking out of the tomb, in the light, behind the three, and let it answer. The second is one early reason a bishop objected to the book. There was a bishop of Antioch, a man named Serapion, about the year two hundred, who was asked by a church in his care whether they could read the Gospel of Peter in their services, and who said yes without having read it, and then read it, and wrote to them again and said no.

Not because of the cross. Because of what the book seemed to say about whether the one on the cross had suffered as a man suffers. Serapion's letter survives, quoted by a historian a century later, and it is an early witness to this gospel, and one reason scholars knew its name long before the grave at Akhmim gave a piece of it back. The historian was the one who wrote the first history of the church, in the reign of the emperor who made it legal, and he quoted the bishop's letter because he was making a list of which books were the church's and which were not, and the Gospel of Peter was on the wrong side of his list, and that is the last night of this season, and I will not open it tonight. What matters tonight is the bishop's reason.

He read the book. He found most of it ordinary. He found a few lines in it that seemed to say that the one on the cross had felt no pain, and he knew a group of people who taught that, and he did not want his churches reading their book. Not the cross that walked. The pain.

It is worth remembering, when people tell you what the church was afraid of, that the bishop who first wrote a lost gospel out of the church did not mention the strangest thing in it at all. The book was read, and challenged, and copied again. Much later a copy was in a grave, and that copy is now kept in Alexandria. Those are the parts of its life we can still see. And I will give you one more thing from it, because it is gentle and it is true to the book and it is a good place to lie down.

After the rising, at the very end of what we have, the disciples go home. Simon Peter, the book says, took his nets, and his brother Andrew, and Levi, and they went to the sea. They went fishing. Before that departure, this gospel also gives the women an errand of their own. Mary Magdalene goes with her friends to the tomb, carrying the wish to do what they had not been able to do at the burial.

They wonder who will move the stone, and what they can leave if they cannot enter. The book lets us hear that small practical question beside its enormous resurrection scene: a stone too heavy for the women, after a stone that has rolled away by itself before the guards. Inside they see a young man whose shining clothing fills their eyes, and he tells them that the one they seek has risen. They flee in fear. That is the book's sequence, not an account I can certify as an event.

But it matters to the story. The cosmic height of the three figures does not replace the friends coming to a grave with something left to do. And the page ends there, in the middle of the sentence, on the way to the water, with the nets over their shoulders and the morning coming up, and nobody knows what the next word was.

The second piece in the small book from the grave is a vision, and I am going to give you one image from it and then take you away from it, and I want to tell you why, because the reason is part of the story. The Apocalypse of Peter is a book in which Peter, on a mountain, with the others, is shown two places. The place of the blessed, and the place of the punished. It was written, as near as anyone can tell, in the first half of the second century, in Egypt or somewhere near it, and for a while it was read in churches. There is a list from Rome, made about the year two hundred, most think, though some put it later, of the books a Christian could read in church, and the Apocalypse of Peter is on it, with a note that some people did not want it read.

There were churches in Palestine, two hundred years and more later, that read it aloud every year on the Friday before Easter. It was, for a century or two, nearly a book of the Bible. And then it was not. The old lists show disagreement, but they do not give us one settled reason for the outcome. I am going to give you one image and no more.

The list from Rome, I should say, is itself a thing the ground gave back, a torn page in bad Latin found in a library in Milan in the eighteenth century, the oldest list of Christian books anyone has, if the early date is right, and it belongs to the last night, and I have said its name in my head and not aloud, and I will keep it that way. And the church in Palestine that read the vision every year is known from one sentence in another historian, who was surprised by it, and wrote it down because it surprised him, which is how most of what we know about what people actually read has come down to us. Somebody was surprised. The image is the good one. Peter and the others are on the mountain, and they ask to be shown one of the righteous who has gone on, and two men appear to them, and the book describes them.

Their faces shine like the sun, and their clothes are a light that no eye has seen, and their hair is like flowers, and the whole of them is like a garland woven of flowers and light, and the air around them is the air of a garden that does not end, where every tree is in fruit and the fruit does not fall. That is the place of the blessed, in the book, and the book stays there for a page, and it is one of the loveliest pages any early Christian wrote, and I want you to stay in it. The faces like the sun. The hair like flowers. The garden with no edge.

