If you have an interest in ancient science or mathematics, chances are you have probably heard at some point about the Archimedes Palimpsest. According to the narrative that New Atheist writers and media outlets keep pushing, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BC) wrote groundbreaking mathematical treatises that were millennia ahead of their time.
Then, according to the standard narrative being pushed, in the thirteenth century AD, ignorant, obscurantist Christians who did not care about science or mathematics erased the text of the manuscript containing the last known copies of several of Archimedes’s treatises and reused the parchment to make a prayer book. Now—or so the story goes—Archimedes’s previously lost groundbreaking works are being recovered through the brilliancy of modern secular technology.
Unfortunately, this narrative that I have just outlined is deeply, deeply misrepresentative and based on an extremely selective presentation of the evidence. If the media would tell the full story of the Archimedes Palimpsest, we would be getting a very different narrative—a narrative not about how religion is inherently dangerous and destructive, but rather a far more complex narrative in which religious individuals are neither inherently evil nor inherently good but simply human beings capable of both good and evil.
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