Notes From the Joyologist

By Nita Wilkinson

Faith Editor

Sometimes I think God has a sense of humor, especially when He takes something that looks completely ordinary and hides something extraordinary inside it.

Just picture this:

It’s May 1844. A young German scholar named Constantin von Tischendorf has traveled all the way to Saint Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. He has come looking for ancient manuscripts. And there, in the monastery library, he notices a basket.

It’s not a particularly exciting basket. He notices it’s filled with old parchment. And Tischendorf knows parchment. He knows ancient Greek. And when he looks more closely, he realizes these aren't simply scraps of old writing. They are pages from an extraordinarily ancient copy of Scripture.

According to Tischendorf's own account, the librarian told him that two similar baskets of parchment had already been burned as rubbish or fuel. So let that sink in, pages of Scripture that had survived for centuries may have been headed for the fire.

Somehow, this particular basket caught the right man's attention. Tischendorf recognized what others apparently did not: these weren't pieces of trash. They were treasure.

He was allowed to take 43 leaves back to Leipzig, where they were published as the Codex Friderico-Augustanus. But the story wasn't over. Fifteen years later, Tischendorf returned to the monastery.

This time, a steward showed him something much larger, a manuscript containing the portions of Scripture he had seen years before, along with the complete New Testament, the Epistle of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas.

What Tischendorf had discovered was eventually known as the Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth-century manuscript and one of the oldest nearly complete Bibles in existence.

Here’s where things get a little complicated. The manuscript didn't stay in one place. Some of the leaves went to Leipzig. The larger portion eventually made its way to St. Petersburg under the patronage of the Russian tsar.

In 1933, the Soviet government sold that collection to the British Museum for £100,000. Other leaves remained at Saint Catherine’s Monastery, including fragments discovered much later.

For more than a century, pieces of this ancient Bible were scattered among different institutions and countries. There was even disagreement about exactly how the larger portion left the monastery in the first place. Was it a gift, a loan or a negotiated transfer? The historical record is complicated, and I don't think we need to solve that argument for a newspaper column.

Oh, I do love what happened next. In the 21st century, four institutions holding pieces of the manuscript decided to do something rather remarkable. They shared it. Through the Codex Sinaiticus Project, the surviving pages were digitally reunited.

Think about that for a minute. A manuscript written by human hands approximately 1,600 years ago, discovered in pieces in a monastery in the Sinai desert, scattered across Europe and Russia, eventually became something that you and I can examine from our kitchen tables.

We can read the same ancient words that someone copied onto parchment centuries before Columbus sailed across the Atlantic, before the printing press, before the King James Bible, before most of the things we think of when we think about the history of the Bible.

That, my friends, makes this self-professed Joyologist ridiculously happy. Because sometimes we forget just how extraordinary it is that we have a Bible at all. We walk into a bookstore and see shelves full of Bibles. We open an app on our phones and have dozens of translations at our fingertips.

For most of human history, that wasn't even remotely possible. And yet Scripture kept being copied, and carried, and translated, and hidden, and smuggled, and preserved.

Sometimes it was treasured. And other times it was persecuteed. Apparently, it was once almost used as kindling. But it survived.

Now, if you have ever opened a modern Bible and compared it with an ancient manuscript, you might notice something interesting. They aren't always identical. Codex Sinaiticus, for example, doesn't contain the longer ending of Mark that appears in many of our Bibles. It also doesn't contain the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 7:53–8:11.

That can sound alarming until we understand what ancient manuscripts actually do for us. They don't prove that somebody secretly rewrote the Bible in a dark room somewhere. They give scholars evidence.

When scholars compare ancient manuscripts, they can see where copies agree, where they differ and how the biblical text was transmitted through generations of handwritten copies.

Codex Sinaiticus isn't the only ancient witness. Codex Vaticanus, another fourth-century manuscript, is also enormously important. In fact, these manuscripts sometimes disagree with each other That's actually part of the wonder.

We don't have to pretend the history of the Bible is neat and tidy to trust Scripture. It is a story of real people copying real words with real hands. And those hands made mistakes. Other hands corrected them. Because we have multiple ancient witnesses, scholars can compare them.

The more evidence we uncover, the more we understand. That doesn't scare me. It fascinates me. And maybe that’s what I love most about the Codex Sinaiticus. It reminds me that the Bible didn't arrive in our hands by accident. There is a long chain of people behind the Bible sitting on your nightstand.

Scribes who copied it, monks who preserved it, scholars who searched for it. And people who recognized it’s value and carried it across deserts and borders.

Today, a fourth-century manuscript once sat in a basket of old parchment and you can turn its pages on your computer. That's a pretty incredible journey.

The words of Scripture have made a very long journey to reach us. So maybe we should stop treating them like ordinary words. Open your Bible, read it, question it, study it, wrestle with it, and treausre it. Because people have carried these words across sixteen centuries so that we could have them in our hands today.

And I, for one, think that's something worth celebrating. The Bible that nearly became kindling is still speaking. ■