The use of the name Zeytun was first documented in 1536 from a copied manuscript titled the "Zeytun Citadel" and in 1545 was first inscribed in the town of Zeytun itself. The manuscript was rebound during the seventeenth century, keeping the original gold crucifix and medallions. Armenian bookbinding changed very little between the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The Armenian language dictated which side manuscripts were bound. The language is read from left to right, so the manuscripts were bound on the left. Zeytun priests added notes of significant events and various messages into the colophons of the Zeytun Gospels. They essentially noted Zeytun’s more recent history and turned the gospel into a living repository. Specifically in the nineteenth century, three colophons were written with deteriorating articulation and heavy vernacular, two of which were dated 1852 and 1859 and pertained to the Ottoman army. During the 1880s, the Monsignor of the Catholic Armenians of Marash attempted to sell the manuscript for its weight in gold (which is just over 7 pounds). The Zeytun people rejected the sale of the manuscript. In 1887 at the Church of the Holy Mother of God, the gospel escaped a fire, guarded by Surenian ishkhans. The ishkhan and the church council kept the gospel safe after 1908 in a secret compartment in the northern wall of the church’s baptism chamber in an iron box with two keys. At the beginning of the Armenian Genocide, in the spring of 1915, the village of Zeytun was the first to be invaded by the Turks. During the invasion, the people of Zeytun were either exiled or killed and, in the process, the Zeytun Gospels was taken from its repository. Sometime during the following years, the canon tables were taken out of the manuscript. Nearly five years after the start of the Armenian Genocide, after the Battle of Marash in 1920, the manuscript was then given to James Lyman, an American missionary, by Father Khachadur Der Ghazarian for safe keeping. After the end of the Armenian Genocide, the manuscript (excluding the canon tables) meandered through many hands for decades until it finally found its way to the Matenadaran (the translation of Matenadaran is "repository of manuscripts" and holds over 23,000 manuscripts, including the national collection of Soviet Armenia). In 1994, the canon tables were sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum for $950,000 after being exhibited at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.