18 January 1815 A.D. Count Tischendorf & Manuscripts
I resolved, in 1840, to set out for Paris. . .
though I had not sufficient means to pay even for my traveling suit; and when I
reached Paris I had only fifty thalers left. The other fifty had been spent on
my journey," wrote Constantin Tischendorf. Today we don't have any of the
actual pages written by the Bible authors. One of our earliest complete copies
of the New Testament was brought to light by this scholar.
Constantin was born in
Langenfeld, Saxony (in what is now Germany) on this day,
January 18, 1815. As he studied, he encountered scholarship that denied
the inspiration of the Bible. Constantin thought that "the history of the
early Church, as well as that of the sacred text, contains abundant arguments
in reply to those who deny the credibility of the Gospel witness."
He became a Bible scholar and
set out with a thin wallet and relentless ambition to search for old
manuscripts (hand-written books) so he could produce an edition of the Bible as
close to the original text as possible. In 1844 he searched throughout Egypt,
Sinai, Palestine, and the Middle East. "To some, all this may seem mere
learned labor: but permit me to add that the science touches on life in two
important respects; to mention only two--to clear up in this way the history of
the sacred text, and to recover if possible the genuine apostolic text which is
the foundation of our faith--these cannot be matters of small importance. The
whole of Christendom is, in fact, deeply interested in these results."
In May of 1844, at the monastery
of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai, he saw a large basket filled with tattered
parchments. According to Tischendorf, the librarian said two similar basketfuls
had been burned as rubbish. Considering that the monastery preserved over 3,000
manuscripts, many for over a thousand years, this claim has seemed improbable
to some scholars. On the other hand, the fact that the monastery allowed over
1100 other manuscripts to lie buried for 200 years under a collapsed building
does not speak highly for the monks' concern or care of the treasures entrusted
to them either. Constantin poked through the basket and found 129 pages of the
Old Testament in Greek. He was excited, for this was the oldest Biblical
manuscript he had ever seen-- dating from the 4th century.
The monks let him keep 43 leaves
but would not let him look at the rest. Their attitude was the same when he
visited in 1853. He trekked to the monastery again in 1859. On the last day of
his visit, a steward "took down from the corner of the room a bulky kind
of volume, wrapped up in a red cloth, and laid it before me. I unrolled the
cover, and discovered, to my great surprise, not only those very fragments
which, fifteen years before, I had taken out of the basket, but also... the New
Testament complete, and, in addition, the Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the Pastor of
Hermas. Full of joy, which this time I had the self-command to
conceal from the steward and the rest of the community, I asked, as if in a
careless way, for permission to take the manuscript into my sleeping chamber to
look over it more at leisure." Immediately, Constantin began to make a
complete copy of the Epistle of Barnabas, of which no good
original had been known.
A few days later, he wheedled
permission to take the manuscript to Cairo, where he and associates exhausted
themselves, copying 110,000 lines in a few feverish days. Documents show that
the monastery reluctantly allowed him to remove the precious volume to Russia
to replicate it. By receipt, Tischendorf promised to return it. At that point
there were no hard feelings as is shown by the fact that when the monks found
some missing leaves they forwarded them to him. However, Tischendorf proceeded
to present the codex to the Tsar as a gift. When the monastery requested its
property back, the Russians maneuvered politically until they extracted an
agreement to sell them the valuable document.
The Communists who took over
Russia in 1917 had little interest in Bible manuscripts. Cash-strapped, they
sold it to the British Museum on Christmas Day, 1933 for the large sum of
£100,000. The ancient book is known as Codex Sinaiticus. It and other old
manuscripts that Constantin found, are invaluable for checking the accuracy of
our translations. It turns out that the last verses of Mark and the story of
the woman taken in adultery were not included in Sinaiticus,
suggesting these were later additions to scripture; whereas the presence of Barnabas
and Hermas
indicated the copyists accepted them as inspired.
Bibliography:
Bentley, James. Secrets of Mount Sinai; the story of the Codex
Sinaiticus. London: orbis, 1985.
"Codex Sinaiticus."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus
Tischendorf, Constantin. "Discovery of the
Sinaitic Manuscript." http://www.purl.org/TC/extras/tischendorf-sinaiticus.html
Various internet and encyclopedia articles.
Last updated June,
2007.
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