The
Muratorian fragment is a copy of perhaps the oldest known list of the books of the
New Testament. The fragment, consisting of 85 lines, is a 7th-century
Latin manuscript bound in a 7th or 8th century
codex from the library of
Columban's monastery at
Bobbio; it contains features suggesting it is a translation from a
Greek original written about 170 or as late as the 4th century. Both the degraded condition of the manuscript and the poor Latin in which it was written have made it difficult to translate. The beginning of the fragment is missing, and it ends abruptly. The fragment consists of all that remains of a section of a list of all the works that were accepted as
canonical by the churches known to its anonymous original compiler. It was discovered in the
Ambrosian Library in
Milan by Father
Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), the most famous Italian historian of his generation, and published in 1740.