Codex Sinaiticus: the earliest complete New Testament

At St Catherine's Monastery, in the heart of Sinai, a manuscript was kept for centuries that its present custodians describe as "the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity." This is Codex Sinaiticus: a Greek Bible from the middle of the fourth century, containing the earliest complete copy of the New Testament.

What it contains

The text is entirely Greek: the Old Testament following the Septuagint version "adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians," and the New Testament in the koine vernacular in which it was originally written.

More telling is that it includes two books not found in the Bible today:

• the Epistle of Barnabas
• the Shepherd of Hermas

That alone dates it. It was written before the canon had finally settled, and so it is a witness to a moment when the boundary of "the Bible" was wider than it later became.

How it was made

It is written on parchment, in four columns to a page — a rare format. The project notes that "there are very few surviving manuscripts written with four columns to a page."

More than one scribe copied it. Tischendorf, in the nineteenth century, counted four; later scholarship settled on three, with a possible fourth. Each is identified by two things: a distinctive hand, and "a distinctive way of spelling many sounds, particularly vowels which scribes often wrote phonetically." Their spelling habits are what tell them apart.

Why it matters

The manuscript carries two quite different kinds of value.

The first is textual. Its text is "heavily annotated by a series of early correctors," and those corrections — not the original text alone — are what make it "of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible." It is not a fixed text but a record of hands at work on one.

The second is physical. It is the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity, and therefore "of supreme importance for the history of the book" as an object, quite apart from what it says.

A date that stays open

It is dated to the fourth century, "sometimes more precisely to the middle of that century," and that dating rests on palaeography alone — the study of the handwriting. The project proposes no place of production, names no individual scholars, and offers no narrower year. Its only comparison is Codex Vaticanus, the sole other nearly complete Bible of comparable age.

How it was scattered

The manuscript is today divided between four institutions:

The story turns on three visits by the German scholar Constantine Tischendorf.

1844. He was shown 129 Old Testament leaves and obtained 43 of them. The only source for this is his own account — "no other record has been found." He published them in 1846, attributing them merely to "a monastery in the Orient."

1853. He acquired a fragment reportedly found "serving as a bookmarker."

1859. Under the patronage of Tsar Alexander II. On 4 February he saw the 347 leaves, later calling them "the most precious biblical treasure in existence." On 16/28 September he signed a receipt for their loan, promising to return them intact on request. Ownership was expressly recognised as remaining with the Monastery unless a donation were realised. The acts of donation were not signed until 1869 — the same decade as a disputed archiepiscopal succession, and the project records that Russian diplomatic involvement in both matters "has been variously interpreted."

1933. Britain learned that Stalin's government meant to sell the Codex to raise foreign capital for the second Five Year Plan. The British Museum paid £100,000, and it reached London on 26 December 1933. On 29 January 1934 the Archbishop of Sinai telegraphed a claim to be "sole rightful owner"; the Museum directed him to the Soviet Government.

1975. On 26 May, while a chamber beneath St George's Chapel at the Monastery was being cleared, Father Sophronios found a cache of manuscript fragments containing further Codex leaves. Most of what the Monastery holds today comes from this find.

The most striking thing about it

The account of that history is not one party's version. It is a synopsis jointly agreed by all four holding institutions, produced under a Partnership Agreement of 9 March 2005. In it the institutions state plainly that events "from 1844 to this very day, are not fully known," and offer the text as a framework and "a basis for dialogue."

Four parties with competing claims to the same object agreed on a shared narrative that concedes the limits of what it knows. That is worth noticing as a way of handling contested history.

Why it belongs here

This manuscript is not incidental to the subject of this site. It was preserved at St Catherine's, a Greek Orthodox monastery in continuous use since the sixth century, whose library is among the richest collections of manuscripts anywhere. The language it is written in is Greek, one of the liturgical languages still present in the region. And what remains of it at the Monastery remains there because life at the Monastery never stopped.