Hershel Shanks
The Codex Sinaiticus contains the oldest complete copy of the New Testament—from the mid-fourth century. Originally it contained the Old Testament too, but most of that is now missing.
The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the big three—not Ford, GM and Chrysler, but Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and Alexandrinus—fourth- or fifth-century codices of the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) that include the New Testament as well. Vacticanus is at the
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PREVIOUS PAGE: At the center of controversy is this fourth-century Greek manuscript. Known as the Codex Sinaiticus, this document from St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai is one of the earliest extant copies of the Septuagint and the earliest complete New Testament. The text is written in uncial Greek script, a capital-letter form also called majuscule, as opposed to miniscule. Each page measures approximately 16 inches tall by 14 inches wide and is divided into four columns. Only about 400 of the more than 730 original leaves survive-and these are currently located in four different countries: Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and Russia. A massive cooperative project is now underway at all four institutions that own parts of the codex to accomplish the conservation and digitization of the manuscript and to investigate the fascinating modern history of the codex that led to one of Mt. Sinai’s greatest treasures being scattered throughout the Western world.
Vatican. Alexandrinus is at the British Library. And Sinaiticus is, well, in four different places. And thereby hangs my tale.
Each venue of Sinaiticus maintains that it owns the part that resides there. The major part is at the British Library (formerly part of the British Museum) in London. A lesser part is at the University Library of Leipzig. A few fragments are in St. Petersburg at the Russian National Library. Finally, the monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai, where it all or discovered a few more monks would like it all back.
The principal actor in drama is a German scholar named Constantin von Tischendorf (commonly
SCHOLAR, TRAVELER AND NEGOTIATOR Constantin von Tischendorf undertook an international quest in the mid-19th century to uncover important ancient Biblical manuscripts. His travels led him to St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, where he discovered ancient parchment leaves-later to be known collectively as the Codex Sinaiticus-supposedly destined for the fire. In the course of several visits to the monastery, he persuaded the monks to let him take the pages back with him to Europe as a loan. More than 150 years later, the codex still hasn’t been returned.
Constantine Tischendorf) of the University of Leipzig, who was the world’s leading New Testament textual critic in the mid-19th century. At that time, Biblical textual criticism was in its infancy and concentrated chiefly on resolving variants in different old Biblical manuscripts in the hope of finding the most-nearly original, the text closest to the supposed autographs.
In 1840 Tischendorf published his acclaimed critical edition of the New Testament. He soon concluded, however, that it was deficient because the most important manuscripts were probably still unknown-at least to him. He decided to devote himself to locating other ancient manuscripts on which to base his studies.1 This would take travel and money. The Theological Faculty of the University of Leipzig gave him a letter of recommendation to the government of Saxony (Germany would not be a national entity until 1870), which awarded him a grant of 100 thalers to get him started. With this, he proceeded to Paris to explore its libraries for ancient Biblical manuscripts. It was the beginning of a journey that would take five years and cost 5,000 thalers.
He soon received additional financial support from King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, as well as from people he called “patrons of learning” throughout Europe. From Paris he proceeded to Holland, Switzerland, England and finally Italy, where in 1843 he was received by Pope Gregory XVI. In Italy he also searched the libraries of Florence, Venice, Modena, Milan, Verona and Turin.
But even this was not enough for Tischendorf. In 1844 he decided to push on to Egypt, where he developed a special interest in the Coptic monasteries of the Libyan Desert. Ultimately he traveled to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth. Then, before returning home in 1845, he worked his way though Anatolia.
Before leaving Egypt, he visited St. Catherine’s at the foot of Mt. Sinai. There he discovered what he called
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AT THE FOOT OF JEBEL MUSA, the traditional site of Mt. Sinai, lies the monastery known as St. Catherine’s (its actual name is the Monastery of the Transfiguration), which was built around the year 500 A.D. A popular site for pilgrimage, it encloses a fourth-century chapel erected by Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena, to mark the site where God spoke to Moses from the burning bush. The Codex Sinaiticus was brought here sometime thereafter and remained, forgotten by the outside world for hundreds of years, until the 19th century.
