World's Oldest Monastery to Use Hi-Tech Cameras to Enhance Text of Oldest Surviving Bible

Aimee Herd : Jun 20, 2005
Aljazeera.net

St. Catherine's Monastery, the world's oldest, plans to use technology to bring a greater understanding of some of the earliest Christian texts, including some pages from the oldest surviving Bible. The Codex Sinaiticus, written between 330 and 350 AD, is believed to be one of 50 copies of the Scriptures commissioned by the Roman Emperor Constantine.

The process, known as "hyper-spectral imaging," photographs the pages at various wavelengths of light, enhancing text that has faded over time. It is hoped that the technique will allow scholars to better understand corrections that were made to the ancient Bible.

Monastery librarian, Father Justin, explained, "If you look at all the corrections made by each scribe, then you can come out with a principle on which he was correcting the text."

St. Catherine's had once loaned the bulk of the manuscript to a German scholar who promised to return it, but never did, the Bible later being sold to the British library in 1933. In 1975, the monks discovered 12 pages and 15 fragments of the Codex Sinaiticus hidden under a collapsed ceiling with thousands of other parchment leaves.

In addition to the ancient Bible, the hyper-spectral imaging technique will be used in hopes of viewing another writing in the monastery's possession, the Codex Syriacus, a faint copy of the 2nd century translation of the Gospels of the New Testament.

The Codex Syriacus is in the form of 5th century text that lies underneath some 8th century writing on parchment. Chemicals were once applied to the document by scholars which made the underlying text temporarily visible, but it also made the parchment brittle. The new technology would be a safer way to view the text without damaging the manuscript.