The Codex Sinaiticus

About 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible have been recovered and put on the internet... Fragments of the 4th Century document - written in Greek on parchment leaves - have been worked on by institutions in the UK, Germany, Egypt and Russia...

"This 1,600-year-old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation.

The link for the online fulltext document is here. For most viewers it will be a curiosity rather than a revelation - unless you can read Greek.

Last fall the BBC had a more extensive discussion of the importance of the Codex Sinaiticus:

For those who believe the Bible is the inerrant, unaltered word of God, there will be some very uncomfortable questions to answer. It shows there have been thousands of alterations to today's bible.

The Codex, probably the oldest Bible we have, also has books which are missing from the Authorised Version that most Christians are familiar with today - and it does not have crucial verses relating to the Resurrection...

...the Codex contains two extra books in the New Testament.

One is the little-known Shepherd of Hermas, written in Rome in the 2nd Century - the other, the Epistle of Barnabas. This goes out of its way to claim that it was the Jews, not the Romans, who killed Jesus, and is full of anti-Semitic kindling ready to be lit. "His blood be upon us," Barnabas has the Jews cry...

Also missing is the story of the woman taken in adultery and about to be stoned - until Jesus rebuked the Pharisees (a Jewish sect), inviting anyone without sin to cast the first stone.

Nor are there words of forgiveness from the cross. Jesus does not say "Father forgive them for they know not what they do".

Fundamentalists, who believe every word in the Bible is true, may find these differences unsettling.

I'll be blogging more about this, hopefully later this week. For the moment it is worth noting that the earliest copy of the Bible is not necessarily the most accurate or the most similar to the original. This 4th century version could have been copied from a 3rd century version, while a "later" 9th century version could have been copied from a 1st century version. It's all very complicated...