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The second great discovery of Aramaic biblical manuscripts took place 28 years after Dr. Cureton's death. It is one of the divinely foreordained synchronisms of history that the mountain which gave to the Israelites and, therefore, to all modern nations the Ten Commandments would be the place where the oldest copy of the Aramaic gospels would be discovered, thus becoming the source of the Original Gospels as well. When Saint Sylvia journeyed to Mt. Sinai during the reign of Theodosius between A.D. 385 and 388, she speaks of the "little church" which, tho so small, "has of itself great grace. When this woman traveler visited the monastery, it was less than three centuries since John the Apostle died. The Monastery of Saint Catherine is one of great antiquity. Situated on the isolated Sinai Peninsula in the shadow of Mt. Horeb, it is among the oldest and most venerable monasteries in Christendom.
It was on Mt. Sinai in February 1892 that Mrs. Agnes Smith Lewis and her sister, Mrs. Margaret Gibson, made a sensational discovery. These sisters were quite remarkable. To begin with, these Scottish sisters were nearly identical twins. Women in nineteenth century England rarely chose to explore foreign lands. Exploration was usually the occupation of men. These two women were exceptional. Both of these twin sisters could speak Modern Greek with fluency, and Mrs. Lewis, who also spoke Arabic and Hebrew, made special preparation for this trip by studying Syriac (Aramaic), becoming thoroughly acquainted with the oldest Syriac manuscripts at Cambridge, which prepared her for the discovery she was to make at Mt. Sinai.
Reaching Cairo in January 1882, they won the good will of the Greek archbishop of Mt. Sinai, who gave them permission to examine the Sinaitic Library on Mt. Sinai. In Margaret Gibson's account of their journey to Mt. Sinai, which she published in her book, How the Codex was Found, a narrative of two visits to Sinai, from Mrs. Lewis's Journals 1892-1893, she describes their journey across the desert and their first sight of the Mount of God which, "rose against the sky like a huge altar, visible against the sky in lonely grandeur from end to end of the whole plain." At length they came in sight of the massive walls of the stately convent of Saint Catherine. Undoubtedly many unknown manuscripts in Greek, Slavonic, Arabic, and Iberian lay hidden behind those walls and the intrepid Mrs. Smith and Gibson were about to change the course of Biblical studies forever.
The early history of the Monastery of St. Catherine is difficult to trace. According to old legends and inscriptions the Emperor Justinian, built the outer walls about A.D. 530. The outer walls were built 20-30 feet high forming an irregular square some 200 feet in extent. The walls were built of solid granite. As recently as 1822 there were no doors into the Monastery. Visitors and monks alike were hoisted in large baskets to an opening in the upper part of the wall. Justinian built the Monastery as a stronghold to protect the pass leading from the plain of Er-Rakkeh in the north (where the children of Israel are said to have encamped) across as shoulder of the mountains into the Wady Tarfa, that slopes gently down to the south. It was first occupied by a garrison of Roman soldiers, sent to protect the inhabitants of an earlier Monastery dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and the pilgrims and anchorites that flocked to the site from Egypt and Syria in the early centuries of the Christian era from the savage Saracen tribes.
The inhospitality of these sacred rocks proved attractive to the religious mind. Hundreds of hermits lived and died there, dwelling alone in solitary caves, or gathering in groups to hear their favorite preachers, in sheltered hollows, where the waters are held in natural cisterns and reservoirs after the heavy rainfalls or snowstorms that occur here, at best, two or three times a year, and where the traces of human habitation still survive in rude stepping-stones or in a few straggling fruit trees of foreign importation. In this ancient Monastery, whose walls exuded the history of earliest Christianity, Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson described their arrival; "The kindness of the librarian, who can never be forgotten by any of us who ever visited this ancient sanctuary, opened everything in the convent to our inspection, and on February 8, 1892, we began our work, examining, copying, and photographing such works as appeared to be especially valuable."
The most ancient of these manuscripts were kept in dark closets, and the damp leaves, which "had evidently been unturned for centuries," could often be separated only by manipulation with the fingers or by the steam of the kettle. One day in the month of February, while searching through the rare, old, unbound parchments which had probably not even been looked at for centuries, they came across a Syriac palimpsest of 358 pages whose leaves were glued together by time and so old that the "least force used to separate them made them crumble."
A palimpsest is a manuscript on which an earlier text has been effaced and the vellum or parchment reused for another. It was a common practice, particularly in medieval ecclesiastical circles, to rub out an earlier piece of writing by means of washing or scraping the manuscript, in order to prepare it for a new text. The motive for making palimpsests seems to have been largely economic--reusing parchment was cheaper than preparing new skin. The papyrus book (codex) did not come into use before the first century of our era and does not become common until two or three centuries later. The earliest books were made possible by a process of preparing the skins of sheep or calves so that they could be written upon on both sides. This process for preparing the skins was developed between 197-158 B.C. In fact, the technical distinction between parchment and vellum is that the former is made from sheepskin and the latter from calf. The finest works of antiquity are those written in gold and silver on the fine purple skins of vellum, especially that come to us from the third to the sixth centuries.
On the palimpsest the sisters discovered, the overwriting bore the date A.D. 778, and proved to be a very entertaining account of the lives of female saints. The preface to this read:
"By the strength of our Lord Jesus Christ (the Son) of the Living God, I begin, I the sinner, John the Recluse of Beth-Mari Kaddisha, to write select narratives about the holy women, first the writings about the blessed lady Thecla, disciple of Paul the blessed Apostle. Brethren, pray for me."
The author wrote of the "Blessed Eugenia" and of Phillip her father, of Pelagia the harlot of Antioch, of the blessed Onesimus, of Theodosia the virgin, of Theodota the harlot, etc., ending: "Let every one who reads . . .pray for the sinner who wrote it.
Barely visible beneath this writing was other greatly blurred writing of much greater antiquity. Though some of the words were wholly obliterated, Mrs. Lewis detected the words "Evangelion," "Mathi." "Luca," and jumped to the correct conclusion that this older writing must be an ancient Syriac text of the four gospels. They photographed this work entirely, and left the convent on the eighth of March. Having reached home, they developed their thousand photographs and showed them to various scholars.
They were unable to find anyone who could make out the blurred writing or saw that it was of any special importance until Mr. Francis Crawford Burkitt, a young scholar at Cambridge, took the photographs and showed them to Prof. R.L. Bensly, who was just finishing a new edition of the oldest Syriac version of the four gospels (the Cureton.) Bensly recognized at once that this was another copy much like the Cureton, but very much more complete and older. Almost immediately it was arranged that Professor Bensly, Mr. Burkitt, and Prof. Rendel Harris would accompany the discoverers back to Sinai where they would accurately transcribe the manuscript word for word.
Arriving at the convent February 8, 1893, they found to their great delight that the experienced experts could easily trace the words in the underwriting, and after forty days of steady labor they were able to return to England bearing with them an almost complete copy of this precious document. The copy was completed in 1895. The special thing that makes this Syriac text so valuable is that it gives us the version of the New Testament used in Palestine at that early age, written in the Eastern branch of the very language which Jesus and His Apostles spoke. Dr. Agnes Smith Lewis made five more trips to Sinai after the discovery mentioned above and made several other finds of special interest. It was F.C. Burkitt, however, who took on the task of researching and bringing the discoveries of the Syriac Bible into the context of the formal Christian theology schools of the West.
Purchase the Books Published By these Remarkable Women, Drs. Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson
