Posted on 08/04/2005 10:22:42 PM PDT by BlackVeil
A manuscript containing the oldest known Biblical New Testament in the world is set to enter the digital age and become accessible online.
A team of experts from the UK, Europe, Egypt and Russia is currently digitising the parchment known as the Codex Sinaiticus, believed originally to have been one of 50 copies of the scriptures commissioned by Roman Emperor Constantine after he converted to Christianity.
The Bible, which is currently in the British Library in London, dates from the 4th Century.
"It is a very distinctive manuscript. No other manuscript looks like this," Scot McKendrick, the head of the Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts Department in the British Library, told BBC World Service's Reporting Religion programme.
"On each very large page, about 14-16 inches (34-37cm) it has a Greek text written in four columns.
"That's the really distinct feature of it - layers of text - it's one of the fascinating aspects of it and it shows us how the Biblical text developed over a certain period, how it was interpreted in those crucial early years of Christianity."
Stolen
The digitising project is particularly significant because of the rarity and importance of the manuscript.
The original document is so precious that it has only been seen by four scholars in the last 20 years.
The Codex Sinaiticus contains the whole of the Christian Bible; specifically, it has the oldest complete copy of the New Testament, as well as the Greek Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, which includes books now regarded as apocrypha.
It is named after the place it was written, the monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai, Egypt, set beneath the mountain where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments.
It remained there until the middle of the 19th Century when a visiting German scholar, Constantin von Tischendorf, took parts of it away to Germany and Russia. To this day, the monastery officially regards it as stolen.
In total the codex is now in four portions, the largest of which - 347 of the 400 pages - is that at the British Library. The rest are split between Leipzig University Library, the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, and the monastery.
Free website
All four institutions are co-operating to digitise the entire text, as well as using hyperspectral imaging to photograph it, in order to find any hidden or erased text.
"To do it also in infra-red or ultra-violet photography, as in forensics, you'll find out any hidden aspects of it as well," explained the British Library's digitisation expert Lawrence Pordez.
The British Library bought the codex from Russia for £100,000 in 1933 He added that a further advantage of using photographs of the manuscript to make a facsimile of it was that there were "no chemicals involved".
"It's also faster to produce," he added.
For his part, Dr McKendrick said he estimated it would be about four years before the codex is fully available online.
This is to give time "to essentially photograph the manuscript, to conserve it, to transcribe anew the whole of the text, and to present that in a new form electronically".
The British Library will also develop a free website to present the manuscript.
The website will both "present the manuscript - just the facts as it were, the images and the transcription - but also interpret it for different audiences, from scholars right through to people who are just interested in this manuscript or in Christianity".
The King James, when first printed, contained the Apocrapha, also, but was later dropped because the Jews Themselves never considered the books to be genuinely the Bible, but history.
They were taken out of the King James in the 1700's for that reason, they are onl history accounts, not inspired books by the Holy Spirit.
The Old Testament books that were in dispute, in the Cathlic lexicon the Deuterocanonicals (sp?), are the ones that did not originate in the Palestinian tradition of Judaism. They came from the Helenistic and North African traditions. St. Jerome - who stood alone at the councils of Hippo and Carthage on this - argued that the Palestinian Jews don't have them in their cannon, so the Church shouldn't either. Well, the Palestinian Jews didn't close their cannon until 100 AD. Why should the Christian world adhere to that? Jerome was living in Palestine at the time and that really factored into his thinking. He was very much persuaded by them. In contrast, St. Augustine, who had a much more level head and presided at both councils, pretty much led the group that used the full group of books (which was basically everybody else). As there was enough of a body of writings by the early church doctors (as we now know them) that demonstrated that the books were used, St. Jerome's arguments were pretty well deconstructed and he dropped his objections. It didn't hurt that St. Augustine had the pope on his side.
The Deurocanonicals in the New Testament are the ones that are almost never mentioned - Hebrews, Revelation, James, 2 Peter and 2&3 John. They were in dispute as well, but that never seems to come up.
Be careful with reading Catholic Bibles. Some of the translations are not quite kosher, if you will. I prefer the Douay-Rheims, which was translated a number of centuries ago. There are some beautiful things in Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) and Baruch. I actually like Wisdom as well.
It's all Greek to me.
How do you explain the removal of the Book of Thomas and the Book of Mary?
Yeah, I'm being sarcastic, I just couldn't resist.
Gibbon notes Constantine's late conversion as being particularly convenient because he had one or two of his sons executed not long before he converted. The baptism washed away those sins and rendered him a new man, able to enter heaven without those sins inconveniently dragging him back to the other place.
"They were taken out of the King James in the 1700's for that reason, they are onl history accounts, not inspired books by the Holy Spirit."
How do you tell if a book is inspired by the "Holy Spirit"?
I am also of the understanding that some Eastern Christian Bibles also contain a 3rd and 4th Maccabees. I don't know this for sure.
I actually have a Douay-Rheims (yes I am Catholic) myself, purchased from the Fraternity of St. Peter. Beautiful book with Morroccan Leather cover....every Bible, regardless of version, should be an piece of art.
EXACTLY. It's why the magical feel is there in scripture no matter the translation or version. It's far far more than text. It is the written manifestation of almighty God. In the beginning was the WORD.
MM
Your knowledge of history is deficient. Some Jews, largely those who rejected Christ. The Palestinian(Hebrew) Canon wasn't established at Jamnia until ~100 AD but the Christian Church was already using the Alexandrian translation of the Hebrew Bible, which dates from ~250-125 BC. The discovery of copies, written in Hebrew, of some of the Deuterocanonicals at Qumran renders moot many of the arguments for rejecting the Septuagint. Over 300 quotes in the New Testament are from the Septuagint, not the Palestinian Canon.
Edward Gibbon "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was strongly anti-Christian so we need to consider that bias in his comments.
He would fit right in in academia today!
The Mormons get the same "feeling in the belly" reading the Book of Mormon.
How do you know whats's inspired?
Where did the table of contents of the Bible come from?
How do you know whats's inspired?
You make a very interesting distinction. Off the top of my head, I would say that it isn't the belly that senses the Holy Spirit. It is the spirit of the sensing person.
I have strong gut reactions (that's a guy's way of defining intuition, I think), but it isn't my gut that hears the Holy Spirit. It is my conscience, my soul, my heart...my spirit.
I don't pretend to know the answer, but discernment is called for. I think a spiritual person has to sift and resift and resift all info until the HS emerges.
Just my humble opinion.
>which includes books now regarded as apocrypha<
...by protestants, because Martin Luther found them inconvenient.
I'm protestant and I have read them all and read the Book of Enoch at least once a month.
It came from Faithful Jews, like PAul and Jude and James
He even moved the book of James to the back of the Bible, and made some commentary about it's application in the preface ...
Any details on how and when this happened? Any hisrorical evidence?
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