Codex Sinaiticus

The German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf visited Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai in 1844 and took to Leipzig 43 leaves of the Old Testament in Greek. In 1859, on a third journey sponsored by the czar of Russia, he saw the rest of the manuscript — hundreds of leaves — and took it to St. Petersburg. In 1933, the Soviet government sold the majority to the British Museum. In 1975, the monks found more leaves in a forgotten room of the monastery. To this day the monastery claims that the codex was taken from it, and not donated — the story of 1859 is told differently by the two sides.

The codex has parts of the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) and the complete New Testament, plus the Letter of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas, writings that some ancient Christians read alongside. It was copied on parchment, with four columns per page, in the fourth century — more or less when the emperor Constantine ordered 50 Bibles to be made for the churches of Constantinople (there are those who think this might be a relative of that request, but there is no proof).

Why it matters: together with the Codex Vaticanus, it is one of the two most important witnesses to the text of the New Testament. Since 2009 the entire codex can be seen, page by page, at codexsinaiticus.org, a joint project of the four institutions that keep it.