SSCN Voumes 1-10, 1994-2004

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

Early Codices of the Bible - 2. Codex Sinaiticus (by Hany N. Takla)

What he found was beyond his wildest dreams. There was a large portion of the Old Testament, the entire New Testament, and the Epistle of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas. The last two had no copies of original Greek in existence. As a true Biblical scholar he could not sleep with the find of the century in such close proximity. So he spent the night in transcribing the Epistle of Barnabas. He left in the morning without convincing the monk to let him have the manuscript. However, upon arriving at Cairo, he stopped at another Greek Orthodox monastery. There, he was able to convince the Monks of St. Catherine's to send him the manuscript to transcribe. He later convinced the monks to give it the Russian Czar as a present, Tischendorf's patron. A decade later, in 1869, the Czar rewarded the two monasteries with monetary gifts and decorations. Meanwhile, Tischendorf published an account of it in 1860, and under the auspices of his patron, the Czar, he published a facsimile edition of it 1862. This 4-volume edition includes 21 lithographic plates made from photographs of the original manuscript. In 1863, he published a critical edition of the New Testament. Finally, in 1867, he published additional fragments of Genesis and Numbers, which had been used to bind other volumes at St. Catherine's and had been discovered by the Archimandrite Porfirius. On four different occasions, then, portions of the original manuscript have been discovered; but they have never been published together in a single edition! In the early 1930's Stalin's government sold this pride of St. Petersburg to England, where it currently resides in the British Museum alongside Codex Alexandrinus. The price was a mere 100,000 British Pounds, half of which was paid by the Crown and the other half by the Protestant churches in America.

Introduction: Among the vast manuscript treasures found in St. Catherine Monastery in Mt. Sinai, is a large vellum Codex of multiple columns. It contained large portions of the Old Testament and the Entire New Testament as well as some of the writings of the Apostolic fathers. The world owes the great Biblical Scholar, Constantine Tischendorf, its discovery. However, the mention of his name to the monks of the monastery would guarantee a short, unpleasant visit. Among the manuscripts of the Bible, it is commonly designated by the Hebrew character Aleph , though Swete and a few other scholars use the letter S Discovery: In 1844, Prof. Tischendorf made a visit to the monastery. Then, he was under the patronage of Frederick Augustus, King of Saxony. There he found a rubbish basket, containing 43 leaves of the Septuagint, including portions of I Par. (Chron.), Jer., Neh., and Esther. The monks at the time permitted him to take them with him. However, they were not agreeable to him taking other more substantial pieces of Isaiah and I and IV Macabees, which he identified. Upon leaving back to Europe he alerted the monks to the value of such a manuscript. The portions that he brought with him, found a home in Leipzig, Germany, nder the name of Codex Friderico-Augustanus, after his patron. He also published them two years later. On his second visit to the monastery in 1853, he could find only two short fragments of Genesis (which he published on his return) and could learn nothing of the rest of the codex. It may have been that the monks were not about to have him take the rest. On his third visit in 1859, being under the patronage of the Russian Czar, Alexander II. The visit seemed to have the fate of his second one, until the last night of his stay. In a conversation with the steward of the church, he learned of the presence of an important manuscript. This turned up to be the rest of the codex (what was left).

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

-6-