In 1844, in the Sinai Monastery, the German scientist Konstantin von Tischendorf discovered a copy of the Bible in Greek, which was later called the "Codex of Sinai".
The Codex Sinaiticus of the Bible (Latin Codex Sinaiticus) is the oldest uncial parchment manuscript of the Bible. The manuscript is in Greek, with an incomplete Old Testament text and a complete New Testament text (except for a few gaps).
Along with other ancient manuscripts, the Codex of Sinai is used by textologists for constructive or summary criticism in order to restore the original Greek text of the Bible.
The codex was written in the 4th century and until the middle of the 19th century was located on the Sinai Peninsula in the library of St. Catherine's monastery. Part of the manuscript of the Old Testament has been lost, but the New Testament text has survived in its entirety. The Codex Sinai is the only Greek uncial manuscript with the complete New Testament. In addition to the biblical texts, the manuscript contains two works by early Christian authors of the 2nd century: "The Epistle of Barnabas" and partly "The Shepherd" of Herma. In scientific literature, the Codex Sinai is designated by the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet א (Aleph) or number 01. Some parts of the old manuscript are preserved in good condition, some in very poor condition. This suggests that the codex was divided and kept in several places of the monastery.
The Greek text of the manuscript reflects the Alexandrian type of text, but also contains a certain layer of discrepancies from the western text of John. 1: 1-8: 39). The manuscript was assigned to the I category of Aland.
Paleographically, the manuscript, according to the unanimous opinion of researchers, dates back to the 4th century. It could not have been written earlier than 325 because it contains a breakdown of Ammonius and the Canons of Eusebius. However, it could not be written later than 360, since it contains references to the Church Fathers in the margins.
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Until the middle of the 19th century, the Sinai Codex was on the Sinai Peninsula in the library of the St. Catherine Monastery. The manuscript was probably seen in 1761 by an Italian traveler, Vitaliano Donati, when he visited the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Sinai. In his diary, which was published in 1879, he wrote:
In this monastery I found several parchment manuscripts … Among them there are some that may be older than the seventh century, especially the Bible, written on thin beautiful parchment in large, square and round letters; also contained in the Greek church Aprakos, written in gold letters, must be very old.
The Sinai Codex was discovered by the German scientist Konstantin von Tischendorf in 1844 by accident. While in one of the libraries of St. Catherine's Monastery, Tischendorf noticed sheets of an ancient manuscript prepared for destruction. As it turned out later, these were 43 sheets of some books of the Old Testament (1 Chronicles, Book of Jeremiah, Book of Nehemiah, Book of Esther). Examining the library, the German scientist discovered 86 more sheets of the same manuscript, which he took to Europe with the permission of the monks of the monastery and published it under the name "Frederico-Augustine Code", dedicating it to his patron, the King of Saxony.
In 1845, Archimandrite Porfiry (Uspensky) saw the codex along with the sheets, which Tischendorf did not find:
The first manuscript containing the Old Testament is incomplete and the entire New Testament with the letter of St. Barnabas and the Book of Herma, written on the finest white parchment. (…) The letters in it are completely similar to the Church Slavonic ones. Their setting is direct and continuous. There are no aspirations or accents above the words, and the words are not separated by any spelling signs other than dots. The entire sacred text is written in four and two columns in a verse-dimensional manner and so together, as if one long utterance stretches from point to point.
In 1846, Captain K. MacDonald, who visited Mount Sinai, saw the codex and bought two manuscripts from the monastery (495 and 496). In 1853 Tischendorf visited the monastery a second time in the hope of acquiring the rest of the codex. However, without success, the monks did not even show him the manuscript. In 1859, Tischendorf, under the patronage of the Russian Tsar Alexander II, returned to Sinai. The day before his departure, the monastery steward brought him a manuscript wrapped in red cloth. Tischendorf found that the document contains not only a significant portion of the Old Testament, but also the complete New Testament in excellent condition. Tischendorf tried to charge the manuscript, but to no avail. Two months later, Tischendorf, his bookseller and pharmacist copied 110,000 lines of the manuscript. After lengthy negotiations, the manuscript was transferred to the Russian tsar. In 1862, a facsimile edition of the text of the manuscript appeared in four volumes.
In the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation in 2010, an agreement was found, signed in 1869 by the archbishop of the monastery of St. Catherine on Sinai and a representative of the Russian Empire. In the document, Archbishop Callistratus III of Sinai, on behalf of the entire monastery, confirmed that the manuscripts of the Old and New Testaments from the monastery library were transferred to the Russian emperor. The deed of gift was given to Count Ignatiev, with whom Archbishop Callistratus met in Cairo. For the Code, the monastery was paid nine thousand rubles. Having received the code, Tischendorf brought it to St. Petersburg, where its facsimile edition was carried out. The Emperor donated the priceless gift to the Public Library, where it was preserved until 1933.