“the pearl of my research.”
Tischendorf himself has described the occasion:
In visiting the library of the monastery in the month of May 1844, I perceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket full of old parchment. The librarian, who was well-informed, told me that two heaps of papers like this, mouldered by time, had already been committed to the flames. To my surprise I found amid this heap of papers a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek [parts of Isaiah, Jeremiah, the so-called minor prophets, Chronicles, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, etc.], which seemed to me to be one of the most ancient that I had ever seen.
The authorities of the monastery allowed me to possess myself of a third of these parchments, or about forty-three sheets, all the more readily as they were destined for the fire. But I could not get them to yield up possession of the remainder.
Why could he not get the other 85 or so sheets? Tischendorf supposed that it was because he appeared to be too anxious. This eagerness “aroused [in the monks] their suspicions as to the value of this manuscript.”
On his return home, Tischendorf presented the 43 leaves to the government, designating them the Codex Friderico-Augustanus, and deposited them in the library of his university in Leipzig to join the other manuscripts that already made up the Tischendorf Collection. And so they have remained to this day.
Tischendorf, of course, wanted the other two-thirds as well. Through a friend, he approached the
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Why Is Sinaiticus Significant?
Codex Sinaiticus, written around the middle of the fourth century A.D., is arguably the earliest extant Christian Bible. It contains the earliest complete copy of the New Testament. Only one other nearly complete manuscript of the Christian Bible-the Codex Vaticanus—is of a similarly early date. The only Christian manuscripts of scripture that are definitely of an earlier date contain relatively small portions of the text.
Three principal aspects of the codex contribute to its great significance: its roles as text, canon and book.
Codex Sinaiticus represents one of the most important witnesses to the Greek text of the Septuagint and the New Testament2 It is customarily given primacy of position in the lists of surviving manuscripts consulted for establishing the oldest text of these two traditions and is usually represented as “à” or “01” for the New Testament. The Codex Sinaiticus is relevant not only for the history of the text of the Septuagint and New Testament, but also for the history of many layers of later revisions to the text made by generations of correctors. These range in date from those made by the original scribes of the codex in the fourth century to those made by much later correctors in the 12th century, and in extent from the alteration of one letter to the insertion of whole sentences. No other early manuscript of the Christian Bible has been so extensively corrected. A better understanding of the base text of the codex alongside its subsequent corrections will provide us with a unique insight into the history of transmission of Greek Biblical texts.
By the middle of the fourth century there was wide, yet neither complete nor universal, agreement over the books to be considered as authoritative for Christian communities. The Codex Sinaiticus, being one of the earliest intact collections of such books, is essential for an understanding of the contents and the arrangement of the Biblical canon, as well as the uses made of it. The Greek Septuagint in the codex comprises books not included in the Hebrew Bible and regarded in the Protestant tradition as apocryphal: 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 & 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach. Appended at the end of the New Testament in the codex are the apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. The idiosyncratic sequence of books is also remarkable: Within the New Testament, the Letter to the Hebrews is placed after Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, and the Acts of the Apostles between the Pastoral and Catholic Epistles. All these facts have to be considered carefully when reconstructing the history of the canonization of Christian books.
This process of canonization has also influenced and been influenced by the medium in which it—the codex—has been transcribed and transmitted. From our earliest evidence onward, and in contrast to earlier and most contemporaneous practices, Christians preferred the format of the codex over the roll, particularly, albeit not exclusively, when copying sacred literature. And from the fourth century onward, parchment was increasingly used instead of papyrus, which had previously been the predominant choice. The quality of Codex Sinaiticus’s parchment and the advanced binding structure that would have been needed to support and contain within one volume over 730 large-format leaves make the Codex Sinaiticus one of the most outstanding examples of book manufacture in its time. The careful planning, skillful writing, and editorial control needed for such an ambitious project gives us an invaluable insight into professional Christian book production that would exert its influence for many centuries afterwards.-Dr. Juan Garcés, curator, Codex Sinaiticus Project, British Library
viceroy of Egypt. The friend reported back that his efforts were unavailing: “The monks of the monastery have, since your departure, learned the value of these sheets of parchment, and will not part with them at any price.”
