It's the most high-tech 1,600-year-old book in the world.
The fragments of the Codex Sinaiticus — the world's oldest Bible, hand-written by monks on parchment in the fourth century — were digitally reunited and published online Monday, quickly becoming one of the Internet's hottest commodities.
"You can see the holes in the parchment from when it was manufactured, you can see insect holes. You can see wax from when the monks were writing 1,600 years ago," says Helen Shenton, head of collection care for the British Library, which owns the largest section of the ancient book. "It's certainly a phenomenal way of studying these documents."
The virtual reunion was the result of a partnership between the British Library and three other institutions that hold fragments of the Codex: Leipzig University Library in Germany, the Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, Egypt, and the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg.
It took nearly four years to decipher, transcribe and translate the 800 pages and fragments, which contain 650,000 words. When the British Library published a small section online last summer, it drew 3.5 million views on the first day and 25 million by the end of the week, and they expect even more interest this week. The Codex ranked among Google's top 20 searches Monday.
The website allows visitors to view the manuscript under intense magnification, with different types of light that show its textures and in various translations from the original Greek.
The Codex was written around the time of the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine the Great, who made Christianity the state religion rather than cause for persecution.
It measures about 38 centimetres high and 35 centimetres wide, and includes about half of what now comprises the Old Testament and Apocrypha — books whose place in the Bible is not universally recognized — as well as all of the New Testament and two early Christian texts that don't appear in modern Bibles.
Missing from the Old Testament are most of the books from Genesis to Chronicles 1, while the books of the New Testament appear in a different order than they do in Bibles today. The Codex contains many corrections that show the evolution of the modern Bible's text, and the scholars behind the project say it is key to understanding why the Bible the modern world has inherited is organized and composed the way it is.
"I'm one of the few people alive — up until today — who'd had the privilege of seeing the physical original in all four locations," says Shenton. "But as of today, anyone in the world with a PC and Internet access can see it."
The Codex is online at
www.codexsinaiticus.org.
The delicate leaves of the book were placed in a "cradle" that opened the pages no more than 90 degrees in order to scan them, Shenton said, though the manuscript was made "with a high degree of finesse" and the parchment is in surprisingly good condition for its age.
The British Library is celebrating the digital reassembly of the Codex with an academic conference this week, she said, along with a summer-long exhibition that will display the library's Old and New Testament sections together for the first time. The books rest in a bulletproof glass case in the library's dimly lit Treasures Gallery, Shenton said, basking in their own air conditioning and humidity-controlled environment.
"With all the Da Vinci Code phenomenon, people are suspecting many people have been hiding things, so there's an interest for the mystery there," Yvan Mathieu, a professor of the Old Testament at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, said of the allure of the centuries-old document.
When he tells people what he studies, their first comments are often about Dan Brown's mystical take on Christianity, he said, but the Codex also has a fascinating history of its own.
In the 19th century, a German scholar named Constantine Tischendorf went to the Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai and recognized the monks' parchment as ancient, he said.
Tischendorf pleaded to borrow the manuscript so he could publish it for scholarly review and promised to bring it back, Mathieu said, but after he carted it back to Russia for his employer, the Czar, revolution broke out and the fragments were never returned.
The largest section, which now lives at the British Library, was bought from the Soviet government in 1933, while other small fragments were scattered in Russia, Egypt and Germany, said Mathieu, who visited Sinai in the early 1990s.
"When you visit that monastery today, one of the first things they show you is a letter by Tischendorf written in Greek, promising that he would return the manuscript," he said.
http://www.vancouversun.com/News/Fra...923/story.html 
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