Codex Sinaiticus

Middle of the fourth century AD

A Greek Bible written by hand in the middle of the fourth century, containing the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. It is a chief witness to the text of the Gospels as it was read in the fourth century.

Codex Sinaiticus is a parchment book that once held the whole Bible in Greek: the Old Testament in the Septuagint version, of which only part survives, and the complete New Testament. It was written by several scribes about the middle of the fourth century and corrected by later hands. It was kept at St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai until the nineteenth century, and its leaves are now divided among four libraries, which have published the whole online with a transcription.

It is cited in this wiki as evidence for the wording of the New Testament at an early date. Two of its readings matter for the story of the resurrection. The Gospel of Mark ends in it at 16:8, “for they were afraid”, and Luke begins on the same page; the twelve verses printed in most Bibles as Mark 16:9–20 are not there. And at Luke 24:13 it gives the distance from Jerusalem to Emmaus as a hundred and sixty stadia, where most manuscripts have sixty. A manuscript shows what one copy contained. Which reading is original is a matter of comparing it with the other copies.

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