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Jewish civilization, without which Christianity might not have spread as quickly and successfully.
The Codex Sinaiticus was written in Biblical majuscule in scriptio continua (also called scriptura continua), without word division, punctuation or pagina- tion; it incorporates two ancient methods for numbering its quires, and it also incorporates a version of the system of numbering the paragraphs of the Gospels developed by Eusebius of Caesarea. It was written in a four-column format except for the poetical and wisdom literature, in which a two-col- umn format was used. This is the only surviving biblical manuscript em- ploying the four-column page format, and it has been suggested that this format is reminiscent of the roll format rather than the codex. Without any evidence for more precise localization, it has been proposed that the codex was written somewhere in Asia Minor, Palestine (Caesarea?) or Egypt.
The Codex Sinaiticus is unique among ancient manuscripts for the num- ber of corrections that were made to it by at least six different ancient cor- rectors, roughly from 400 to 600 CE, though some corrections may be later. In his monograph on the codex D. C. Parker stated that there may be as many as 27,000 corrections to the text. The number of corrections—greater than other ancient manuscripts—and the care in which they were made, confirms, according to Parker, the importance that must have been given to this manuscript early in its history. The nature of the corrections, and how they were made, provides insight into how the text was copied and studied in the first centuries after its creation, and may provide variant readings from other manuscripts which are no longer extant.83
Originally the Codex Sinaiticus contained the Old Testament according to the canon of the Greek Septuagint, including the books known in English as the Apocrypha (but without 2 and 3 Maccabees), along with the New Testament and two other early Christian books—the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas. The complete codex originally incorporated 743 parchment leaves (1486 pages) with a page size of 43 cm. wide by 38 cm. high (16.9 x 15 inches). Though its columnar format was derived from
83 Parker, Codex Sinaiticus: The Story of the World’s Oldest Bible (2010). 156