Media News - Monday, July 06, 2009

World’s oldest bible goes online

The oldest bible in the world, the Codex Sinaiticus, written in Greek in the fourth century but now scattered between the British Library, Germany, Russia and St Catherine's monastery in Egypt's Sinai desert, will be reassembled online today in a GBP 1m scholarship exercise. Nobody alive has seen all the pages together in one place. The pages of the codex, described as 'a jewel beyond price' by Scot McKendrick, head of western manuscripts at the British Library, which has the largest part, have been scattered for over 150 years. From today, scholars or the merely curious anywhere in the world will be able to search all the surviving text, down to thumbnail-sized fragments found at St Catherine's, free online. The pages can be searched in facsimile, transcribed or translated. The digital photography is of such high resolution that insect bites and scars of some of hundreds of animals whose hides became the vellum pages can be seen. An exhibition which opens today at the British Library traces the history of the manuscript, and the project that involved collaboration between the British Library, the monks in the Sinai, Leipzig University library, the national library of Russia in St Petersburg, and the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at Birmingham university. (The Guardian)

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