And one more thing from the good pages, because the book gives it and it is kind. The blessed, in this book, are shown to Peter not so that he will want to join them, but so that he will know what has become of the ones who have already gone. Where are the righteous, the disciples ask, and what is their world like. That is the question that opens the vision. Not what will happen to me.

What has happened to them. It is a book written for people who had lost someone and wanted to be told, in pictures, that the someone was in a garden. That is the gentler part I want to leave with you. Other pages turn toward punishment, but that contrast alone does not explain the book's changing place in the churches. And then the book turns and shows the other place, and it shows it for many pages, in detail, punishment by punishment, each one fitted to its sin, and I am not going to tell you any of it, not one, because this is a sleep story and because the house rule for this book, made before the season began, is one image and then away.

What I will tell you is what happened to the book because of those pages. They were copied, and read, and remembered, and they belong to a long tradition of visions of that place, in books and paintings and later poetry. The book gradually lost its place in most churches, for reasons the record does not let us reduce to one. Only fragments of the Greek survive, including the piece found in the grave and smaller witnesses found elsewhere, and a fuller version, nearer to what was first written, survives in Ge'ez, on the hill, because copyists there preserved this too, and I said that once tonight already and it keeps being true. One image.

The faces like the sun and the hair like flowers and the garden with no edge. Keep that one, and let the rest of the book go back into the ground where the book was buried, and come with me north, down the river, to Cairo again, and a January morning in 1896, which is the same year as the storeroom, because that year the ground was in a giving mood.

A German scholar named Carl Reinhardt was in Cairo in January of 1896, and he bought a book. That is the whole of the finding story for the most important book of tonight, and I am giving it to you at its true length, which is one sentence, because the dealer who sold it did not say where it came from, and nobody has found out since. The dealer was from Akhmim and gave a story about a find in a wall, but that story has not established the finding place, and there is no grave and no jar and no cliff in this story. There is a book in a man's hands in a shop, and the man knows enough to know it is old, and pays for it, and takes it to Berlin. Here is the book, because you will want to see it before we go further.

It is papyrus, not parchment. It is small, about the size of a paperback, and it is a codex, a book with pages, not a scroll, and it has, or had, a hundred and fifty two pages, written in Coptic, in a good clear hand, in the fifth century, as near as the hand can be dated. Four books are in it, bound together, and I will give you the four in the order they sit, though the order does not give us its owner's biography. The first is the Gospel of Mary. The second is the Secret Book of John, the book you had two nights ago from the Cairo jar, in a version somewhat shorter than the jar's, so that when the jar came out fifty years later this was one of the books that helped the scholars read it.

The third is a book of questions and answers between the risen one and his disciples, called the Wisdom of Jesus Christ, another account of revelation. And the fourth is a short story about Peter and his daughter, which does not belong with the others and was bound in with them anyway, for a reason the codex does not tell us. Four books. A gospel, the Secret Book, a dialogue, a story. The surviving volume puts these works together, with the Gospel of Mary first.

I want to stay with that third title for a moment: the Wisdom of Jesus Christ. Its place in this volume reminds us that the Gospel of Mary did not survive by itself. These works were brought together in a physical book. We cannot recover an owner's whole mind from that choice, or say that the last short story was added merely to fill spare pages. But we can notice what the volume makes possible.

A person turning its leaves could pass from Mary's vision to other accounts of revelation, and finally to a story about Peter's household. The codex is evidence of books being kept together. That is a smaller claim than an owner's biography, and a more useful one. It lets the surviving object remain an object, with more than one work inside it, rather than making every binding a single argument whose author we can name. It went to Berlin, to the museum, and it was given a number, and the number is the name it is known by now, and I will not read it to you, it is a catalogue number, it does not sound like anything.

And it was handed to the man in Berlin who could read it, whose name was Carl Schmidt, a young scholar of Coptic who had already made his name on another codex, and who read it, and saw what it was, and stood up in front of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin in July of that same year, 1896, and told them. A Gospel of Mary. The Secret Book of John. He described them. He promised an edition.

And the learned world waited for the edition. I want to give you Schmidt for a moment, because he is the hinge of this part of the night and he is easy to lose behind the delay. He was a young man from the north of Germany, not yet thirty, and he had come to Coptic the way people came to it then, through Greek and through the church, and he had already, in his twenties, edited a strange Coptic book of visions from a manuscript in Oxford that required specialized knowledge, and he would go on to edit the great Coptic book of the Pistis Sophia, which is in London, and to buy, in his last years, in a Cairo shop, a heap of Coptic books that still needed to be studied, and to be, for forty years, the man in Europe you sent a Coptic page to when you did not know what it was. He was thorough. He was slow.

