June 21, 2010 issue
Unlikely story of discovery
By John A. EsauPage:
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It’s a most unlikely story.
Esau
It’s a story of two sisters, identical twins Margaret Gibson and Agnes Lewis of Victorian-era England. After both were married in their 40s and widowed several years later, they embarked on lives of scholarship and discovery.
It’s also a story about the Bible.
We don’t often ask how the Bible came to us. We buy a copy; we trust the translators.
But the curious still wonder: What do we really know about the history of the Bible? How were its diverse manuscripts written down and passed on through the centuries?
Gibson and Lewis made a discovery that shed new light on Scripture.
It’s a most unlikely story in terms of time. It’s a most unlikely story in terms of place. In 1892, the British sisters traveled to Cairo, Egypt, looking for ancient biblical manuscripts.
This story of feminine scholarship and adventure is told by Janet Soskice in The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels. It reminded me of Mark Twain’s account of his journey to the Middle East in The Innocents Abroad.
What the sisters found doesn’t quite compare to the Codex Sinaiticus manuscript found at that same monastery by Constantin von Tischendorf several decades before. That manuscript contains a Greek translation of the Old Testament, including most of the Apocrypha, the 27 books of the New Testament, plus the Epistle of Barnabas and parts of the Shepherd of Hermes. It jumped biblical scholarship back six centuries and remains one of the oldest and most important New Testament manuscripts, dating from the fourth century.
What Agnes and Margaret found in a dark closet in the St. Catherine Monastery was a fourth-century manuscript of the four Gospels. The discovery, however, was neither easy nor obvious.
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