Vatican to Digitize 41 Million Pages of Ancient Manuscripts

"Never been sacked" is important as well. Often books can get burned and destroyed during political upheaval, either intentionally (burn the books) or accidentially (the building with the books goes on fire).

When the Spanish conquered what is now Mexico, they destroyed all the Mayan books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices#Background > "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."

The gospel claims that John's mother, Elizabeth, was just sort of "swallowed" by a mountain for a while, in what always struck me as a pretty hamfisted retcon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_James

But yeah, these have been available for a long time. Wider readership could possibly erode support for the Church, as people realize just how pedestrian and hamfisted some of the early Church writings were, and they might start to read the gospels more critically. Maybe, maybe not. The barrier to wider readership isn't a conspiracy so much as mass laziness though.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ has a large collection of writings relating to Christianity.

One of the reasons "no one cares" about a lot of the "quite different" books is that they haven't been established as being written in the same time period. The Gospel of Thomas has the strongest claim to being contemporary with the other gospels, but even that claim is fairly weak; the GoT appears to quote heavily from and allude to the other writings, as if it was written at a later date in response. My own read is that it's from around the time of Marcion.

Many of the other "gospels" appear to have been written much later, and they lack even basic historical credibility. The canonical gospels reference names and locations that are appropriate for 1st century Palestine (lots of guys named Simon, references to specific small villages), as if they were written by people who were at least familiar with the area at that time; many of the other gospels name Jesus, Mary, Jerusalem, and that's it, as if they were written by people from elsewhere who had heard the names but had no firsthand knowledge.

One of the other writings linked on that page (I forget whether it's Ignatius or someone else) actually discusses the gospels, describing the authorship of the four that are in the Bible. Many of the writings, including some that are in the Bible, warn against false teachers and distortions of the gospel.

The net result is that few people are either particularly surprised that there were "quite different" gospels, or are particularly inclined to treat them as credible.

It's a strange thing, actually, to see people reject older nonsensical beliefs while creating their owns devoid of all rationality.

I'm pretty sure the Vatican's got to "ruin" the images with a watermark or anyone would be able to use them as is for whatever they want. It'd be different if it was sculpture, but these pics seem to me like they'd definitely fall into the "slavish reproduction of a public domain work" category.

[0] http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/welcome/#...

A more likely reason why your friend had such a hard time was Napoleon, who made a policy of transferring all the grand archives of the countries he conquered back to Paris. An enormous number of documents were lost during the transfer and the eventual repatriation, somewhere around one third. Records relating to Galileo's trial were lost, for example. Of course, the most likely reason that your friend and I had difficulty is just the incredibly user-unfriendly systems of cataloging that the ASV uses.

At the risk of sounding like an apologist for the Vatican, I should also point out that the fact that these archives are open at all is remarkable. These aren't a national archive, for instance, where the state maintains records as a service for its citizens and to keep the nation's heritage alive. The ASV is quite simply the dumping ground for the Vatican's bureaucracy over the past 1700 or so years. They don't owe this to anyone.

It would be like if Microsoft pooled all documents generated by HR, marketing, product development, engineering, legal, and its other divisions, physically dumped them in various containers over the centuries, and one day in the year 3749 A.D. announced that the public could rifle through the papers if they wanted to. The immediate impetus would be to demonstrate that Office 3750 was not in fact part of an anti-competitive plot to secure a monopoly on productivity software sold in Alpha Centauri and Venus. But by 3800 A.D., that original purpose would have been long forgotten and researchers, regardless of which office suite they use, would be able to mine the archives for anything that anyone working for Microsoft ever said, did, or observed during the work day, so long as those thoughts were captured on some format that eventually made its way to paper.

...to make the analogy more complete, let's also assume that most of the other major institutions and their archives have been wiped out by this time. What ends up happening, then, is that researchers in 3749 A.D. dig through MS' archives for glimmers of things like what people ate during the day in 2014 or what sort of music they listened to.

Long term storage medium capacity doesn't need to progress in line with regular storage mediums it just need to be updated once it's too out of sync.

The old data can stay on the old version since there's no urgency in transferring it over as long as the spec for it is kept on the latest medium a reader can always be built to read it.

We tend to worry about not having devices to read it but given how 3D printers are progressing having the spec and building a replacement reader should be easy enough.