This codex is probably the most famous of all biblical manuscripts—containing the entire Old and New Testament, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas; dating from the 4th Cent., it is the oldest surviving complete New Testamant. It is so-named because, for many centuries, it was preserved and later recovered from the Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai, Egypt. A. Grafton and M. Williams (Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius and the Library of Caesarea) thinks that it, together with the Codex Vaticanus, is one of two surviving copies of the fifty deluxe copies of the Bible, commissioned from Eusebius's scriptorium in Caesarea, that Emperor Constantine gave as a gift to the church.
St Catherine, Sinai. Photo©F. Jenkins.
This copy of the Bible has had a rather unhappy history. Its significance was first appreciated by the Russian textual scholar Constantine Tischendorf while he was staying at the St Catherine monastry. He asked to "borrowed" a small part of it in 1844, and then a more substantial portion during his third visit in 1859. They were never returned to the monastry. In 1933 with the country facing famine and bankruptcy, Joseph Stalin sold a major part of it to the British for a hundred thousand pounds (equivalent to about half a million USD in today's currency). Tischendorf never repented of his 'theft,' defending his act on the grounds that the manuscript was about to be burned by the monastery, a 'slander' the monastery has always protested. Today this copy of the Bible is housed in four different locations, the British Library in London (previously on display on the first floor of the British Museum; 347 leaves of the more than 730 estimated total), the University Library in Leipzig (43 leaves), the State Library at St. Petersburg (fragments of 3 leaves) and St Catherine in Sinai (more than a dozen leaves).
The Codex Sinaiticus.
Photo©.
Resources:
Sevcenko Ihor, 'New Documents on Constantine Tischendorf and the Codex Sinaiticus,' Revue de etudes slaves, 45 (1966), 185-453.
Bibliography:
Scot McKendrick, David Parker, Amy Myshrall, Cilian O'Hogan, eds., Codex Sinaiticus: New Perspectives on the Ancient Biblical Manuscript. Hendrickson, 2015.
D. C. Parker, Codex Sinaiticus: The Story of the World's Oldest Bible. Hendrickson, 2010.
Useful Websites:
☰ View the Codex Sinaiticus
☰ About Sinai Monastery
©ALBERITH
170418lch