Codex Sinaiticus – World's Oldest Bible – Goes Online

by stevesmys | July 6, 2009 at 11:12 am

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The Codex Sinaitcus, the world's oldest bible, is now available online.

An online project by the British Library has reassembled the surviving pages of the text with translations in English, German, Greek and Russian.

The original texts are held in separate parts in London, Leningrad, Leipzig and Sinai. They include a completed New Testament but only half of the Old Testament remains. Missing pieces include Genesis through 1 Chronicles.

The texts also include books that no longer appear in standard versions of what is now considered the Bible as well a slightly differing running order of the ones that do.

Codex Sinaiticus, which loosely translated means "the book from Sinai," was discovered at the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai in Egypt by German Bible scholar Constantine Tischendorf in the mid-19th century.

Maybe for lay people the ancient koine Greek script will not mean much, apart from for its beauty its survival over 1,600 years – but the book does contain interesting pointers to the early development of the Bible. Although its existence has been known for more than a century – the scholar Constantine Tischendorf brought bits of it back from the monastery in the mid-19th century – it has much to teach about what was important to the men who originally copied it out and the changing priorities of the new Christian faith.

New technology also highlights the textures of the original parchment that the original 800 pages of text were written on.

The site was especially slow the first day it was made available and the library has reported that users have had to make multiple attempts to gain access.