He wanted every reading right before he printed it, and he had a whole career of other pages on his desk, and the Berlin codex was one of them, and he did not know, in 1896, that he was beginning a piece of work that would outlive him.

They waited fifty nine years. I want to tell you why, because it is the strangest delay in the whole history of the lost books, and it joined a printing disaster to the interruptions of a difficult century, and Schmidt was not a man in a hurry. He worked on it. He worked on it for sixteen years, alongside everything else, and by 1912 the edition was finished and typeset and printed, or nearly printed, the sheets run off at a press in Leipzig and stacked and waiting to be bound. And a water pipe burst.

In the press, in the building where the sheets were stored, a pipe burst, and the water came through the ceiling and onto the sheets, and the whole printing was ruined. Every copy. Sixteen years of work, wet through and pulped, before a single one had been bound. Schmidt began again. And two years later, in 1914, the world went to war, and Germany was in it, and the war disrupted the work, and the edition waited.

The war ended. Schmidt went back to it. And by the middle of the 1930s it was nearly ready again, and Schmidt was old, and in 1938 he died, with the edition unfinished on his desk. A few years later, in nineteen forty one, another scholar, Walter Till, took it up. Till was an Austrian, a grammarian, the kind of scholar who writes the book other scholars keep open on the desk while they read, and he had the patience for it, and he needed all of it.

He had Schmidt's transcription, and Schmidt's translation, and Schmidt's notes, in Schmidt's hand, and a codex in Berlin he could not always get to, and another war already under way. In nineteen thirty nine the world had gone to war again, and Berlin was the wrong place to be printing anything, and then Berlin was the wrong place to be at all, and the book, the actual book, the papyrus codex from the shop in Cairo, survived the war, which not everything did. And then, in 1945, the jar came out of the ground in the Nile valley, the jar from two nights ago, with its thirteen books, and among them three copies of the Secret Book of John. And Till, whose edition had been ready during the war, waited in the hope of using the newly discovered copies, until he finally let the edition go, and in 1955 the edition came out at last. Fifty nine years after Schmidt stood up in front of the Academy.

A water pipe, two wars, a death, and a jar. And when the edition came out, readers could finally study the Gospel of Mary more fully. Much of it was missing. Greek fragments, one published in nineteen thirty eight and another in nineteen eighty three, supplied earlier witnesses to parts of the work already present in Coptic. Those pieces show that the book circulated before the surviving Berlin manuscript was copied.

They do not give us a perfect Greek original for the whole Coptic text, or prove that the author had read all four canonical Gospels. The work is usually placed in the second century. Its scene of a woman speaking and men questioning her belongs to that ancient writing, though the identity and life of its author remain beyond what the fragments tell us. I tell you all this for one reason, and it is a reason to rest. The Gospel of Mary was found in 1896.

It was announced in 1896. Its existence had entered scholarly discussion from that summer on. And its modern existence was not a secret, and these publication delays do not show a modern effort to suppress it, and those events help explain why a full edition took so long. The record here gives us delays, not proof of a conspiracy. Sometimes a book is late because the century was late.

And there is one more thing to say about the delay, and it is the kind of thing that only happens with books. A discovery does not arrive on every scholar's desk at once. The books from the jar had to be brought into reach, photographed, read and published. Till hoped to use the new copies, but waiting could not go on forever. In nineteen fifty five the Berlin edition finally appeared.

A pipe, two wars, a death, and the hope of another manuscript had stood between a book and its readers.

Now the book itself, and the first thing you need to know about the Gospel of Mary is what is not there. The codex, when Reinhardt bought it, was already missing pages. We cannot tell exactly when or how each group disappeared. First pages can be vulnerable, because they are the ones on the outside, and the ones that get wet, and the ones that a dealer might sell separately if he thought they would fetch something. The Gospel of Mary, in the Berlin book, begins on page seven.

Pages one to six are gone. And in the middle of it, after page ten, four more pages are gone, eleven to fourteen. So what we have is less than half of a short book. The end of one conversation, a whole middle, a hole, and the end. Two scraps of it in Greek turned up later, in the twentieth century, one in a library in Manchester and one from the heap I named last night and will not name again, both of them older than the Berlin book by two centuries, both of them small, both of them carrying passages we already had from the Coptic and nothing from the missing pages.

So the missing pages are missing. Nobody has them. Nobody is going to say tonight what was on them, and anybody who tells you what was on them is telling you what they wish was on them. I can tell you what the two Greek scraps are, because they are small and they matter. The one in Manchester is a single leaf, written on both sides, from the very end of the book, the argument between the men and the going out to preach, and it was copied in the early third century, which puts it among the oldest pieces of the book we have.

The other, from the heap, is the beginning of the part where Mary stands up and speaks, a few lines, from about the same time. Two scraps, from two places, or one, because nobody wrote down where the Manchester leaf was dug, two centuries before the Berlin book, and neither of them touches the hole. I find that oddly comforting. The Greek scraps show people reading and copying the book long before the Berlin manuscript was made. They cannot tell us when the Berlin copy lost its pages, or what those pages said.

The hole belongs to the surviving evidence, and we have to leave it open. Here is what is there, in order, in my own words, because there is no public domain English of this book and the house rule is paraphrase and then point. It begins in the middle of a conversation. The risen one is talking with his disciples, and somebody has asked him whether matter will be destroyed, whether the stuff of the world will end. And he answers that everything that exists is woven together and will be unwoven again, back to its own root.

And then somebody, Peter, asks him what the sin of the world is, and he says something that the book's readers have loved for a hundred years, which is that there is no sin, that people make sin when they act after the nature of adultery, which is why it is called sin, and that this is why he came, to set the good back at its root. And he tells them that they will be troubled, and that they should not be, and he says, Peace be with you. My peace. Be careful that no one leads you astray by saying, look here, or look there, because the son of man is within you. I want to stop on that line for a breath, because it is the hinge of the whole book and it is easy to walk past.

Look here, look there. In the four gospels the same warning is about the end of the world, about people who will say the kingdom is here or there and be wrong. This book takes the same warning and turns it inward. Do not look here, or there, because the thing you are looking for is inside you. You had that line, in almost the same words, from the jar, last night, from the gospel with no story.

Two books, one out of a jar and one out of a dealer's shop, with a hundred miles of river and fifty years between the finding of them, agreeing on one thing, which is that the thing is inside, and that anyone who points is pointing wrong. That agreement is not a conspiracy. It is a generation. It is what people were saying, in Egypt, in the second century, and writing down, and the ground kept it. Follow him.

Those who seek him will find him. Go and preach the good news of the kingdom. And do not lay down any rule beyond what I gave you, and do not make a law the way the lawgiver did, or it will hold you. And he leaves. And they are miserable.

They weep. They say, if they did not spare him, how will they spare us. And this is where the book turns, because a woman stands up. Mary stands up, and greets them all, and tells them not to weep and not to be double minded, because his grace will be with them and will protect them. And she turns their hearts, the book says, toward the good, and they begin to discuss what he had said.

And Peter, and this is the same Peter who will behave badly in a few pages, says to her, sister, the saviour loved you more than he loved the other women, and we all know it. Tell us the words of the saviour that you remember, that you know and we do not, because we have not heard them. And Mary says, what is hidden from you I will tell you. And she begins. She begins with a vision.

I saw the Lord in a vision, she says, and I told him, Lord, today I have seen you in a vision. And he says to her, you are blessed, because the sight of me did not make you waver. Where the mind is, there is the treasure. And she asks him a question, whether a person sees a vision with the soul or with the spirit, and he begins to answer, and he says it is neither, it is the mind, which is between the two, and the page ends. And the next four pages are gone.

That is the hole, and it is the worst hole in any book the ground gave back, because whatever he told her about the mind and the vision, and whatever she saw at the beginning of the climb, is on those four pages, and the four pages are in a dealer's drawer in 1896 or in the mud of the Nile or nowhere, and we come back in on page fifteen, in the middle of the climb, with the soul already on its way up, and that is where the next chapter begins. I will say one thing before we go up with it. Everything in this book so far is ordinary, in the sense that any early Christian could have written it. Peace be with you. Do not be led astray.

Go and preach. The son of man is within you. A woman comforting frightened men. It is only in the vision that the book becomes the kind of book that ends up in a jar, and even then, as you will hear, it is a gentle one.

