Codex Sinaiticus: The World's Oldest Bible Goes Online
The Codex Sinaiticus is the oldest version of the Christian Bible in book form, and, according to many scholars, one of the world's greatest written treasures. The actual leaves and fragments from the book are in the British Library in England, as well as in various archives in Germany and Russia, and the St. Catherine's Monastery of Sinai, where the text was originally discovered. Starting today, however, anybody with access to an Internet connection and a modern browser can now see a virtual facsimile of the book online.
While large parts of the text are still missing (including most of the text of Genesis), this marks the first time that such a complete version of the Codex has been available to both scholars and the public.
The site is currently quite slow, thanks to some heavy demand right after launch, but we got a chance to test the site while it was still running smoothly. One nice aspect of the project's web site is that it was built with open standard and modern web development techniques in mind.
As these projects typically take years to come to fruition and have to conform to pretty stringent accessibility and long-term storage standards, their web sites often also look like they were developed five years ago. Here, however, the Codex Sinaiticus team did a good job at making the text accessible to the general public (with translations into German, Russian, and Greek), as well as students and scholars who need access to more detailed information and images taken under different lighting conditions.
As is also typical for these projects, however, there is no way for the public or other scholars to directly participate by fixing potential errors in the transcription or translation, for example.
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The project website also has more information about how the book was digitized, and the philosophy behind the development of the site.
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Fascinating. And I love the idea of the Russian, Greek and Latin translations. But is it just me, or is the idea of a Wiki-Codex too tempting of a site for hackers and smart-alecks as well as serious scholars? (Insert quips of re Dan Brown wannabes here). Still, interesting post. Thanks.
It's interesting how Genesis is missing...
wonder if it just hasn't been included yet, if those pages are missing, or if there's a conflict with the current church dogma on creation.
I can see the consiracy theorists just eating this up!
I dunno, if it can't be said in 140 characters - I'm skeptical! :) jk
Yup, that's the first place I wanted to go, was Genesis 1.1...
Also, the site is agonizingly slow, as you said. Reckon I'll wait.
re:Genesis - what's missing are the actual, physical pages of Genesis. They just haven't been found yet. Though, of course, if you are a conspiracy theorist, you know why they were burnt right after their discovery...
That would be a thing: I Twitter Bible, wherein every verse was 140 or under.
It's interesting that this particular manuscript was discovered in a trash bin at the Mt. Sinai monastery and that it should be the manuscript highlighted. As others have noted:
Dr. F.H.A. Scrivener, who published A Full Collation of the Codex Sinaiticus in 1864 testified: "The Codex is covered with alterations of an obviously correctional character—brought in by at least ten different revisers, some of them systematically spread over every page, others occasional, or limited to separate portions of the manuscript, many of these being contemporaneous with the first writer, but for the greater part belonging to the sixth or seventh century."
A great amount of carelessness is exhibited in the copying and correction. "Codex Sinaiticus 'abounds with errors of the eye and pen to an extent not indeed unparalleled, but happily rather unusual in documents of first-rate importance.' On many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40 words are dropped through very carelessness. Letters and words, even whole sentences, are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately cancelled; while that gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same words as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament" (John Burgon, The Revision Revised). It is clear that the scribes who copied the Codex Sinaiticus were not faithful men of God who treated the Scriptures with utmost reverence. The total number of words omitted in the Sinaiticus in the Gospels alone is 3,455 compared with the Greek Received Text (Burgon, p. 75).
It's important to note the vast differences between this and many modern revised bibles that the general public keeps at home. We should open our eyes and realize that what we read has truly been modified. We do not possess the original bible. We simply have copies that have been grossly modified and tampered with by men.
"One nice aspect of the project's web site is that it was built with open standard and modern web development techniques in mind."
What are some of these standards and techniques?
According to CNN this Bible includes the gospel of Baranabas, which of course makes no mention of the resurrection. Additionally, there are whole sentences inserted up to 800 years later, as well as deletions.
www.thedeenshow.com
Please hire a writer who can get his facts straight. This is not a "Christian Bible" - centuries from it! Christianity was not even a thought in this time period - and still not for many of US. Let Moses have his moment in time and let the scholars do their work without these cult biases.
u may not know our @fredericl is an academic studying ancient religious history. he got to post on related topic on RWW! http://bit.ly/QtYxk [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2499203429]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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July 16, 2009 10:03 AM