World's oldest bible reconstructed online

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 6 Jul 2009 at 15:37

The surviving parts of the world's oldest Bible have been reformed online and made free for anybody to view.

The Codex Sinaiticus was hand-written by four scribes in Greek on animal hide, known as vellum, in the mid-fourth century around the time of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great who embraced Christianity.

Not all of it has withstood the ravages of time with half of the Old Testament missing. However, the pages that have survived include the whole of the New Testament and the earliest surviving copy of the Gospels written at different times after Christ's death by the four Evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

"The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's greatest written treasures," says Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library. "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 texts include numerous revisions, additions and corrections made during its evolution down through the ages.

"The Codex ...is arguably the oldest large bound book to have survived," adds McKendrick, pointing out that each page is 16in tall by 14in wide.

"Critically, it marks the definite triumph of bound codices over (papyrus) scrolls - a key watershed in how the Christian Bible was regarded as a sacred text," he says.

Four-year project

The ancient parchments are held by the British Library in London, the Monastery of St. Catherine in Egypt, the National Library of Russia and Leipzig University Library in Germany.

Each institution owns different amounts of the manuscript, but the British Library, which digitised the delicate pages of the entire book in London, holds by far the most.

The four-year joint project, which began in 2005 with the aim of "virtually reunifying" and preserving the Bible, as well as undertaking new research into its history, has shed new light on who made it and how it was produced.

Importantly, experts at the British Library say, the project has uncovered evidence that a fourth scribe - along with the three already recognised - worked on the texts.

The assembly and transcription of the book includes previously unpublished pages of the Codex found in a blocked-off room at St. Catherine's Monastery, at the foot of Mount Moses, Sinai, in 1975, some of which are in a poor condition and have been difficult to study.