Secrets of Mount Sinai: Story of the Codex Sinaiticus

Recent scholarly finds such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels have shaken the very fabric of Christianity. The author of this remarkable book suggests that further shocks of this kind are in store for us. They are contained in the so-called Codex Sinaiticus, 347 pages of ancient manuscript whose history alone is an intriguing story. Originally found in the mid 19th century in the monastery of St Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai, they were sold by Stalin in 1931 for £100,000 to the British Museum, where they remain to this day. The author, who recently went to the monastery himself, begins by telling the story of how St Catherine's came to be there, and of how the Codex was found and 'borrowed' from the unsuspecting monks by an unscrupulous German scholar named Constantin Tischendorf. He then proceeds to examine the Codex itself.What exactly is it about these long-lost pages that makes them so central to the current controversies within the Christian church? First, they represent one of the two oldest surviving texts of the Bible in existence - the whole of the New Testament and most of the Old. They also, argues the author, throw new light on Christianity itself by the omissions and alterations they contain. This earliest text of St Mark's Gospel, for example, contains no account of Christ's appearance to the disciples after the Resurrection; the text of large sections of St John's Gospel appears to have been heavily reworked; in the same gospel the story of the woman taken in adultery is a later insertion.