Codex Sinaiticus: The Oldest Complete Bible Has 2 Books Yours Doesn't

On the fourth of February 1859, in a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, a German scholar who had already decided to go home was handed a bundle wrapped in red cloth. Inside it was the oldest complete copy of the New Testament in existence. The Codex Sinaiticus was written in the middle of the fourth century, on the skins of about 360 animals, in four narrow columns of Greek capitals with no spaces between the words: almost four million letters. It is one of only two surviving complete Bibles from that century, and it does not match the one on your shelf. It contains two books that are not in modern Bibles at all, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, written straight through as part of the New Testament. The Gospel of Mark in it stops at chapter 16, verse 8, with the women running from the tomb and saying nothing: the twelve verses that follow in your Bible are not there, and they are not in Codex Vaticanus either. The story of the woman caught in adultery is absent. And between the fourth century and the twelfth, at least seven correctors went through the book with pens. Tischendorf counted 14,800 corrections in the two thirds of it he had; the estimate for the whole manuscript is about 23,000. This video is about the object, not the argument: how it was made, who wrote it, what is in it, what is missing from it, how it left the desert, and what happened when modern imaging was finally pointed at it. Covered here: the parchment and the four column layout; the three scribes and the one who could not spell; the sacred names; the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas; the end of Mark and the missing pericope; the passages marked doubtful and then unmarked; the colophon naming a book older than this one; Vitaliano Donati in 1761; Tischendorf in 1844, 1853 and 1859; the receipt the monastery still displays; Constantine Simonides, who claimed in 1862 that he had forged the whole thing at nineteen; the leaves found inside other bindings and in a sealed room under the chapel of Saint George in 1975; the 1933 sale to the British Museum for 100,000 pounds; the ultraviolet lamp, the raked light photography and the hyperspectral imaging; and the 3,036 differences between the two oldest Bibles we have. This channel does not tell you what to believe. It tells you what was measured, by whom, and what the measurement can and cannot show. CHAPTERS 0:00 A red cloth on a table in the Sinai desert 0:55 Two books yours does not have 1:44 Three hundred and sixty animal skins 2:43 Four million letters, no spaces 3:18 The sacred names 4:03 Three scribes, one of whom could not spell 5:21 What is in it: Barnabas and the Shepherd 6:00 Mark ends at verse eight 6:38 The woman caught in adultery is missing 7:08 The passages somebody wanted out 8:10 The colophon: a book older than this one 8:56 1761: the first man to see it 9:52 1844: the basket, and forty-three leaves 10:51 1859: the Tsar, and the receipt 12:23 1862: a man says he forged it 13:33 The leaves that kept turning up 15:08 The weakest part of the story 16:38 1933: bought for a hundred thousand pounds 17:30 Raked light, and what it shows 18:45 Three thousand and thirty-six differences 19:32 What the codex cannot tell you SOURCES AND FURTHER READING The Codex Sinaiticus Project - codexsinaiticus.org, the joint digital edition of the British Library, Leipzig University Library, the National Library of Russia and Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai. Milne, H. J. M. and Skeat, T. C. - Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus, British Museum, London, 1938. Parker, D. C. - Codex Sinaiticus: The Story of the World's Oldest Bible, British Library, 2010. Metzger, B. M. - The Text of the New Testament, Oxford University Press. Hoskier, H. C. - Codex B and Its Allies (on the differences between Sinaiticus and Vaticanus). Sevcenko, I. - "New Documents on Tischendorf and the Codex Sinaiticus", Scriptorium xviii, 1964. Lake, K. - Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus, Oxford, 1911 and 1922 facsimiles. All images and footage used are public domain or openly licensed. Credit for every file is listed in the production notes for this video. #CodexSinaiticus #BibleHistory #Manuscripts #Archaeology