In 1853 Tischendorf returned to the monastery but was unable to locate the sheets he had earlier seen and had been forced to leave behind. His only recovery was a fragment of 11 short lines from Genesis that came from the original codex. He brought this back, with his appetite whetted.
In 1856 Tischendorf decided to approach the Russian government, whose emperor was, after all, the head of the Orthodox Church. Tischendorf reports that his proposal to return to the monastery under the auspices of the Russian government initially met with some opposition in St. Petersburg-after all, he was a Protestant and not Russian—but finally, he reports, “the good cause triumphed.” The government even agreed to provide financial support for his travels. So in January 1859, he set sail for “the East” under the auspices of Tsar Alexander II.
With the support of such a patron, Tischendorf was warmly received at the monastery. But he was unable to find any Biblical manuscripts that had any interest for him. He instructed his camel drivers to prepare to leave for Cairo. Then he took a walk with the monastery steward (Oikonomos) outside the walls. What followed belongs to Tischendorf:
As we returned, toward sunset, he begged me to take some refreshment with him in his cell. Scarcely had he entered the room, when, resuming our former subject of conversation, he said, “And I, too, have read a Septuagint.” … So saying, he took down from the corner of the room a bulky kind of volume, wrapped up in a red cloth, and laid it before me. I unrolled the cover and discovered, to my great surprise, not
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only those very fragments which, fifteen years before, I had taken out of the basket, but also other parts of the Old Testament, the New Testament complete, and, in addition the Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the Shepherd of Hernias. Full of joy, which this time I had the self-command to conceal from the steward and the rest of the community, I asked, as if in a careless way, for permission to take the manuscript into my sleeping chamber to look over it more at leisure.
There by myself I could give way to the transport of joy that I felt. I knew that I held in my hand the most precious Biblical treasure in existence—a document whose age and importance exceeded that of all the manuscripts that I had ever examined during twenty years’ study of the subject.
Once again, however, the question was how to pry the monks from their treasure. His first move was to ask the steward to allow him to take the manuscript to Cairo to have it copied. For this, he was told, he would need the permission of the prior (the Dikaios, who is responsible for the monastery in the archbishop’s absence) and, alas, the prior had just departed for Cairo on his way to Constantinople. When he heard this, Tischendorf immediately left for Cairo in hopes of getting there to talk to the prior before he left for Constantinople. Tischendorf arrived in time and convinced the prior of his mission. The prior sent word back to the monks at the monastery to have the manuscript brought to Cairo. Once again Tischendorf had the treasure in his hands.
While the manuscript was in Cairo, Tischendorf made a proposal to the monks that reveals his early thinking about how he would obtain the manuscript permanently—by means of a “gift” to the tsar:
The relation in which I stood to the monastery gave me the opportunity of suggesting to the monks the thought of presenting the original to the Emperor of Russia as the natural protector of the Greek Orthodox Faith. The proposal was favorably entertained, but an unexpected obstacle arose to prevent its being acted upon.
The “unexpected obstacle” involved church politics. The monks had just unanimously elected Cyril as the new archbishop of the monastery, but the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who ordinarily performed the ordinations, was fiercely opposed to Cyril’s election. The monastery sent a delegation of monks to Constantinople to plead their case, but the Sultan refused to see them. At this point, the new archbishop, still in Cairo, asked Tischendorf, in Tischendorf’s words, “to use my influence on behalf of the monastery.” Tischendorf promptly left for Constantinople. What happened next is not entirely clear. The monks appealed to other patriarchs, archbishops and bishops and ultimately were successful in having the archbishop’s election by the monks confirmed. It seems clear, however, that Tischendorf took considerable credit for this outcome:
I myself brought the news of our success back to Cairo, and with it I also brought my own special request [that the Codex Sinaiticus be presented as a gift to the tsar], backed with the support of Prince Lobanow [the Russian ambassador to the Sublime Porte].
