The Rabula Gospel is a manuscript containing the four Gospels in Syriac, copied in the year 586 AD by the monk Rabula and a group of his fellow monks in the Monastery of Saint John of Zaghba in Syria.
The manuscript consists of two hundred and ninety-two pages, measuring 33 cm by 25 cm, written in the Syriac Estrangelo Variant script. It contains twenty-six illustrations, with the first thirty pages adorned with beautiful images representing key events in the life of Christ and the Old and New Testaments.
The significance of this manuscript lies in its being the oldest manuscript in the world to contain illustrated images with its history clearly recorded and without any ambiguity. The depiction of the crucifixion in this Gospel is the earliest of its kind in the world, from which it spread to be displayed above church altars, both in the East and the West, and to adorn Christian homes and institutions wherever they may be in the world.
This Gospel was transferred from the Monastery of Saint John in Zaghba to the Church of Saint George in Antioch, and it is not known how it reached the possession of the Maronite Patriarchs’ treasury in Ilige in the twelfth century, who annotated events that occurred in their time on its pages.
The Patriarchs carried it with them from the Monastery of Our Lady in Ilige to the Monastery of Our Lady of Qannoubine in the year 1440, along with Patriarch Yuhanna Al-Jaji.
From Qannoubine, it traveled to Europe in the year 1652 and came into the possession of the Coislin family, and from there to the National Library of Paris. Since the first half of the eighteenth century, it has been in the Laurentian Library in Florence, where it was discovered by Archbishop Estefan Awad al-Semaani, who showcased its treasures to the world.
In an effort to revive the Syriac Maronite heritage and to commemorate the 1600th anniversary of the death of Saint Maron, Dr. Fouad Al-Shamali undertook the task of re-drawing the illustrations of the Rabula Gospel, and the work continued for about two years.