Codex Sinaiticus: the virtual edition
In fragments for centuries, one of the oldest books in the world is now available to flick through in one place – online
Even if it was not the oldest Bible text in book form, the online publication today of the Codex Sinaiticus would be an extraordinary achievement.
The book itself is well worth the extravagant description of Dr Scot McKendrick, head of western manuscripts at the British Library: that it is one of the world’s greatest written treasures. There are older Biblical texts and fragments, but the codex, originally bound together rather than compiled as scrolls, may be the oldest surviving book in the world, dating back to the very earliest years of that particular new technology.
But now so sophisticated is modern technology that scholars will not only be able to read the document on their screens using a standard light setting, but also separately by a raking illumination that highlights the texture and features of the very parchment on which the 800 surviving pages of text were written.
The original book is thought to have been 1,460 pages long but much of the early part of the Old Testament, Genesis for example, is missing. It is possible other bits may yet be found – 40 pages turned up at the Monastery of St Catherine on the Sinai peninsula, where the codex may have been written, as recently as 1975.
The experts will be able to decipher the distinct handwriting of the three original scribes and, perhaps even more excitingly, trace the extensive corrections made to the text – letters, words, whole sentences – over the 600 years after it was first compiled in the mid-fourth century. And, for the first time, they will be able to do so for free, without leaving their desks, let alone shuffling between London, Leningrad, Leipzig and Sinai where the four parts of the original still remain.