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  Raiders of the Lost Codex: Scholars Piece Together Ancient Bible

Raiders of the Lost Codex Scholars Piece Together Ancient Bible

By Matthias Schulz

Part 2: Enter the Russians

Porfiri Uspenski, a bearded Russian clergyman and icon scholar, was traveling in Egypt at the time. Uspenski worked for the governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Holy Synod. He visited the Mt. Sinai monastery twice, in 1845 and 1850, and the monks gave him five pages of the Codex, which are now in St. Petersburg.

In 1853 Tischendorf packed his bags and traveled back to the monastery. This trip proved to be disappointing. He was able to find only a tiny scrap of the manuscript -- in use by the monks as a bookmark. The rest had disappeared. Six years later, though, he returned in grand style with sponsorship from the czar of Russia, and he was able to hand out bribes "like a Russian prince," as he put it.

This mission was almost a failure: There seemed to be no sign of the codex. Camels for Tischendorf's return trip had already been reserved when the abbot invited his guest to his room for a final drink. The monk pulled a bundle of papers from a red cloth and showed him not only the pages he'd left behind, but another 260 pieces of parchment.

Tischendorf was flabbergasted. In the pale moonlight, he leafed through the oldest known copy of Jeremiah, the Book of Revelation and the Epistles. "There were tears in my eyes," he wrote, "and I was happier than I had ever been before." He went to the abbot and offered him 10,000 thaler, but the abbot refused to sell.

He did, however, allow the professor to borrow the near-complete manuscript so it could be reproduced and printed in Europe -- in return for a receipt and the promise to return the pages as soon as possible. But Tischendorf came up with another idea: Wouldn't it be wonderful, he said, to present the czar with the handwritten documents to commemorate the upcoming 1,000-year anniversary of the Russian monarchy? He assured the abbot that it would bring the monastery fame, good fortune and money. The monks supposedly agreed.

"Unfortunately this plan for the gift stalled," says Böttrich, the New Testament expert. Malcontents at the St. Petersburg court were against the idea, and ten years later the pages were still in the Russian Foreign Ministry. The Archbishop of Sinai, who was responsible for the monastery, only signed off on a deal between the monks and the Russian court on Nov. 18, 1869. The brotherhood received 9,000 gold rubles in return -- and they also apparently wanted a steamship.

Many details surrounding the deal still aren't fully explained. The gift deed has disappeared, and records relating to the transfer of the Codex are now being kept in the Russian state archives, where Natalya Smelova, a member of the Internet project, is analyzing them.

The Codex, Virtually Complete

The project is in full swing in Leipzig. Wearing white cloth gloves, conservator Ute Feller removes pages one by one from a basement storage container. Inspectors with magnifying glasses make painstaking lists of folds and stains. Each "shaving," each note in the margin, and each "wounding" of the parchment is noted.

Meanwhile experts at London's British Library are using scientific tools to unravel the Codex the way pathologists would inspect a mysterious dead body. They plan to use multispectral analysis to highlight hidden traces of ink, and holes in the binding may answer other questions: When did the magnificent work break apart? What did the cover look like?

Even the withdrawn priests of Sinai are involved in the sleuthing effort. During construction work on the abbey back in 1975, a rubble-filled room was exposed where additional parts of the Codex Sinaiticus were found. This material has been kept strictly protected and was even off-limits to academia -- until now.

All the research -- which also involves American and Russian experts -- has shed light on what many consider to be one of the world's first books. It was created between 330 and 350 A.D. Scribes would have sat at small tables with inkwells and pencils, scratching chains of uppercase Greek letters onto the light-colored animal skins. "Scribe A" was the most original: He wrote with a flourish, but he was sloppy. He forgot four pages from the Gospel of St. Luke. He simply eliminated the famous definition of love in St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Was it intentional? "Scribe D" noticed the mistakes and added the missing text in the margin.

But who commissioned the work in the first place? Many researchers believe the order came straight from Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor. In 313 AD he lifted all state sanctions against what was then a persecuted "Jesus cult." He ordered a number of churches built, and had 50 magnificent Bibles made to spread the little-known religion of brotherly love throughout the Roman Empire. The Codex may have originated during this period.

The New Testament section of the Codex proves how old it is. It includes not just the usual text but also two apocryphal chapters, which were later removed by church fathers. The Epistle of Barnabas was written by a student of the Apostles, and the Shepherd of Hermas consists of five visions of the apocalypse dating from the start of the 2nd century.

The researchers plan to present their results to the world by 2010 using a Web site. Hundreds of thousands of words will have to be translated and digitized by then. The work is slow, and some Mt. Sinai monks still grow incensed when the name of Constantin von Tischendorf comes up.

"The experts have spent the last two months working on a small report on the early history of the manuscript," one insider says. "The text is only one page long, but they just can't seem to finish it."

He explains the reason for the foot-dragging: "Any kind of consensus disappears whenever they have to decide how to phrase the parts about the legal status of the manuscript."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan