Codex Sinaiticus

Open the codex at almost any page and the first thing that registers is the layout. Four narrow columns of Greek run across the opening, so a reader looking at two facing pages sees eight of them, an arrangement that survives in no other biblical codex and which some have read as an echo of the scroll it replaced. The letters are a formal biblical majuscule, unspaced and unpunctuated in the manner of the period, written on parchment prepared from calf and sheep skin to a quality that implies serious expense. At least three scribes shared the work, and their hands can be told apart by habits as small as how they space a line ending.

What the codex contains is as important as how it looks. Its New Testament is complete, the earliest surviving example of that, and it does not stop there: it goes on to the Epistle of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas, two works that fourth-century Christians read and that later canons excluded. That is not a scribe padding a book. It is evidence of what a Bible could be before the question was closed, and it is the sort of evidence a printed edition cannot give.

Roughly four hundred leaves survive of an estimated seven hundred and thirty. About half the Greek Old Testament is gone. The rest is spread across four institutions in four countries, and correctors from several later centuries have worked over the text, scraping and rewriting, so the manuscript carries a visible record of its own revision.

In 1844 Constantin von Tischendorf, a young German scholar hunting biblical manuscripts, was at the monastery of St Catherine on Sinai and saw leaves of an ancient Greek Bible. He left with forty-three of them, which went to Leipzig. He came back in 1853 and found nothing, and again in 1859 under Russian patronage, and on that visit obtained the bulk of the manuscript, which travelled to St Petersburg and to Tsar Alexander II as protector of the Orthodox Church.

What kind of transaction that was has never been agreed. Tischendorf described a gift to the Tsar. The monastery holds that the leaves were handed over on loan, for copying, against a receipt that promised their return, and that they were not returned. Both parties can point at documents, and the documents can be read both ways. The dispute is not a curiosity: it is the reason the oldest complete New Testament in existence is not in one place.

The Russian holding was sold by the Soviet government to the British Museum in 1933 for a hundred thousand pounds, half of it raised by public subscription in Britain during a depression. Further leaves turned up at St Catherine's in 1975, walled into a room. Today the manuscript sits in London, Leipzig, Sinai and St Petersburg, and the only place it exists whole is on a screen, in the digital reunion completed in 2009.