Antiquitopia

For those who missed it, Hendrickson Publishers has released a facsimile edition of Codex Sinaiticus.  Being to scale, it is of course huge, as is the price. Check it out here for you or your library--it can be yours for only $799.

While prepping for my lecture on textual transmission and scribal practices, I came across a website that I had never seen before today. I generally use the Codex Sinaiticus online to illustrate a few points (it is a fairly good hand, but still shows evidence of accidental scribal error; its shows students that ancient scribes didn't use spaces; its Gospel of John lacks 7:53-8:12, etc.), but I was very happy to see that there is a website where one can view the manuscript of the Aleppo Codex, which, along with the Leningrad Codex, are the two most important Hebrew witnesses to the Hebrew Bible. So check out the Aleppo Codex here , and I will add it to my sidebar.

Deidre Good posts on a report from the Guardian of a new Sinaiticus fragment found as part of the cartonnage, or binding, of another book. This reuse of old writing materials to form the binding of new books was common in antiquity (check out the bindings to the Nag Hammadi Codices, for example). With our current technology, we can view the piece without destroying the underlying papyrus it protects as cartonnage, although St. Catherine's does not quite have that technology yet. The fragment, by the way, is of Josh. 1:10.

I thought it would be fun to use the amazingly accessible digitized Codex Sinaiticus as I work on my Hebrews chapter. Whether anything from this exercise will impact my dissertation or not, I do not know, but I thought it would be good experience to read it from an ancient witness in addition to and in contrast with (wherever relevant) the conflated Nestle-Aland text. So, for the opening lines of Hebrews (coming on the heels of a portion of 2 Thessalonians), go here . Hebrews begins at the top of the fourth column. You might notice an interesting aspect of the codex here--often the last letter in the line of a column is dropped or minimized. For example ΤΟΥΣ ΑΙΩΝΑΣ looks more like ΤΟΥ ΑΙΩΝΑΣ where the masculine accusative plural ends the column line. You will also notice that, typical of its time, the capital sigma looks more like our C and their capital Ω looks like a bigger lowercase ω. You can even see some ancient editing at work where ΗΜΩΝ is indicated in the left hand margi...

As nearly every other biblioblogger has noted already, the Codex Sinaiticus is now fully online (it seems). It originally went online last July 24 (2008), showing Mark (and I think one or two other biblical books). It has taken this long to get it fully in operation. Now you can read the entire thing. Here is a snippet from the homepage: Codex Sinaiticus Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript – the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity – is of supreme importance for the history of the book. It is really a fantastic site and gives you much important information (in addition to the digitized photographs of the codex itself).

If you are having trouble seeing the Codex Sinaiticus on its new site because there are too many concurrent connections, go to the German version of the site (which evidently has less traffic than the English section). It is a very nice tool. It has photos of each page which you can view with two different types of light and which you can magnify, a transcription of each verse, and translation (the translation was not up when I was playing around on the German site). Have fun looking at the oldest most complete Bible online!

Codex Sinaiticus, one of the most important ancient texts, since it is the earliest most complete New Testaments that has survived (plus the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas), is now going to be digitized and parts of it, Mark I think, will go online today. The majority of the text has been housed in the British Museum, with pages or fragments of it being housed in Leipzig, St. Petersberg, and at St. Catherine's in the Sinai. It also contains Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) along with "Apocrypha"--often referred to as the Septuagint (LXX), although this designation only technically refers to the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible). The first half of the Old Testament texts are missing (from Genesis up to 1 Chronicles). Those going online today or soon include 1 Chronicles, 2 Esdras, Esther, Tobit, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Psalms. Most New Testaments rely upon a reconstructed synthetic text that takes into account all ...