When Tischendorf returned to the monastery, the monks and the archbishop received him
UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE RUSSIAN TSAR Alexander II (pictured here), Tischendorf set out for St. Catherine’s for the second time in 1859 to try and recover more of the Codex Sinaiticus. Alexander, as nominal head of the Russian Orthodox Church, had been reluctant to sponsor the Protestant, non-Russian Tischendorf, but he eventually agreed. In November of that year, the tsar was “presented” with 347 folios of the Codex Sinaiticus by a triumphant Tischendorf. However, not until a decade later, in 1869, was the gift made official and deposited in the Imperial Public Library of St. Petersburg.
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Maggs Bros. LTD., LONDON
PROUDLY DISPLAYING THE MANUSCRIPT to newsreels and members of his staff, London bookseller Ernest Maggs was responsible for opening negotiations to buy the Codex Sinaiticus from the Soviet Union. In 1933 the Soviet government sold its 347 leaves of the codex to the British Museum for 100,000 pounds-more than half of which was raised by public subscription-out of a need for hard currency. These leaves can still be seen on display at the British Library (formerly part of the British Museum).
warmly, but they would agree only to lend him the manuscript to take to St. Petersburg “to have it copied as accurately as possible.” Thus were 347 folios delivered to the Russian capital, including the complete New Testament, plus sheets of the Old Testament and several books of the apocrypha.
These were “presented” to the tsar in November 1859. It is not quite clear what it meant to be “presented,” but at the presentation Tischendorf made no mention of the manuscript’s being a gift. On the contrary, he apparently stated that “the community of Sinai had the right to ask for the manuscript’s return.”3 That the Russian government understood that Tischendorf was not making a gift is clear from the fact that the manuscript was retained in the files of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “pending,” in the words of the British Library, which ultimately obtained them, “ratification of the presentation.”4 (Only in 1869, when a somewhat mysterious ratification of the gift was executed, was the manuscript removed from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and placed in the Imperial Public Library of St. Petersburg.)
Since then, much has been written about whether the monastery gave Tischendorf the manuscript to give to the tsar or had only lent it to him for copying. In 1960, Ihor Sevcenko, then a professor at Columbia University, visited Mt Sinai and learned that a monk named Nicephorus claimed to have a receipt signed by Tischendorf at the time he received the manuscript in 1859. Two days later Nicephorus produced the receipt-in Tischendorf’s own handwriting! It read as follows (original in Greek; translation by Sevcenko):
I, the undersigned, Constantin von Tischendorf, now on mission to the Levant upon the command of Alexander, Autocrat of All the Russias, attest by these presents that the Holy Confraternity of Mount Sinai, in accordance with the letter of His Excellency Ambassador Lobanov, has delivered to me as a loan [emphasis supplied] an ancient manuscript of both Testaments, being the property of the aforesaid monastery and containing 346 folia and a small fragment These I shall take with me to St. Petersburg in order that I may collate the copy previously made by me with the original at the time of publication of the manuscript.
The manuscript has been entrusted to me under the conditions stipulated in the aforementioned letter of Mr. Lobanov, dated September 10, 1859, Number 510. This manuscript I promise to return [emphasis supplied] undamaged and in a good state of preservation, to the Holy Confraternity of Sinai at its earliest request.
[signed] Constantin von Tischendorf
Cairo, September 16/28, 1859
I myself recall seeing an English copy of this letter, in a small black frame under glass, on my first visit to the monastery in early 1973. I am told that it is still there.
