Description
Referred to by the Insight book under Manuscripts of the Bible, the Codex Sinaiticus is one of the earliest copies of the Greek Scriptures found and still in existence today. Forty-three leaves of this codex are kept in Leipzig, and portions of three leaves are at Leningrad, 347 leaves are preserved at the British Museum in London. It has been reported that 8 to 14 more leaves were discovered in the same monastery in 1975.
This book tells the story of the Codex and its value.
D. C. Parker’s Codex Sinaiticus: The Story of the World’s Oldest Bible draws on both Parker’s expertise as a textual scholar, historian, and storyteller to tell the story of how the Codex Sinaticus journeyed from the 4th century (350AD) to the modern world and became the first fully digitized document of its kind.
Readers, as they follow the story of Codex Sinaiticus will be introduced to the key personalities, places, and events that shaped the Codex’s history including its emergence in 1844 at St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mt. Sinai (a discovery rich with legend, intrigue, and adventure) Readers will also be introduced to the contents of the Codex as Parker catalogues how much of each biblical book it contains, its marginal notes, significant textual variations, and explains how so many pieces came to be housed in four different locations.
Parker also documents the transformation of the Codex into digital format by way of photography and provides several of the digital pictures in Full-color for the reader to examine as Parker explains them.
Despite its rather unorthodox journey, Codex Sinaiticus is a treasure beyond price. Produced in the middle of the fourth century, its bound parchment pages originally held the full canon of the Christian Bible and more–the handwritten Greek text of the earliest surviving copy of the complete koine New Testament; the earliest and best copies of some Septuagint texts, the Old Testament Scriptures as they were adopted by the first-century congregation.
