By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
The world’s oldest surviving Bible, parts of which have been kept in four different countries for more than a century, has been reunited and published in full online.
Known as the Codex Sinaiticus, it was written by a number of hands in Greek on parchment leaves around the time of Constantine the Great in the fourth century. Orginally more than 1,460 pages long, portions of the Bible were held by the British Library, Leipzig University Library in Germany, the Monastery of St Catherine in Mount Sinai, Egypt, and the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg. Along with the Codex Vaticanus, it is believed to be the oldest existing Bible in the world.
This reunited Bible offers different versions of Scripture than later editions of the Bible, such as in St Mark’s Gospel which did not originally contain the last 12 verses about the resurrected Christ. The hope is that by bringing the pages together online, scholars will be able to research the Greek text in depth, which is fully transcribed and cross-referenced.
“The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world’s greatest written treasures,” said Dr Scot McKendrick, Head of Western Manuscripts at the British Library, to the London Telegraph.
“This 1,600-year old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation. The project has uncovered evidence that a fourth scribe – along with the three already recognised – worked on the text; the availability of the virtual manuscript for study by scholars around the world creates opportunities for collaborative research that would not have been possible just a few years ago.”
Professor David Parker from the University of Birmingham’s Department of Theology, who directed the team which made the electronic transcription of the manuscript said the four-year process was a “huge challenge.”
“The transcription includes pages of the Codex which were found in a blocked-off room at the Monastery of St Catherine in 1975, some of which were in poor condition,” he said.
“This is the first time that they have been published. The digital images of the virtual manuscript show the beauty of the original and readers are even able to see the difference in handwriting between the different scribes who copied the text. We have even devised a unique alignment system which allows users to link the images with the transcription. This project has made a wonderful book accessible to a global audience.”
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