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As late as January 21, 1864, Tischendorf wrote to Cyril, the monastery’s archbishop, pleading to him: “Do not delay the donation [of Sinaiticus] any longer.”5 The obvious implication is that no gift had yet been made. Continued efforts by Tischendorf to obtain an admission from Archbishop Cyril that a gift had been made were unsuccessful, as were efforts to have Cyril make a gift.
It was left to Cyril’s successor, Archbishop Cal-listratus, to provide the Russian authorities with a confirmatory deed of gift. This was done only in 1869, 10 years after Tischendorf had taken the manuscript from the monastery. Although the deed of gift has often been referred to since then and even quoted in existing documents, it has yet to be published. Sevcenko says that his investigation indicates that the deed of gift was obtained “by the use of pressures that deserve closer scrutiny”6 Callistratus himself expressed “bitter complaints” that the manuscript had been “purloined” from the monastery.7 In the words of the Russian diplomat who negotiated the “donation,” he wanted to put “an end to the story of the Sinai Bible [that had been] stolen by us.”8
After the Russian Revolution, St. Petersburg became Leningrad, and the library housing the Codex Sinaiticus became part of the Soviet Union. In the 1930s the Soviet government was desperately in need of hard currency and began selling off art and rare books from its nationalized museums. In 1931 a prominent London bookseller named Ernest Maggs traveled to the Soviet Union with a colleague, Maurice Ettinghausen, who was both a bookseller and a scholar. There they hoped to acquire some rare books. When they saw the priceless Codex Sinaiticus, Ettinghausen remarked to his hosts, “If you ever want to sell it, let me know.”
Some time later, Maggs received a postcard saying that the Soviet government would be prepared to sell the Codex Sinaiticus for 200,000 pounds. The British group countered with 40,000 pounds. Finally, a price of 100,000 pounds was agreed upon. This was the largest price that had ever been paid for a book. It was an enormous sum at the time. The British government agreed to pay half the amount and guaranteed the remainder if it were not raised by public subscription.
The public appeal was orchestrated by Sir Frederic Kenyon, the father of Kathleen Kenyon who would become a famous archaeologist and the excavator of Jericho and Jerusalem. The British prime minister at the time, Ramsay MacDonald, desired, by the public subscription, to associate the whole nation with the project. As Scot McKendrick, the head of the British Library’s Western Manuscripts division, recently told me, “He wanted to involve the national government and the whole nation in saving the Codex Sinaiticus from the Soviet scourge.”
The Codex Sinaiticus arrived in London in December 1933. “It was a huge event,” McKendrick went on. “It was installed in the front hall of the British Museum. Over 5,000 people queued up to see it.” A box was placed next to the exhibit where people could drop their coins. Thousands of British children contributed their pennies.
Ultimately, the public subscription raised more than half the cost of the manuscript. The government was required to pay only 41,440 pounds. Still, there were dissenting voices in Parliament:
DURING 1975 REPAIRS TO THE MONASTERY, 11 additional leaves and 14 fragments of the Codex Sinaiticus were discovered among some forgotten manuscripts at St. Catherine’s. After an unauthorized report on the new finds was published in Biblical Archaeologist in 1978, the monks hid the pages away and refused to let scholars or the public see them until 2005, when they joined the Codex Sinaiticus Project. The badly deteriorated condition of this folio is an example of the challenges that face conservators on the project.
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An American Monk in Sinai
Hershel Shanks: Tell me a little bit about your background.
Fr. Justin: My parents were Baptist missionaries. I was born in Texas but when I was two, we moved to Chile. I lived there until I was nine. That’s why my accent is not a Texas accent.
I grew up in El Paso and went to school at the University of Texas at Austin. Three years after I graduated, I entered a Greek monastery in Boston.
HS: How did that happen?
Fr. Justin: I became Orthodox and when I became Orthodox, the Church became the most important thing. When you become a monk, the Church becomes your life.
HS: What led you to the Orthodox Church?
