Ever
see an ad that said: “Get the all the books of the Bible for $19.99” but then
at the bottom it says: “Each book sold separately”? Or better yet, ever go to
the store (i.e. if you are buying something like this) and buy the Bible? You
pick it up whole book, not individual chapters/books of the Bible. Before the
fourth (c.350) century (if they had had this ad), then that would have been the
case. The books of the Bible were not sold together, but in individual
manuscripts. The Bible wasn’t officially set up in the beginning; it was just
the small books that were floating around that weren’t in a certain order. For
instance, your book of Genesis could be completely different from your neighbor’s
book of Genesis. Suddenly a group of four scribes decide to write the Codex Sinaiticus, a 41 cm long and 36 cm
wide Bible. . These scribes ranged from the fourth to the twelfth century
because of the corrections the manuscript had to go through. The Codex Sinaiticus is one of two surviving
canons of the Bible even then it is still missing a few pieces. The manuscript
is the first full book of the Bible and contains all of the books, along with
two extra books that are not in the current Bible. So it’s like the first draft
of the modern day Bible. The Bible wasn’t a magical book that just appeared in
time and space; the Bible took time and lots of corrections. I can’t stress
this enough: Codex Sinaiticus was the
first rendition of the Bible that we have to be so heavily corrected. The
manuscript was made up of seven hundred and thirty leaves and over an estimated
a thousand five hundred pages. Half of the Old Testament is lost to historians
of today, but the rest remains in good condition. But we are assuming back then, the manuscript
was a complete piece of work. The assumed goal of the manuscript was to put all
the books of the Bible together and to give them order. The Codex Sinaiticus wanted to set in stone
the order of the Bible and to create one universal book. The language of the
Old Testament was a very old Greek while the New Testament was in the
vernacular Greek of the fourth century. The manuscript’s (Bible) name
translated from Greek is “The Sinai Book”. Mount Sinai is a mountain in Egypt
is where the Ten Commandments were created (as written by the Bible), so naming
the book based on something set in stone was very clever and meaningful. The
cleverness comes from the fact that it is one of the two Bibles our modern
world has. It is helping to set the Bible in the past and gives the modern work
of the actual forming of the Bible up to this point. It gives historians the means
to see the development of Early Christianity, but also the advancements of
making very large manuscripts. It is also very ironic because the book had a
lot of corrections in the script over the centuries by other scribes.
I
found it very interesting that it was in Greek because this is a luxury text. The
manuscript was not designed with lavish pictures, but just the text. So the luxury would come from its four columns
and size, but it didn’t have all the illuminations, which became extremely
popular in the later luxury manuscripts. The manuscript is for the common
people to read and not to be adorned to stay in a church for the rest of its
life (though now it sits in many different places). The manuscript showed the
Early Christianity because of its text (and this time not the language). The
text showed the similarities between the early Jewish Scriptures and the new
Christians trying to find their own. It is a great place for historians to get
a look at the religion from its earliest to the oldest (from then to now).
Another
great piece of the manuscript is the manuscript itself. A huge advancement in
the binding of manuscripts must have happened in order to get the seven hundred
and thirty leaves to fit and stay closed. The manuscript was over a thousand
pages, and took four people to write. It was the equivalent of a factory line,
however a much slower and delicate process. The four scribes would have to sit
and write their own piece to put in the book. Once everyone was done, they
layered this huge book together. They had to make sure that everything was in
the right order before they bound it together. A single mistake in the order
would have changed the Bible, as we know it today. The manuscript must have
been a durable parchment because it has survived to this (although damaged). The
binding must have also taken a long time to fit every piece, so the binding
must have advanced from the little books to the big books (the little books
being easier to bind and the bigger ones a difficult and tedious process).
The
Codex Sinaiticus is an important step
in our history and the Christian religion. It changed the way books are bound,
so that way larger books could be produced. It put the Bible text into one
complete book so that way the argument over the order of the books in the Bible
could be solved. Although corrected, it gave an outline of the Bible we use
today (with two books extra). All in all, it is a great marker for the relation
of early Christianity and the use of manuscripts.
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