English
29 April 2009
In my last post I talked about how painstaking it is to copy a text even with the help of computers. 
It is even more interesting, however, to look at ancient manuscripts of the New Testament. The oldest extant Bible, called Codex Sinaiticus because of its former location at St Catherine monastery on Mt Sinai, is hand-written in all capitals with no punctuation or even spaces between the letters.This Bible is complete, with the Old and New Testaments, as well as a few apocryphal books, in Greek. It took an enormous amount of time—and parchment—to complete this work. Scholars can identify at least three original scribes and seven correctors.
There is a project to make available online a complete facsimile and exact transcription of the manuscript. The project is still under operation, but some of the Bible can be viewed at the Codex Sinaiticus project website.
Pictured is a portion of the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark.
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