A Brill Calendar: January 18

Von Tischendorf and the "Codex Sinaiticus"

Few manuscripts written in ancient times and discovered only much, much later, entail as fascinating a story as the ‘Codex sinaiticus’.

Probably penned in the latter half of the 4th century in Egypt, it includes almost the entire Old Testament, the complete New Testament, plus two books excluded from the Biblical Canon: extremely early documentary sources in the literary tradition of Judeo-Christian awareness. However, this treasure was not found in one fell swoop during a sunny afternoon. No suggestion of divine providence and guidance here!

It took the lucky finder, Lobegott (‘Praise the Lord’) Friedrich Konstantin von Tischendorf (Lengefeld, Saxony, January 18, 1815 – Leipzig, December 7, 1874) some fifteen years, from 1844 until 1859, to completely extract the find of his life from the place where he first found only a small portion: in the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai Peninsula. This monastery contained a library with a significance surpassing the understanding of the simple but shrewd monks, who maintained an immense mass of holy books they could hardly read themselves.

In a second, much later visit, in 1853, von Tischendorf was unable to find the volume he had set eyes on back in 1844. Originally he had only obtained permission to take some four dozen leaves with him out of the Sinai Desert: leaves he had published, whilst keeping the location of his treasure trove secret. Finally, in 1859, in the very last days of a third and rather desperate expedition financed by the Russian government, when Lobegott had given up almost all hope, the Codex materialized again; and after intrigues & complicated bargaining the German biblical critic was allowed to procure it for Tsar Alexander II. Biblical science – one of the corner-stones of the European Academic tradition – would never be the same again.

It is seldom that a dramatically discovered manuscript causes sensation twice: in 1933 the British Museum purchased the Codex from Stalin’s godless government, ‘cleansing’ the Soviet Union during the Great Depression, at the hefty price of 100.000 Pounds Sterling.