Local reunites 1,100-year-old manuscript texts

Mar. 29—After 39 years of holding onto a fragment of centuries-old text, a local man was finally able to reunite the piece with four other folio pages of the ancient codex.

Winfred Belcher is a Tahlequah resident, a student of Greek paleography, and a licensed professional counselor in Muskogee. On Feb. 27, 1984, he discovered a 1,100-year-old leaf of a Greek manuscript in a supermarket/antique store in Warrendale, Pennsylvania.

Gary Catanese, owner of Catanese's Supermarket, didn't want to sell the manuscript, but instead let Belcher send what Catanese presumed was a 500-year-old page of the Greek New Testament to Dr. Robert Kraft at the University of Pennsylvania for further review. Catenese later sold the fragment for $1,000 to Belcher.

Belcher said Kraft found the fragment to potentially be a work from a codex of an early church father.

After being sent the Greek texts from Kraft, Belcher learned to read the ancient text, and on March 19, 1984, he went to the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary library to further his research. There he identified the leaf as St. John Chrysostom's "Expositions/Commentaries On Psalm 118-150."

"John of Antioch, nicknamed 'Chrysostom' — which means 'Golden Mouthed One' — was originally trained in one of the finest pagan Roman schools of oratory where he had planned an eventual career, possibly as high as the Roman Senate, before converting to Christianity," said Belcher. "He has written more works than any other of the Greek Early Church Fathers. He was made Bishop of Constantinople, a position that he never sought or wanted, and during the year 398 A.D., Chrysostom wrote his 'Commentaries On The Psalms' and wrote commentaries on all 150 Psalms, though perhaps only 58 of them have survived."

While making several moves, including one in 1991 to Tahlequah, the page sat at the rare book room at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio.

In 2009, Belcher resumed his search for the missing pieces, by emailing various people such as Dr. Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffman, Catalogue of Greek Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Collections of the U.S.A. project director, and using a database of medieval Greek manuscripts called Pinakes.

"We didn't find anything. It all went quiet. Well, this last year, after I had my second near fatal auto accident at [age] 64, I said, 'Maybe I need to grow up a little bit here. Maybe It's time for that leaf to go to a more suitable facility,'" said Belcher.

Belcher and Kavrus-Hoffman agreed to have the fragment housed at the University of Michigan in October 2022, after Belcher did another sweep through Pinakes to give his efforts one more shot.

On Nov. 10, 2022, he found the University of Portland had another piece from the same codex called MS 6273, which was the commentary on Psalm 142 and the beginning of Psalm 143.

"It was just like a frozen moment in time. I mean, my gosh, I had been seeing clients with trauma all day long, so trauma therapist by day, Greek paleographer by night, and I've been working on it for several weeks," Belcher said. "So the first part of the night, I was down. I was disappointed. Then when I saw it, I was just transfixed there at the computer. I didn't say anything."

Belcher said MS 6273 and the Warrendale Fragment represent the only surviving manuscripts in the United States of John Chrysostom's "Commentary On The Psalms" and that it maybe the third to fourth oldest surviving text in the world.

On March, 24, 2023, Belcher reunited his fragment with the other four discovered folio pages at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

"What would it feel like for any of you to work off and on, and to try and fail, for nearly 39 years, and just as you are about to give up on your last night of research, to finally triumph in the end?," said Belcher. "It was a moment of overpowering holy silence to come to face to face with MS 6273 and to know instantly that it matched the Warrendale Fragment."

The Warrendale Fragment was renamed to assist scholars in accessing the document, as well as having Belcher authorized to continue his efforts in finding the other parts of the codex.

Belcher was credited for discovering the Warrendale Fragment, the true identification of the fragment, the identifying of MS 6273 as being a part of the same codex, for identifying MS 6273 as being a part of the commentary of Psalm 142 and the beginning of Psalm 143, and being the first person to transcribe the text of MS 6273.

Kavrus-Hoffman will also be continuing her research on the 10th-11th C. Warrensdale Fragment and MS 6273 on May 1 at Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Studies program. The work will be published in the second edition of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor's Collection of Medieval Greek Manuscripts.