Fr. Justin: Since I was brought up Proestant, I knew a lot about the New Testament but nothing about what happened in between. So I began to read medieval history and later Byzantine history. After I read a great deal of Byzantine history, I began to study the early church, and from that I began to attend Orthodox services.
HS: How did you happen to become a monk at Mt. Sinai?
FR Justin: I read about Sinai [when I lived] in Texas. I read a National Geographic article that featured Weitzmann and Forsyth’s Princeton-Michigan expedition,9 and I read Skrobucha, a German scholar who wrote a book about Sinai in 1959, published by Oxford University Press with photographs in 1966.10 From all my readings I began enthused about Sinai. When I first thought about becoming a monk, I wanted to go to Sinai. Friends of mine said “You can’t go to Sinai, You’re not Greek.” So I took a 22-year detour and went to the Boston monastery first.
HS: Was ther something in your background, your experience that led you to think this way?
FR. Justin: I’m just in awe at the heritage that is in Sinai, going back to the theophanies of the Old Testament and 17 centuries of continuous history. I think everyone at Sinai has cause to revere the history of the monastery and then, by living there, you become part of the heritage.
HS: What is your assignment at the monastery?
FR. Justin: There is a rule at Sinai that you must be of Greek descent to live there. So a monk from England and I are there by exception to that rule. When I first went there, because I was familiar with computers and scanners, I was taught the skills necessary to photograph the [ancient] manuscripts. Then a year and a half ago, the librarian retired. To my surprise, I was selected to succeed him. I’ve been librarian there for a year and a half, but I was photographing the manuscripts before that and want to continue doing that even now.
HS: You say you have to be Greek by descent? Does that mean Greek Orthodox or Greek nationality?
FR. Justin. Greek nationality.
HS: What is life like as a monk at Mt. Sinai?
FR. Justin. It revolves around the services. We do the complete canonical office. We start at 4:00 in the morning until about 7:30, and we have a service at noon and we have vespers at 4:00 in the afternoon. So the whole daily cycle revolves around the services. It’s all a balance between communal prayer, private prayer, activities done together and activities done while you’re in your own room.
HS: You have work too?
FR. Justin. Oh, yes.
HS: When do you work?
FR. Justin. After the morning service we start work around 8:00 and work until 12:00. Then we have quite time and vespers and a meal after vespers. And then we have another work period, say from 5:30–8:30 in the evening.
HS: When you went there, the Sinai peninsula was occupied by Israel.
FR. Justin. I first visited there in 1978. Sinai was under Israel from 1967 until 1982. And as part of the Camp David accords, it was returned to Egypt, but the roads there were built by the Jews for defense purposes. They were the first to encourage visitors who came to Jerusalem to continue on to Sinai, so they opened up the monastery to the public at large. After the peninsula was returned to Egypt, the Egyptians paved the roads and put in hotels and continue this support for visitors and pilgrims.
HS: Are there hotels there now?
FR. Justin. In the area, yes, but not within the vicinity of the monastery. You can take a taxi, and about a 10-min drive from the monastery you come to a village where they have the police headquarters, hospital facilities, and hotels and restaurants for the visitors.
Some people who visited Sinai in the 1950s have said that they do not want to come back because they want to remember it when it was extremely isolated, very seldom visited and it took real heroism to reach the monastery.
HS: What is the attitude of the monks toward opening this up?
FR. Justin. The older fathers remember when it was seldom visited, and they would like it to be like that again. The younger monks have never known it any other way. For them, that’s how the monastery is. It’s the older monks who tend to resent the intrusion. But people remind us that since the fourth century you had monks living in great isolation, but you also had pilgrims.
HS: Egeria?*
FR. Justin. Egeria, yes. So you can’t think of Sinai without visitors.
* See “A Pilgrim on Mount Sinai,” Past Perfect, BAR January/February 2007.
HS: I suppose you become a monk because of the silence, because of the contemplative conditions.