At the same time, Constantine Simonides (1820-1867), paleographer, forger and seller of ancient manuscripts, announced in The Guardian (September 13, 1862) that the codex discovered by Tischendorf did not belong to the 4th century, but to 1839 and was written by Simonides himself at the age of 19; he called this work "a bad job of his youth." Simonides claimed that one Moscow edition of the Bible, which he compared with the Athonite manuscripts, served as the basis for him. Tischendorf replied in the German newspaper "Allgemeine Zeitung" on December 22, 1862, that in the New Testament alone, in many places, the Sinai Codex differs significantly from all Moscow editions and from all other manuscripts. Henry Bradshaw, in The Guardian (January 26, 1863), posed the question of how the manuscript could have been brought from the monastery at Athos to Sinai. He also recalledthat the manuscript contains the Epistle of Barnabas, which until now was not in the Greek manuscript.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Vladimir Beneshevich (1874-1938) discovered parts of three manuscript sheets as part of other manuscript books in the library of the Sinai Monastery. These fragments were acquired by the Russian Empire and brought to St. Petersburg.
In 1933, the Soviet government, considering the Christian relic a burden for an atheist state, sold the entire codex to the British Museum for £ 100,000. The sale was carried out on the personal order of I. V. Stalin. The British raised money for the purchase in 1 day. In St. Petersburg, only fragments of three sheets of the codex, acquired by Beneshevich, remained. At present, the codex is broken, its fragments are in Leipzig (43 leaves, acquired by Tischendorf in 1844) and London (the remaining 347 leaves, brought by Tischendorf in 1859 to Russia). In addition to the fact that at one time Emperor Alexander II sent 9,000 rubles to Sinai as a token of gratitude, modern monks raised the question of the legality of the alienation of the monument by Tischendorf. In their opinion, the German scientist, being a representative of the "pirate archeology" of the 19th century,misled the abbot of the monastery. In support of their correctness, they refer to a preserved receipt, in which the scientist promises to return the parchments to the monastery immediately after the completion of their scientific publication.
Skate and Milne of the British Museum, using an ultraviolet lamp, very carefully examined the corrections of the proofreaders on the parts of the manuscript in the British Library since 1973. As a result of their work, the article Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus was written.
In May 1975, a room with a collection of handwritten books was discovered during renovations at the St. Catherine Monastery. Among them were found 14 fragments of the Sinai Codex, as well as 12 complete sheets: 11 sheets of the Pentateuch and 1 sheet of the "Shepherd" of Herma. Together with them, other manuscripts were found (among them 67 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament). On September 1, 2009, British scientist Nicholas Sarris discovered a new, hitherto unknown, fragment of a manuscript in the library of the Sinai Monastery.
In 2005, all four owners of the sheets of the code entered into an agreement that a high-quality scan of the manuscript would be carried out in order to post the full text on the Internet. The first digital photos were published on July 24, 2008 and are available to everyone at www.codex-sinaiticus.net. From 6 July 2009 the texts are available in full.
The Sinai Codex is written on thin parchment. Of the entire text of the Old Testament, only 199 leaves remain, while 148 leaves of the New Testament remain. Initially, the manuscript probably consisted of 730 leaves.
The size of each page is 38.1 by 33.7-35.6 cm. The text on the sheet is arranged in four columns of 48 lines each. The text color is pale brown. Some words are abbreviated.
The words of the text are written without interword spaces and hyphens (in the vast majority of ancient manuscripts they are not). Only dots at the end of sentences are used as division. There are no signs of stress and aspiration. Quotes from the Old Testament text in the letter are not highlighted. The Breaking of Ammonius and the canons of Eusebius are marked in red and may have been added by another scribe. The entire text is written in Greek uncial script.
Researchers believe that three scribes (called A, B, and D) worked on the Codex Sinai. Obviously, in the period from the 4th to the 12th centuries, at least 7 scribes made adjustments to the text (a, b, c, ca, cb, cc, e). Readings for which the scribes were responsible for inserting before the manuscript left the scriptorium were designated א a in the critical apparatus. Later (perhaps in the 6th or 7th century) a group of proofreaders, working in Caesarea, made a large number of corrections to the text of the manuscript (א ca, א cb). From these readings, one can judge that the text was tried to be edited according to a different model. Tischendorf, examining the part of the book available at that time (2/3), concluded that about 14,800 corrections were made to the text.
Tischendorf believed that the Codex of Sinai was among the fifty manuscripts of the Divine Scriptures ordered around 331 by the emperor Constantine Eusebius of Caesarea (De vita Constantini, IV, 37). This assumption was agreed by: Pierre Batiffol, Scrivener and Skate.