We come back in on page fifteen, in the middle of the climb, and I am going to give you the climb as the book gives it, which is as a list, because a list is what this hour is for, and because the book is a list here, four powers, with part of the encounter lost, and then the quiet. The soul is going up. That is the picture. A soul rising past powers, in a scene that can recall the worlds of other writings from the season, layer over layer, each with its ruler, and at each layer a power that stops the soul and asks it a question, and the soul answers, and goes on. The first power is lost with the missing pages.

We do not know its name or its question. We come in as the soul has answered it and is rising toward the second. The second power is desire. And desire says to the soul, I did not see you going down, and now I see you going up, and why are you lying to me, when you belong to me, and always have. And the soul answers, I saw you, but you did not see me, and you did not know me.

To you I was a garment, and you did not recognise what was inside it. And desire, having no answer to that, lets it go, and the soul rises. The third power is ignorance. And ignorance says, where are you going. You are bound by wickedness.

You are bound, so do not judge. And the soul says, why do you judge me, when I have not judged. I was bound, though I did not bind. I was not recognised, but I have recognised that everything is being unwoven, on earth and in heaven, back to its root. And ignorance has nothing to say to that, and the soul rises.

The fourth power is the one the book spends longest on, and it is called wrath, by most who have read it, and it has seven forms, and the book names them, and I will give you the names once, quietly, because they are a list and lists are for sleeping. Darkness. Desire. Ignorance. The longing for death.

The kingdom of the flesh. The foolish wisdom of the flesh. The wrathful wisdom. Seven forms of one power, and the seven of them ask the soul the last question, where are you coming from, killer of men, and where are you going, destroyer of places. And the soul answers, and this is the answer that ends the climb, and I am going to give it to you slowly, because it is the quietest ending in any book from any jar.

What binds me has been killed, the soul says. What surrounds me has been overcome. My desire has come to an end, and ignorance has died. From a world I was set loose, in a world, and from a likeness by a likeness that is above, and from the chain of forgetfulness, which exists only for a while. From this time on I will reach the rest of the time, of the season, of the age, in silence.

And that is all. When Mary had said this, the book says, she was silent, because that was as far as the saviour had spoken to her. Silence. Rest. The rest of the time, of the season, of the age.

I want to point at one thing in the climb before we leave it, because it is the thing the season has been circling. The powers challenge the soul with claims about desire, wickedness, and its place. The soul answers them. It says, you did not see me. You did not know what was inside the garment.

And then it goes on. I hear an answer to the tower of names, to the maker who does not know he is not the highest, to all of the seven from two nights ago, is that they never knew what they had. They had a garment. The thing inside it was never theirs, and it is going home, and it does not need to win the argument to leave. I want to stay here a moment, because it is the whole of the book's teaching in one breath, and it is not a strange teaching at all when you hear it plainly.

A soul going home. Four voices trying to hold it back by telling it what it is, and the soul answering each of them by saying, you did not know me, and I know what you are, and I am going on. And at the end, no argument, no victory, no trumpet. Silence. The climb ends in rest and silence, and if you have followed the season this far you will know that the Secret Book of John built a whole tower of names to get there, and this book climbs it in a page and a half, and sits down at the top, and says nothing.

Mary said this, and was silent. And then the men started talking.

Andrew speaks first. Andrew, Peter's brother, the fisherman, says to the others, say what you like about what she has said, but I do not believe the saviour said these things. These are strange teachings. And then Peter, who a few pages ago had asked her to speak, because the saviour loved her more than the other women, says the thing the book is remembered for. Did he really speak with a woman in private, without our knowing, and not openly.

Are we to turn around and all listen to her. Did he prefer her to us. And Mary weeps. She says, my brother Peter, what are you thinking. Do you think I invented it in my own heart, or that I would tell a lie about the saviour.

And Levi answers Peter. If this is the Levi known from another gospel, he is the tax collector who gets up from his table and follows. Peter, Levi says, you have always been hot tempered. Now I see you arguing against the woman like the adversaries do. If the saviour made her worthy, who are you to reject her.

The saviour knows her, surely, better than any of us do, and that is the reason he loved her more than us. We should be ashamed, and put on the perfect person, and go out, as he told us, and preach the good news, and not lay down any rule or any law beyond what the saviour said. And they went out, the book says, and began to preach. And that is the end. The Gospel according to Mary, the last line says, because these books put the title at the end, as you learned last night.

