The Discovery of the Mount Sinai Manuscript

from True or False by David Otis Fuller, ed., p. 71
via Sentry Magazine, Vol. 21 No. 4, December 1995

This famous Codex (with facsimiles of the handwriting and with an account of its discovery) is published in full in Dr. Scrivener’s work entitled 'A Full Collation of the Codex Sinaiticus’ (1864).

Constantine Tischendorf, a noted German scholar, who was indefatigable in the guest of old manuscripts, was visiting, in the year 1844, a monastery on Mt. Sinai, and in the course of that visit he chanced to find one day, among the waste, some leaves of vellum which, upon inspection, were found to contain parts of the Septuagint Version of the Old Testament in a script which indicated that the manuscript was of great antiquity.

In describing his famous discovery, Tischendorf says: ‘I perceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket, full of old parchments; and the librarian informed me that two heaps of papers like this, moldered by reason of age, had been already committed to the flames. What was my surprise to find among this heap of documents a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, which seemed to me to be one of the most ancient I had ever seen.’

The monks allowed him to take forty-five of the sheets. But nothing more transpired until fifteen years later, when he again visited the monastery, this time under the direct patronage of the Czar of Russia. And then he was shown a bulky roll of parchment leaves, which included, among other manuscripts of lesser importance, the Codex now known as the Sinaitic.

Naturally enough, Dr. Tischendorf was highly elated by his discovery. Indeed, his enthusiasm was unbounded. He says, ‘I knew that I held in my hands the most precious Biblical treasure in existence,' and he considered this discovery to be ‘greater than that of the Koh-i-noor (diamond) of the Queen of England.’