World's Oldest Bible Gets Digitized, Includes Disputed Apocrypha Books

The oldest known surviving copy of the New Testament is being brought into the 21st century as parts of it will go online for the very first time. The full text of the Codex Sinaiticus will be available online approximately one year from now.

The Codex Sinaiticus is a 4th century text handwritten in Greek. The British Library plans to begin publishing the book online, beginning with The Gospel of Mark and the Book of Psalms, which will go online Thursday.

While translations of the Codex Sinaiticus have been widely available for some time, this is the first time that the pages of the manuscript will be able to be seen by a larger audience. Previously, the pages have been viewed up close mainly by those in academia.

As the pages are published online and the web site becomes operational, photographs of each page of the text will be shown, along with links to translations in English and German. A search function will make the manuscript searchable.

The Codex contains all of the New Testament, and also includes part of the Old Testament, and originally contained the entire text of the Christian Bible. It also includes Apocrypha, the 14 disputed books of the Old Testament which are typically omitted from the Protestant Bible. The Codex also contains two early Christian texts, "Epistle of Barnabas" and the "Shepherd of Hermas."

The British Library announced their plans to digitize the book three years ago. What makes it so difficult is that the 1,600 year old book resides in pieces in four different countries - the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, and Egypt.

The complete book was formerly housed at the Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, Egypt. In the 19th century when it came to the attention of German scholar Constatine Tishendorf, he took parts of it to German and Russia. The British Library later bought a few hundred pages off the Russians.

In addition to the English and German translations, scholars hope to eventually translate the manuscript into Russian and modern Greek.

The website for the Codex Sinaiticus is http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/.