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Home , Codex, Codex Sinaiticus

ANCIENT SCRIBES AND MODERN ENCODINGS: THE DIGITAL SINAITICUS

David Parker

The is one of the two oldest in Greek, and con- tains the oldest complete . It is currently housed in four locations (London, Leipzig, Sinai and St Petersburg). Since 2002, it has been the subject of a major project which includes a formal account of its , a conference, a print facsimile and a popular , conser- vation and physical description, fresh digital imaging, a TEI-compliant electronic transcription, translations, and articles of both a specialist and a general nature. Project information and resources are publicly accessible from the Codex Sinaiticus website (www.codexsinaiticus.org). This provides the context for the text that follows. The chapter focuses on the transcription, which was made in Birmingham University, at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic . It describes the concept and methodology of the project, and compares it with the process by which the itself was made in the fourth century. In particular, the workings of the team of scribes and the decisions they had to make are outlined, and a comparison is made with the process of making a complex web-based . Finally, the significance and likely impact of editions which make hitherto almost inaccessible material available to everyone with a browser is discussed.

Introduction

The Codex Sinaiticus is a manuscript of the in Greek (see Plates 23–25), written in the middle of the fourth century. Although about half of the is missing, it includes the oldest known complete version of the New Testament. It contains more than the standard western Bible, since the (the principal ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament) includes absent from the Hebrew canon. In addition to the New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus contains two other ancient Christian writings, the of Barnabas and the Didache.1

1 The best short introduction to the manuscript is S. McKendrick,In a monastery 174 david parker

A number of factors single out the Codex Sinaiticus as one of the most remarkable ever to have been produced. First of all, it is very large: with a page size of 43 cm high by 38 cm wide (15 inches by 16.9), making it about three-quarters of a metre wide when lying open, it is the largest format Greek Bible extant from any period. Then there is the quality of the , which is remarkably thin and smooth. Next, the number of extant complete Greek Bibles is tiny compared to the total number of codices of the Greek Bible. There are only about fifty in all, of which four date from the fourth and fifth centuries; the rest are much later. Moreover, the number of cor- rections (over twenty thousand) and their frequency far exceed those found in any other , and so far as I know any other ancient manuscript. These factors are all the more remarkable when Codex Sinaiticus’ place in the history of the book is considered. The codex form itself was only popularised by Christians in the copying of the texts which came to make up the New Testament, and until the fourth century only had been used in their manufacture. The composition of Christian codices of the third century shows how experimental the codex format still was at that time: examples include single quire codices and a codex consisting of single-sheet gatherings, as well as more normal arrangements. These codices were restricted in size by the strength of papyrus, and could only contain a compara- tively small number of writings, such as the letters of Paul, or at the most the and Acts. Most seem to have consisted of a single . Only in the fourth century, after the Peace of Constantine and in more settled and prosperous times, did the Christian book begin to acquire its now familiar monumental character. So, at a point when the making of parchment codices was in its infancy, and at a time when the concept of the Bible had hardly come into being, a complex single- parchment Bible was produced of a quality which in some respects has never been matched. To contain these books (48 of the Septuagint, 27 of the New Tes- tament, and two more—77 in total), a codex was required contain- ing between 730 and 740 leaves (1,460–1,480 pages) in 95 quires. The practical challenges of this will be considered shortly. Before that, the history of the Codex must be described if the current project is to be understood. . For the project see also S. McKendrick and J. Garces, ‘The Codex Sinaiticus project: 1. The book and the project’, 148–152.