I want to say one more thing about Levi, because it is easy to miss and it is the book's own quiet joke. In Mark and Luke, a man named Levi is the tax collector, the one who sat at the table where the money was taken and got up when he was called and gave a dinner, and the respectable people were scandalised that the teacher would eat at his house. The book puts the last word in his mouth. The man the respectable people would not eat with is the one who tells Peter that the woman's word is good enough. If this is the same Levi, the choice has a quiet force.

The book itself does not tell us why its author chose him. Now I owe you two things about this, and I am going to give them to you in the order the house rule gives them, which is report the lines, note what was said later, and move on. The lines say what I have told you. A woman had a vision, and told it, and one man doubted it and one man was angry that she had been told anything at all, and a third man said that the saviour's love was the saviour's business and that the woman's word was good enough. That is the book.

It is a book about who gets to speak, and it says a woman does, and it says the men who argued otherwise were wrong, and it puts that in the mouth of Levi and lets it stand. Scholars call it a leadership text, and that is a dry phrase for a warm thing, and I will use it once and let it go. What was said later. In the last fifty years a great many people have read this book and the one from the jar last night, with the companion line and the hole in the papyrus, and have built out of the two of them a story about who Mary was to him, and what the church hid, and why. You have heard that story.

It has sold a great many novels. I am going to say once, plainly, what the books say and do not say, and then I am going to move on, because this is a sleep story and not a debate. The Gospel of Mary says he loved her more than the other women, and more than the men, and that he told her things he did not tell them. It says nothing else. The book from last night says she was his companion, and the word is a word for a partner or a close friend, and the line about the kissing has a hole in it where the word for where would go.

Those are the lines relevant to this claim. The marriage story goes beyond them, and is somebody's, and is not the ground's. An authentic book is not the same as a true event, and an authentic book is also not the same as the story people tell about it afterwards, and this book has had more stories told about it than any book in the season, and it did not ask for any of them. It asked for silence, and rest, and to be allowed to go out and preach. Report the lines.

Note what was said later. Move on. We are moving on, and the next chapter is the last of the finds, and it is three warnings, each of them short, and the last of them has the worst name in the story on it.

Three more things the ground gave back, and each of them is a warning, and I will give them in order of size, small, smaller, and then the one that made the newspapers. The first is two scraps of papyrus that a museum in London bought in 1934 and published the next year under a title I like better than any title tonight. Fragments of an Unknown Gospel. That is what they called it, because that is what it was. Two leaves and a corner, in Greek, from a book that is not one of the four and not any of the ones we have named, dated by its handwriting somewhere in the second or third century, which made it, when it was found, among the oldest pieces of any gospel anybody had.

It has four scenes on it. A dispute with lawyers, in which he is nearly stoned and walks away through the crowd. A leper, who comes to him and says that he had been eating with lepers at an inn and caught it, and asks to be made clean, and is. A question about whether to pay the kings what is owed to kings, which is a question you know from elsewhere, answered here with a different quotation. And a scene on the bank of the Jordan, torn, where he seems to do something with a handful of seed and the river, and the page ends.

The unknown gospel is a warning, and the warning is this. There were more gospels than the ones we have, and more than the ones we have names for, and most of them are gone, and we know that only because the ground gave back two leaves and a corner of one, with no name on it, from a book nobody in sixteen hundred years had mentioned. The museum bought the scraps from a dealer, as usual, with no finding place, as usual, and the two men who published them were the museum's keeper of manuscripts and a younger colleague of his, and they were careful men, and they gave the book the only name they honestly could, which was no name at all. It is known by the number of the papyrus now, and the number does not sound like anything, and I like that. A gospel with no name, from no place, by nobody, saying things that sound almost like the things you know, and not quite.

The second warning is the smallest thing in the season. A scrap of papyrus from the seventh cave above the Dead Sea, the size of a large postage stamp, with parts of five lines of Greek on it, about twenty letters, most of them damaged. In 1972 a Spanish scholar proposed that the twenty letters were a piece of the Gospel of Mark, which would have made it the oldest piece of any gospel by half a century and more, and would have put a Christian book in a cave sealed before the year seventy, and would have changed everything. For decades the proposal was argued over, and books were written for it and against it, and the scrap was photographed under every kind of light. And the answer, which most people who have looked at it now give, is no.

The proposed reading requires disputed letters and a text that differs from the usual wording of Mark. A possible shape on a damaged scrap is not enough to make the identification certain. The scrap was, for a while, the most famous piece of papyrus in the world, and was carried to conferences, and argued over in newspapers, and examined with great care, without producing an identification that most scholars accept. It is in Jerusalem now, in a drawer, being a scrap. I have seen a photograph of it, and it has carried more argument per letter than any object in this season, and it has never said a word.

It is probably a piece of something else, and nobody knows what. That is the second warning, and it is a warning to me, and to everyone who tells these stories. The ground gives back what it gives back. It does not give back what we want, and twenty letters are twenty letters, and a hope is not a reading. And the third.

The one with the name on it. Somewhere in the 1970s, near a town called El Minya, in Middle Egypt, in a cave or a tomb, a papyrus codex came out of the ground into the hands of a dealer. That is all anyone will say about where, and nobody is going to say more now. It was sold, and sold again, and shown to scholars in Geneva in the early 1980s, who saw that the manuscripts were important but could not meet the asking price, and it went to America, and it went into a safe deposit box in a bank in a suburb of New York, and it stayed there for sixteen years. Papyrus, in a box, in a bank, on Long Island, in the damp, for sixteen years.

After those years the book passed through further hands. By the time conservators could work on it, its leaves had broken into nearly a thousand fragments. When it finally came to a foundation in Switzerland at the turn of this century and was laid out on a table for the first time, a scholar who had spent his life on Coptic books is said to have called it the worst kept codex he had ever seen, and then spent five years with a woman who restores paper putting it back together, fragment by fragment, with tweezers, under glass. And in 2006 they published it, with a magazine behind them that put it on the cover, and the world learned that there was a Gospel of Judas. Here is the plot, kept small, as the house rule has it.

The book is a conversation. Jesus, before the end, laughs at his disciples, more than once, for praying and for thinking they understand, and takes Judas aside, and tells him things about the layers above the world that you would recognise from two nights ago, the same tower of names, told shorter. And near the end he says to Judas that Judas will exceed all the others, because he will sacrifice the man that clothes him. And then the book ends with the handing over, in one line, and a bag of money, and no kiss, and no rope, and no field. That is it.

That is what the newspapers called the gospel that made Judas a hero. And I will tell you, once, what happened next, because it is the third warning. The first translation read the book as I have just told it, Judas as the one disciple who understood, doing what he was asked. Within two years other scholars, reading the same Coptic, said the first translators had got the tone wrong, that the word they had read as spirit was the word for demon, and that the book was not praising Judas at all but making him the worst of a bad set, the one who would hand over the body and be shut out of the place of the blessed for it. The book has been read both ways since, by people who can read it, and it is not settled, and it may never be, and I am not going to settle it for you.

What I will tell you is that the book, either way, is not about whether Judas did it. He did it, in this book, as in the four. It is about what the doing meant, in a system where the body was a garment and the world was a mistake, and that system is the Secret Book's system, and you have already sat through it, and you already know what the season thinks of it. The ground gave it back. It was restored in Switzerland, its pages placed under glass, with an agreement that they would return to Cairo.

It is the last of tonight's discoveries to enter public discussion, and I am glad to leave it. Three warnings. There were more gospels than we know. A hope is not a reading. And a name on a book does not tell you what the book is for.

Now the hill.

The hill. The rain. The lamp. The copyist has been writing all night, and he has not heard a word of this, because I have not put tonight's recovered witnesses on his shelf. Not the gospel from the grave, not the vision, not the book from the drawer in Berlin, not the one with the worst name on it.

He has never heard of a genizah, and I have given him his own box for leaves that he values. He has never heard of Akhmim. He has never been to Cairo and would not go. The books the ground gave back are not his books, and that is the point of the hill, and it has been the point all season. On the hill nothing was ever lost, so nothing ever had to be found.

He has one column and a half left in the last gathering, the one he has been filling by lamplight since the fourth night, and he is going to finish it tonight, and I want you to watch him do it, because it is the last thing tonight has to show you and it is the quietest. The gathering is five leaves, folded once so that each becomes two, twenty pages, and he has ruled every page with a dry point and a straightedge before he wrote a word on any of them, so that the lines are pressed into the parchment and not drawn, and you can feel them under a fingertip in the dark. He writes in two columns to a page. He has written all of the forty columns but the last, and half of the one before it. The reed pen is worn and he has cut it twice tonight, and the little knife lies open beside the ink horn, and the ink is the black ink that his church makes from soot and gum and the juice of a plant, and it goes on wet and dark and dries black, and stays black, which is why the old books on the hill are still black.

