Codex Sinaiticus (~350 AD)

It is a display Bible, made at expense, for reading aloud.

H. J. M. Milne and T. C. Skeat's 1938 study Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus identified three copyists — designated A, B and D — correcting Tischendorf's earlier count of four. Between the fourth and twelfth centuries at least seven correctors went over the text, some within the scriptorium itself.

The contents are a snapshot of a fourth-century Bible. About half the Greek Old Testament survives in it, Septuagint text, including Tobit, Judith, 1 and 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach. The New Testament is complete — all twenty-seven books, the earliest complete copy in existence.

And then it keeps going: the Epistle of Barnabas entire, followed by part of the Shepherd of Hermas, bound in without a break.

It also shows what a fourth-century Bible did not contain. Mark ends at 16:8; the long ending is absent. John 7:53–8:11, the woman taken in adultery, is absent.

Codex Vaticanus, its near-contemporary, agrees on both.

Constantin von Tischendorf, a Leipzig textual scholar hunting manuscripts, saw leaves of the codex at St Catherine's Monastery on Sinai in May 1844 and took 43 of them to Leipzig, publishing them in 1846 as the Codex Frederico-Augustanus. He returned in 1853, and again in 1859 under Russian imperial patronage, and left with the bulk of the book. Whether that departure was gift, loan or purchase is still disputed between the monastery and its critics; the monastery holds that the leaves were lent.

The Russian portion was sold by the Soviet government to the British Museum in December 1933 for £100,000, then the largest sum ever paid for a manuscript. It is now British Library Add MS 43725. In 1975 a blocked room beneath the monastery's chapel of St George was opened and yielded a further twelve leaves and many fragments of the same codex; in 2009 a monk-scholar, Nikolas Sarris, identified another fragment of Joshua reused inside a bookbinding at Sinai.

Its authenticity has been challenged exactly once seriously. In 1862 the Greek dealer Constantine Simonides, a known forger, announced that he had written the codex himself as a young man in 1839–1840. The claim collapsed under examination — Tischendorf had published the Leipzig leaves in 1846, and the manuscript carries corrections in hands separated by centuries — and no textual scholar has since taken it up.

The story still circulates online; the evidence has not changed.

The apologetic weight is straightforward. Roughly 280 years after Paul wrote to Corinth, a single bound volume already contained the twenty-seven books the church still uses, in a Greek text recognizably the text printed in critical editions today. Sinaiticus was not the beginning of that text — where it can be checked against the earlier papyri P46, P66 and P75, the agreement is close, which is precisely why modern editions read as they do.

The manuscript is now more accessible than at any point in its history. The Codex Sinaiticus Project — the British Library, Leipzig University Library, St Catherine's Monastery and the National Library of Russia working jointly — completed digitization and a full electronic transcription in July 2009. Every surviving page is photographed in standard and raking light and searchable free of charge, which means the claims made about it can be checked against it.