oldest known surviving copy of the New Testament goes online (Codex Sinaiticus)

[Julian Delphiki]

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/07/24/online.bible/?iref=mpstoryview

The oldest known surviving copy of the New Testament gets the modern touch Thursday when parts of it go online for the first time.

The full manuscript of the Codex Sinaiticus will be online a year from now.

The British Library plans to begin publishing the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th century text handwritten in Greek, on its Web site. The Gospel of Mark and the Book of Psalms go online Thursday. The full manuscript is to be online in a year.

Translations of the Codex Sinaiticus have long been widely available, but publishing images of the manuscript online will let anyone see pages that, until now, have been viewed in detail mainly by academia.

As the Web site becomes operational, it will show photographs of each page of the text, with links to translations in English and German. There will also be a search function.

"It contains the earliest complete copy of the New Testament," said Scot McKendrick, the head of Western Manuscripts at the British Library.

While the Codex contains all of the New Testament, it also includes part of the Old Testament and originally contained the entire text of the Christian Bible. The manuscript also includes the Apocrypha, 14 disputed books of the Old Testament that are usually omitted from the Protestant Bible. It also includes two early Christian texts: the "Epistle of Barnabas" and the "Shepherd of Hermas."

The library announced plans three years ago to digitize the 1,600-year-old book, a tough job since pieces of the manuscript reside in four countries.

"It was a challenge, but it was ... also very exciting," said Juan Garces, the curator of the project.

Photographers took digital pictures of the text in United Kingdom, Russia, Germany and Egypt to put the entire manuscript online.

"It unites something that belongs together," he said.

The complete text once was housed at the Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, Egypt, before it came to the attention of a German scholar, Constantine Tischendorf, in the 19th century. He took parts of it to Germany and Russia. The British Library later bought several hundred pages from the Russians.

Digitizing the text is a windfall for scholars, but the main goal was to make the Codex available to everyone.

"It makes it accessible, and it opens up to anyone who can access it via the Internet," Garces added.

Eventually, the manuscript will be translated into Russian and modern Greek.

"The user will come to the Web site and will be able to look at images of each page of Codex Sinaiticus, will be able to zoom in and out and look around the page and see the page lit in standard light." Garces said.

Dan Browns of world unite.

http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/

 

[Plotinus]

No, making this kind of resource more generally accessible might help to stamp out Dan Brown-style idiocy. Well, we can but hope.

 

[Princeps]

No, making this kind of resource more generally accessible might help to stamp out Dan Brown-style idiocy. Well, we can but hope.

Well, I'm sure some people thought that having the genocidal, rape-filled, infanticidal foundational documents of the judeochristian cult readable to everyone, would probably wipe out that superstitious, obscurantist and solipsistic belief system, but it didn't.

 

[Plotinus]

Well, those documents are already widely available to everyone in every language under the sun, and have been for rather a long time, so I'm not sure why publishing an older edition of the same documents would make much difference on that score. What the Codex Sinaiticus (like other codices from the same period) does show is that the text of the New Testament as we have it now hasn't changed since antiquity, thereby refuting the Dan Brown-style conspiracy theorists who claim that the church has tampered with the text over the intervening centuries. Mentioning no names.

 

[bob bobato]

Double post. Look down, under me.

 

[bob bobato]

Well, I'm sure some people thought that having the genocidal, rape-filled, infanticidal foundational documents of the judeochristian cult readable to everyone, would probably wipe out that superstitious, obscurantist and solipsistic belief system, but it didn't.

Don't just look at the superficial parts, there is more than just 'magic powers' and genocide in the bible (and that's mostly in the Old Testament, anyways). Read what they say when no-one's being raped, there's good stuff there.

Unless you're being sarcastic. I could never tell on the internet.

 

[scy12]

Who named it Codex Sinaiticus anyway ?

 

[Plotinus]

Presumably Constantin von Tischendorf, who discovered it in the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai. Ancient codices are usually named after the places they were discovered.

 

[Princeps]

Unless you're being sarcastic. I could never tell on the internet.

Of course i'm not being sarcastic.

 

[TheDS]

Then you're just being infantile and completely useless. Christianity is not about murder and rape and war, it's about loving your neighbor and promoting harmony. Like anything great, it has had its message corrupted, and had its name taken in vain, and then stupid people who have no sense whatsoever of history slander it simply because it's in vogue to do it now. If you were half the man you want us to believe you were, you would not have allowed stupid, hateful people to tell you what to think about the Bible, and instead would have read it yourself, with an open mind, to find your own opinion.

If you don't want to believe in God, that's your choice; Jesus never forced anyone to believe anything they didn't want to. He was a man of peace. Whether he was truly Holy, a man with a vision using religion as a tool to get his message out, or someone with delusions of grandeur, no one can tell for sure, but the fact remains that his message was one of peace and forgiveness for everyone.