He dips. He writes. The last column of a gathering is the one where a copyist is most tempted to hurry, because the end is in sight, and he does not hurry, because the book is the Book of Enoch and the column is the last of it, the short chapter at the very end, the one Enoch leaves for his son, and he has been waiting all night to get to it, and he is not going to rush it, and I am not going to read it to you, because it is his. He writes the son's name. He writes the last words, in Ge'ez, in the spelling of the older copy before him, and he does not know that in a museum in Alexandria there is a Greek copy of the first thirty two chapters of the book he is copying, from a grave, and that the Greek copy stops seventy six chapters short of this one, and that no surviving cave fragment or Greek manuscript gives this last chapter.

Its complete ancient text reaches us through Ge'ez copies, made by hands like his. He knows only that it is last. The rain has eased. You can hear it still on the thatch, but softly now, the way rain sounds when it is thinking about stopping. The lamp has an hour of oil left in it and he will not need the hour.

Outside the door the yard is black and the juniper is dripping and somewhere down the hill a dog has given up barking. He writes the last line of the column. He lifts the pen. He reads the column back, from the top, lips moving, the way he reads everything, and he finds one letter he does not like, and he does not scrape it, because it is a letter and not an error, only a letter he would have made better, and he leaves it. Then he takes the gathering, all five leaves of it, and turns it over, and looks at the first page of it, the one he wrote in the first days of this rain, and then at the last page, the one he wrote just now, and they are the same hand, and the same ink, and the same book, and it is done.

Tonight he leaves this gathering unsigned. Other Ethiopian scribes have recorded their names in their books, but I have not given this copyist a name. He lifts the lid of the box, and lays the gathering in on top of the others, the last of them, and the lid, which has not fitted for a year, sits up a little higher than it did, and he leaves it so. There is no gathering to rule in the morning. What is left is thread and two boards, and that is not tonight's, and he knows it, and he does not mind.

That is the whole of what he does. He finishes the last gathering. He ruled the first leaf of it some mornings before the season began, and the last leaf of it on the first night, and he has filled it since at his own pace, a column a night, a column and a half, one night nothing, because the book he is copying is not being copied for us and never kept pace with anything. The writing is done. What is left is the sewing and the boards, and the shelf, and when the season ends, in three nights, that will be done too, and the rain will have stopped, and he will begin again on something else, because that is what a copyist does.

That is the thing about the hill. It was never keeping pace with anything. In Alexandria the small book from the grave is under glass with the museum lights off. In Berlin the codex is kept in a museum collection. In Cambridge the leaves from the storeroom belong to a vast library collection.

The book with the worst name has been brought back from its thousand fragments and placed under glass. Every book the ground gave back is asleep tonight in a building somewhere, kept now, on purpose, by people paid to keep it, with a number on it and a temperature and a door that locks. And on the hill a man lays the last gathering in a box and leaves the lid sitting high, and there is no number, and the door does not lock, and the book has never been lost, and never been found, and never needed to be. He pinches the lamp. He does not blow it, because blowing spatters the oil.

He pinches it, and the room goes dark, and the rain on the thatch is the only sound, and it is stopping. He sits a moment in the dark, the way he does, with his hands on his knees, and listens to it stop. It does not stop all at once. It thins, and then there are single drops from the eaves, far apart, each one a small sound on the stone of the threshold, and then there is a gap between two of them long enough that you think it has ended, and then one more, and then it has ended. He gets up in the dark, and finds the door by the grey of it, and stands in it, and the yard smells of wet earth and juniper, and above the hill the cloud has come apart and there are stars in the gap, three or four, and he looks at them the way he looks at a page, and goes to bed.

The books the ground gave back. A storeroom that kept writing over centuries. A grave with a small book in it. A drawer in Berlin, and a burst pipe, and two wars, and a book that waited fifty nine years to be read, and had waited fifteen hundred before that. A woman who was told to speak and spoke, and was silent when she had finished.

And a name on a book that does not tell you what the book is for. Some of tonight's pages were found by chance and some by patient searching. They survived through a mixture of deliberate keeping and accident, and much has returned to readers, under continuing care, and so are you. Goodnight.