ArtsBeat

Can today's digital technology help illuminate a breakthrough in communications technology that occured nearly 1700 years ago? That question was answered earlier this week when it was announced that a project involving four international libraries had digitized and reassembled over 800 pages of the text of the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest known copy of the Bible in all of Christendom and one of the most substantial books of any kind to survive antiquity. On Monday, the recombined text became available to scholars, historians, and the general public for enhanced viewing online. You can learn more about the project and examine the actual text here.

The Codex, which represents one of the earliest uses of a bound manuscript consisting of a quire of parchment pages -- the thing we would today recognize as a "book" (as opposed to the scroll or wax tablets of antiquity) -- is thought to be the more reliable of the only two surviving  transcriptions of the Greek Bible commissioned from Eusebius of Caesarea by Roman Emperor Constantine after his conversion to Christianity around the year 325 of the Common Era. (The other surviving copy is the Codex Vaticanus housed in the Vatican Library in Rome.)
 
The work of four unknown scribes (you can actually see their fingerprints on the text), it was handwritten in Koine (early) Greek uncial letters on vellum parchment made from the skins of donkeys or antelopes.  Its heavily corrected text -- over 14,800 corrections, annotations or other markings dating from the 4th to the 12th century -- make it of singular importance to Bible scholarship and the history of the Bible, while the manuscript construction makes it a key artifact in the history of the book. The Codex Vaticanus, by way of comparison, is relatively unmarked.

 
The Codex Sinaiticus Project brought together portions of the text "discovered" in 1844 by the German biblical scholar and archaeologist Constantin von Tischendorf at the Monastery of St Catherine, the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery built in the 4th century at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt, from which the text derives its name. Owing perhaps to its remoteness and the extremely dry desert air of its surroundings, the monastery houses the greatest library of early Christian manuscripts outside of Vatican City.
 
Under what remain disputed circumstances, Tischendorf (1815-1874) "borrowed" and/or removed significant portions of the manuscript and brought it Europe on three separate expeditions between 1844 and 1859, where it was divided between Leipzig University Library (where he was employed), the National Library of Russia (archive of his patron, Tsar Alexander II of Russia) and the British Library, which acquired the bulk of the National Library of Russia's portion in 1933 when it was feared that Josef Stalin might have it destroyed.  Owing to the proprietary nature of Library collections, cooperation between the various parties with claims to the Codex Sinaiticus -- including the Monastery at St Catherine, whose official position now is that it was "stolen" -- had been difficult, but all were enlisted as co-equal partner institutions in the online project. 
 
Biblical scholars will note that the Codex Sinaiticus was originally comprised of the whole of both Testaments, but only the Septuagint version of the Old Testament adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians remains significantly intact. The New Testament is present in its entirety, along with two controversial texts -- the "Epistle of Barnabas," and portions of "The Shepherd of Hermas"--that were later excluded. The order in which the books of the New Testament are presented is also significantly at variance with the canonical version of the text adopted at the Synod of Hippo in 393 A.D. and there are other textual variations and omissions too numerous to note here.
 
--R.D. Pohl