FR. Justin. Yes, but [there is] silence in a relative sense. We only have visitors in the morning, from 9:00 to 12:00, so before 9:00 and after 12:00 it is still profoundly silent.
HS: How many tourists do you have every day?
FR. Justin. Over a thousand, especially in the winter. Hundreds of thousands in the course of a year.
HS: What benefit to the monastery are all of these tourists?
FR. Justin. We’ve never charged admission to the church, so there’s no financial benefit to the monastery, but we are reminded that if you come to know each person, each one has a special reason for being there, and we believe that each one receives a blessing by being there. We come to know just a few of these people, but many times those few that we come to know turn out to be very special people. So that’s why we have confidence that everyone is blessed by being there.
“Monstrous,” cried Laborite John Joseph Tiner. “I have seen this thing in the British Museum and I call it useless. If scholars like such things, let them buy them and leave this 40,000 pounds to be spent for the relief of poverty and distress.”
James Maxton, antoher member of the Parilament and a supporter of Ramsey MacDonald, replied: “Would the Labor Party allow St. Paul’s to collapse or sell the pictures in the National Gallery merely because, until now, the majority may not see anything in them? … The Government must have a sense of proportion … There are many things in this country of which the vast majority of voters are unappreciative … Is the Government not to have the right to have the courage to say, ‘This is a thing that England ought to posses’?”
The 347 leaves are still the highlight of the exhibit at the British Library, where they now reside.
The 11-line fragment of Genesis that Tischendorf obtained on his second visito to the monastery and a mutilated fragment of the last leaf of the codex remain in St. Petersburg. And the full name of the codex remains Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus.
Om May 26, 1975, during repairs to the monastery, workmen demolished a wall and unexpectedly came upon a small room containing chests with manuscripts of great importance. Among the manuscripts were pages thought to be missing leaves from Codex Sinaiticus! In August 1977 Savas Agourides, professor at the Theological School of Panespistemion Athenon, visited the monastery and was given access to these newly discovered
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leaves. He later reported to James H. Charlesworth, now of Princeton Theological Seminary, about his experience. He was almost overcome with excitement. He told Charlesworth: “I was trembling, and time was too short for reading it. To my surprise I think that I was holding four pages of Genesis from Codex Sinaiticus. Father Sophronios was very generous; for more than five minutes he allowed me to hold and read lines from in.”11
Charlesworth wrote a report in an American scholarly journal.12 Apparently incensed at Charlesworth’s unauthorized public disclosure, the monastery turned inward and no further word would come from Mt. Sinai. Charlesworth visited the monastery in 1979 in attempt to heal the breach. The archbishop would not even see him. In a report on this trip, Charlesworth asked, “Have the monks hid them again?”13
In a 1980 article Charlesworth laments that “apparently the Archbishop of the monastery conceals them.”14
However, with a new project initiated in 2005, all that is about to change (see box on p. 48).
Originally, the Codex Sinaiticus contained approximately 730 folios, of which a little more than 400 have been recovered. Of these 347 leaves (or, to be precise 346.5 leaves; half of the last one is missing) are in the British Library, 43 are in the University Library of Leipzig, fragments of 5 leaves are in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, and 11 leaves and 14 fragments are in St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai.
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There is no question that the entire Codex Sinaiticus came from St. Catherine’s, although scholars are also clear that conditions were not such in the mid-fourth century that it could have been produced there. In the words of Philip Mayerson, a leading scholar on this issue: “Life itself for the Sinai solitaries was a struggle to provide the means for keeping body and soul together and to survive the periodic attacks of marauding bedouins.”15
The Codex Sinaiticus, like so many of St Catherine’s fabulous icons, was produced elsewhere sometime in the Byzantine period and was later brought to the monastery. When and from where, we cannot know for sure. Mayerson suggests that the most likely origin was Caesarea Maritima, which reached its apogee in the Byzantine period. Some have speculated that the Codex Sinaiticus may even be one of the 50 Bibles the emperor Constantine commissioned Eusebius, the church historian and bishop of Caesarea, to prepare after making Christianity a legal religion in the Roman Empire.
I recently asked the monastery’s librarian, Father Justin Sinaites, if the monastery still wanted the Codex Sinaiticus back. “Idealistically speaking, of course, because it’s one of the great treasures. However, we’ve agreed to set aside our differences in order to pursue this collaboration.”
He was referring to an unusual project initiated in June 2005 by the four venues with leaves from the Codex Sinaiticus to digitize and conserve the manuscript, as well as to make it more accessible to scholars and the public.
At first, the archbishop of the monastery, Archbishop Damianos, did not want anything to do with the project, in the words of Father Justin. “But then people who knew about the project and knew the archbishop presented the case that this is an extremely important project and in spite of
A Grand Cooperative Project
An investigation into the modern history of the Codex Sinaiticus is just one element in a much larger Codex Sinaiticus Project, the budget of which is nearly two million dollars.
Of course the codex will be conserved with the latest conservation methods to preserve it for future generations. High-quality digitized photographs will be accessible on the Internet. A replica or facsimile edition will be published.
The Web site for the project will include, in addition to the text of the codex itself, a variety of interpretive entries in several languages written specifically for the Web site. The text of Sinaiticus will also be transcribed so that it will be easily read by anyone who can read Greek. The text of the Web site is planned to be available in several different languages.
A television documentary and a popular book are in the planning stages.
Finally, an exhibit will also be organized to showcase the results. A scholarly conference will be held to allow the scholars participating in the project to share their experience with other scholars and to obtain feedback from them. This will be followed by a book of scholarly essays based on the conference. And all this will be accomplished by the end of 2009.
A SMALL TEAR HAS FORMED along a crease in one of the leaves of the codex. This is just one small example of the damage that is being repaired as part of the conservation phase of the Codex Sinaiticus Project.
BSpade 21:2 (Spring 2008) p. 49
BORN IN TEXAS as the son of Baptist missionaries, Father Justin Sinaites is now a Greek Orthodox monk living in the monastery at Mt. Sinai, where he serves as the monastery’s librarian (see pp. 46). In a recent interview with BAR, Father Justin explained that the monks of St. Catherine’s would like to have all the pieces of Codex Sinaiticus back.
GOODWILL AMBASSADORS. The four institutions who own parts of the Codex Sinaiticus have agreekd to come together to conserve it and to study it and its modern, as well as ancient, history. Representatives of the partnering institutions are (from left): Dr. Ekkehard Henschke of the University Library, Leipzig (Germany), Lynne Brindley of the British Library, His Eminence Archbishop Damianos of St. Catherine’s Monastery and Dr. Alexander Bukreyev of the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg.
our differences, it was worth considering”
The archbishop then agreed to meet in Athens with representatives of the British Library. Then the archbishop insisted that the project must include a study of the most recent history of the codex (since Tischendorf), how it was taken from the monastery and what happened in it since. And this was agreed.
Scot McKendrick, who is the point man at the British Library for the project, attended the Athens meeting and described it to me as “a very honest and constructive meeting” that resulted in an agreement in principle: “We would face up to the facts of the modern history. The significance of the codex, however, is sufficient to make parties who have had disagreements in the past work together. We’ve all gone into this face up to what the facts of the case are.”
Father Justin explained how this investigation of the recent history will proceed:
Each institution is responsible for collecting the archives on the recent history. Then the agreement is that the scholars approved by the four institutions will investigate all of this and then draft a recent history that would itself be approved by all four participating institutions. I think that it’s going to be enormously difficult. We might even find that it’s impossible. But that’s the goal that we’ve set ourselves. It should go far toward solving the antagonism that has existed in the past.
Will the Codex Sinaiticus find rest at last?
BSpade 21:2 (Spring 2008) p. 50
(Reprinted from Biblical Archaeology Review 33.6 [2007]: 32-43, 80; http://www.bib-arch.org.)