Sinaiticus Online
It is hard to name the most significant discovery in ancient literature: the hoard of Greek manuscripts at Oxyrhincus must rate high in anyone's list, as must the Gnostic library of Nag Hamadi; in the field of Biblical studies the Dead Sea Scrolls should probably come first, but a very close second would be Tischendorf's discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus in St Katherine's monastery, the oldest Greek Bible in the world.
Possibly the most studied Greek text of all, the Codex Sinaiticus has been a source of controversy ever since Tischendorf emerged from the Sinai desert with it in his saddlebags. The monks, as soon as they realised the value of what they had given away, began to protest that they hadn't given it away after all and had always highly valued it and only loaned it to their visitor out of courtesy. Tischendorf, of course, claimed that they were on the point of throwing it out as useless rubbish - a tale I am inclined to believe - and that he rescued it from being used as kindling in the kitchen stoves.
However that dispute paled into insignificance once the manuscript became available to scholars, because it differed in certain important ways from the majority of Greek manuscripts, known collectively as the Textus Receptus - the Received Text. Perhaps the most significant difference was the ommission of a verse in the first letter of St John which, in the Textus Receptus, was a plain statement of the doctrine of the Trinity. The Codex Sinaiticus does not have the verse at all - neither do other early manuscripts - and most scholars now agree that it was inserted into the Bible at a late date.
In addition the Codex included two books that were popular in early Christianity but which, in the end, were rejected from the canon of Scripture. The "Shepherd of Hermas" and the "Epistle of Barnabas" were very influential in the early church but gradually fell out of favour, probably because doubts were raised about their authorship.
Some people were very upset at the thought that their favourite verses were either not in the Codex at all or had wording significantly different from what they were used to and there was a strong movement which claimed that Sinaiticus was not to be trusted - it came from a monastery and had been written by monks, both anathema to Protestant literalists. Of course, what they fail to realise is that the Textus Receptus, too, was preserved in monasteries and copied repeatedly by monks!
Although it would be foolish to put absolute reliance on any one manuscript, as the oldest, Sinaiticus holds a special place in the history of the Biblical text. There is no reason to ignore it in the attempt to arrive at what the Bible authors originally wrote.
When Tischendorf obtained the Codex he presented it to the Russian government, though some parts of it were given to various universities which had sponsored Tischendorf in his work. Although the Russians eventually sold their part of the Codex to the British Museum - a million pounds sterling of foreign exchange was invaluable to the struggling communist government - the other holders are, understandably, reluctant to reliquinsh what they have. The result is that anyone who wants to study the Codex Sinaiticus has to travel from place to place in order to see the whole thing.
In addition he has to negotiate access from each holder in turn and not only are there such things as university holidays and competing scholars who also want to read the Codex in the second week in September, but even when everything works out you might still turn up at the university library only to be told that the librarian is ill or has forgotten about your visit or - even more galling to the eager scholar - a more important scholar has turned up and wants to read it at the time you had reserved.
After years of negotiation, these various bodies have been brought together in a project to put the whole of the Codex on the Internet, with no restrictions, no copyright problems, free for anyone to access, to study or just to quench their curiosity. Obviously it is not - and never can be - the same as sitting at a desk with the venerable manuscript open in front of you, to see, feel, smell and even examine with a microscope if that is what you want. Few, however, will feel that that is a disadvantage and most will regard the free and easy access as an advantage that far outweighs the disadvantage.
So far about 800 of the 1,460 pages in the Codex Sinaiticus are available on-line
We entirely commend these various institutions for their generosity in making this manuscript available world-wide in this way. We look forward to the day when all the world's treasures, literary and other, are available on the Internet for serious study or just for idle browsing. Museums and libraries are not the holders of copyright to be jealously guarded, they are the stewards of the world's heritage in which we all have a vested interest.
I am less pleased with the website, for although it claims to offer the facility to zoom into the manuscript, that doesn't appear to work, and neither does the facility to view the document by oblique lighting. If these facilities are only available on certain pages, then there should be a notice warning the user of this, or preferably the buttons should be greyed out when the function is unavailable. I trust these are just teething problems that will be debugged rapidly as the site becomes better known.
"Shepherd of Hermas" For those who believe that God guarded the Bible from error, the fact that "Hermas" was excluded is a great relief. Although the first part of the book is fairly innocuous doctrine, the second part sets out a geography of the world which describes it as a flat surface surrounded by bronze walls, each one guarded by an angel responsible for one of the four winds. Christians can be very grateful that this nonsense did not end up as inerrant Scripture! Return
© Kendall K. Down 2009
