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June 19, 2005

The Manuscript Conservation Project at Saint Catherine's Monastery

If you are interested in the Bible as an important piece of literature in the history of Western Civilization or as the center of your religious life, the story of Codex Sinaiticus and other manuscripts housed at Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai will interest you. Reuters has an expansive article on the current conservation project at Saint Catherine's. The quotations below are from this article.

Codex Sinaiticus is the oldest nearly complete manuscript of the Bible. There are many older fragments. The Christian New Testament is well preserved and the Greek text of the Septuagint (LXX, the authoritive Greek Translation of the Hebrew Bible) is more fragmentary but once had been complete. In addition to the conical books Sinaiticus contains all or part of I Machabees and IV Machabees (but not II and III), Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. One can see from the list of books contained in Sinaiticus, that even by the mid-fourth century the canon of the Bible (both testaments) was still in flux. Of course, it remains so, to some extent, to this day with many Christians considering the books sometimes called the Apocrypha as authoritive.

Codex Sinaiticus was produced between 330 and 350 CE and is thought by some to be one of the fifty Biblical manuscripts commissioned by Constantine. It was not available to western scholars until Constantine Tischendorf, a Russian scholar, "discovered" it at the monastery in 1844 and subsequent visits. The truth is the monks at the time didn't know what they had. A good overveiw with pictures of Codex Sinaiticus can be found at Prof. Timothy W. Seid's manuscript website.

The conservationist are using hyperspectral imaging like the multi-spectral imaging used on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.

There are many notes on the margins by scribe correcting (or sometimes just changing) the text in the body of the manuscript. With time and as the result of previous restoration attempts, these marginalia are becoming increasing difficult to read. But they can be important.

"If you look at all the corrections made by each scribe then you can come out with a principle on which he was correcting the text," said monastery librarian Father Justin.

The library of ancient manuscripts at St. Catherine's is very extensive.

The monastery plans to build a conservation workshop to treat the Codex and other works in its collection of 3,304 manuscripts and 1,700 scrolls, which make up the biggest collection of early Christian texts outside the Vatican.

It will also build a new library to house the collection, preserved by the monastery's remote location, a dry desert climate and the care of the monks. "There is nothing else quite like this collection. It doesn't compare," Pickwoad said. [an adviser to the monastery's conservation project]

They also want to make their manuscripts available on line. The first ones will be available sometime next year.

Father Justin, who is from Texas, has started digitizing some of the monastery's better preserved manuscripts using a camera that can take photos up to a resolution of 72 megapixels.

"When I came to Sinai I came to live in the desert. I didn't know I'd be doing computer photography and going to London four times a year," he said.

The monastery aims to have 100 manuscripts photographed and accessible through a Web site by mid-2006. "Even though it's only 100 out of 3,000, it will be an important scholarly resource," he said.

Another interesting part of the conservation effort is to determine the origin and ownership history of the manuscripts.

Book historians are currently cataloguing the condition of the manuscripts and the physical features of their bindings, 50 percent of which are original.

"The evidence of where a manuscript has been and where it has come from to get here is often in the binding," Pickwoad said.

Conservators are even keeping the dust they brush from the manuscripts for traces of pollen or seeds which may yield evidence on how texts in languages including Persian, Amharic and Hebrew made it to the middle of the Sinai Desert.

A couple of additional observations: First, Shirley and I visited Saint Catharine's Monastery in 1970. While we did not get to see their library, we did see much of the Monastery and I took the occasion to climb Jebel Muse which was thought by the founders of the monastery to be Mount Sinai. This was part of a several day visit to the Negev and Sinai in the company of Nelson Gleuck. It was an exhilarating and learning experience.

Second, there is a tendency among many people to think of the text of the Bible as having been past down to us without error. The marginal notes in Codex Sinaiticus are among the large body of evidence that many mistakes were made. In an earlier post I noted the issue of the number of the Beast in the Revelation of John 13:18. Is it 666 as most manuscripts have, or 616 as some ancient papyri have or 665 as one manuscript from the Middle Ages has? And there are literally thousands of other examples like this. There is a whole discipline, textual criticism, whose goal is to understand the history of these various manuscript readings and to map their linage much as biologists seek to determine the historical relationships between the many species of living things.

Via Paleojudaica

Posted by DuaneSmith at June 19, 2005 09:27 AM | Read more on Religion |

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