London - Some 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian
Bible have been recovered and pieced together to be launched on the
internet, the British Library in London said Monday.
More than half of the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript,
written in Greek on parchment leaves, have been pieced together in a
joint effort between institutions in Britain, Germany, Egypt and
Russia.
High-resolution digital images of the recovered pages of the 4th-
century book have been made available at www.codexsinaiticus.org.
To mark the online launch, the British Library is staging an
exhibition which opened Monday and will run until September 7.
The Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery for
1,500 years until it was found in 1844 and split between the four
countries.
Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British
Library, said the wide availability of the document presented many
research opportunities.
'The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's greatest written
treasures. 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 project has been supported by The Arts and Humanities Research
Council, The Stavros Niarchos Foundation, The Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft and The Leventis Foundation.
The original version contained about 1,460 pages, each measuring
40 centimetres by 35 centimetres.
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