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papyrus rolls, in length—and, of course, in its codex form—the complete Codex Sinaiticus represented a quantum leap from the papyrus rolls of the Romans and the papyrus codices in which early Christian documents were most typically written. Most papyrus codices are thought to have contained only one of the Gospels, and the most it is thought that could have been incorporated in the largest papyrus codex would have been the Gospels and Acts. However, just over half of the original Codex Sinaiticus survives, now dispersed between four institutions: St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, the British Library, Leipzig University Library, and the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. The British Library holds the largest surviv- ing portion— 347 leaves, or 694 pages— which includes the whole of the New Testament. This is the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. The other institutions hold portions of the Septuagint, which also survived almost complete, plus the Epistle of Barnabas, and portions of The Shepherd of Hermas. The surviving portions of the manuscript have been assembled virtually in a digital edition at codexsinaiticus.org and were published in a color printed facsimile in 2010. The story of how the surviving portions were rediscovered and dispersed in the mid-nineteenth century by biblical scholar Constantin von Tischendorf has all the elements of international intrigue and romance.
Were it not for the preservation of the bulk of the Codex Sinaiticus in the oldest and most remote Christian monastery—St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, after which the codex was named—or in some other monastery or monasteries over the centuries, it probable that this manuscript would have been lost, especially after the style of writing in scriptio continua had become archaic and illegible to readers, perhaps by the eighth century. To say that the monks in the monastery preserved the manuscript may imply a more ac- tive role than was actually taken after it ceased to be actively used; existence of the manuscript in the monastery may be a more appropriate designation. How long the manuscript was preserved at St. Catherine’s is unknown, but Tischendorf told of finding the manuscript in a most neglected state in the monastery library there in 1859. On the one hand neglect could be respon-
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