Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah · 4. The Quest for Origins
Tischendorf and Codex Sinaiticus
In short
- 1.Constantine von Tischendorf found leaves of a fourth-century Greek Bible at St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, in 1844.
- 2.By his own account they were in a basket of parchments, and similar heaps had already been burned.
- 3.He returned in 1859 under the patronage of Czar Alexander II and secured the rest.
- 4.**Codex Sinaiticus** and **Codex Vaticanus** are our two great fourth-century witnesses — and they differ from the printed text in thousands of places.
The claim being examined
The oldest Bibles are pictured as continuously preserved treasures of the Church.
The Islamic position
The recovery of the earliest text depended on nineteenth-century discovery, meaning the intervening centuries read a demonstrably later text.
Analysis
Ehrman quotes Tischendorf's own narrative at length. The scholarly significance is that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus omit the longer ending of Mark and the story of the woman taken in adultery, among much else; the reconstructed text of the last 150 years is substantially the text of these manuscripts rather than the Received Text. The devotional significance, which Ehrman notes wryly, is that the manuscript's own discoverer regarded the work as a divinely ordained task.
Sources
Bart D. Ehrman · Constantin von Tischendorf · Bart D. Ehrman, *Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why* (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), ch. 4, pp. 117-125
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