Codex Sinaiticus

Codex Sinaiticus, the earliest known manuscript of the Christian Bible, compiled in the 4th century ce.

In 1844, 43 leaves of a 4th-century biblical codex (a collection of single pages bound together along one side) were discovered at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai (hence the name Sinaiticus). The German biblical scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf (1815–74) found several hundred additional leaves, constituting the majority of the present manuscript, at the monastery in 1859. Tischendorf persuaded the monks to give the precious manuscript to Tsar Alexander II of Russia in exchange for needed protection of their abbey. Tischendorf subsequently published the Codex Sinaiticus at Leipzig and then presented it to the tsar. The manuscript remained in the Russian National Library until 1933, when the Soviet government sold it to the British Museum for £100,000. Additional fragments of the manuscript were subsequently discovered at St. Catherine’s. In July 2009 the reunified Codex Sinaiticus was digitized and placed online.

Codex Sinaiticus consists mostly of the text of the Septuagint, the Greek-language Bible. Some 800 of the original 1,400 handwritten vellum pages remain. Though about half of the Hebrew Bible is missing, a complete 4th-century New Testament is preserved, along with the Letter of Barnabas (c. mid-2nd century) and most of the Shepherd of Hermas, a 2nd-century Christian writer. There were probably four scribes who contributed to the original text. Later corrections representing attempts to alter the text to a different standard probably were made about the 6th or 7th century at Caesarea.