Codex Sinaiticus Online
July 6th, 2009 by Andrew Bernhard under Miscellaneous. No Comments.
As has been widely reported (BBC, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC), the surviving portions of Codex Sinaiticus have now been reunited online. This famous ancient manuscript is described well at its official website, codexsinaiticus.org:
Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript – the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity – is of supreme importance for the history of the book.
The different parts of Codex Sinaiticus are currently housed in four locations:
- The British Library, UK
- Leipzig University Library, Germany
- St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai
- The National Library of Russia, St Petersburg
Thanks to considerable international collaboration, digitial images of all the surviving pages have been brought together on a single website. It is great to see the culmination of such a major project and the significant media attention it has garnered (see Brandon Wason’s blog post regarding this matter).
The contents of Codex Sinaiticus themselves are noteworthy, as they testify to the slow process by which the ultimate boundaries and arrangement of the Christian canon of scripture were defined. The fourth-century manuscript presumably contained both the complete Old Testament and New Testament in Greek, even though most of the opening of the Old Testament (from Genesis to 1 Chronicles) has been lost. Yet, neither Testament is presented precisely as it would be in most modern Bibles. The Old Testament contains texts that are now commonly classified as Apocrypha (2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 & 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach), and the New Testament is arranged differently (Hebrews is placed after 2 Thessalonians, and Acts appears between the Pastoral and Catholic Epistles) with two additional ancient writings included (The Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas).
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Notes: The version of the Greek Old Testament/Hebrew Bible included in Codex Sinaiticus is called the Septuagint. While The Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas were ultimately excluded from the New Testament, quality critical editions of both ancient texts are available in modern collections of the “Apostolic Fathers.”
