A Sister Act of PerseveranceThe second paragraph has a number of errors. Codex Syriacus is the earliest copy of the Gospels in Syriac, not the earliest known copy in any language.Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, not a language in its own right. Jesus spoke Galilean Aramaic, a Western dialect. Syriac is an Eastern dialect of Aramaic which originated in Edessa. And the content of this manuscript is not all that different from modern editions. Actually, it's closer than the traditional Greek text in that it leaves out the longer ending of Mark. But it also has its own odd secondary readings. For details see here and scroll down to "The Old Syriac."
Sunday, August 30, 2009
THE SISTERS OF SINAI
How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels
By Janet Soskice
Knopf. 316 pp. $27.95
In early 1892, twin sisters Margaret and Agnes Smith, unschooled in paleography but possessed of keenly rebellious spirits, traveled from England to St. Catherine's Church, at the foot of Egypt's Mt. Sinai. There, in a "dimly lit little room below the prior's quarters," they discovered "an unpromising brick of parchment," its surfaces coated with dust. Despite the state of this "grimy codex," Agnes, the older of the sisters, was convinced that she had made a great discovery, and after 40 days of study she emerged with proof.
As scholar Janet Soskice reveals in her luminous new study, "The Sisters of Sinai," Margaret and Agnes had nosed out nothing less than the earliest known copies of the Gospels -- an account written in Syriac, the language likely spoken by Jesus himself. At the time, Soskice writes, "the Bible remained an unquestioned compendium of truth, its immutable word conveyed supernaturally through the generations." And yet this codex -- so different in content from the modern edition of the Gospels -- indicated that scripture was actually the product of years of careful revisions. The Bible, in other words, had evolved.
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Some even worse garbling of the subject is noted here. The book under review sounds interesting, though.
UPDATE: Reader Meg Dea e-mails::
Most disappointing about that review is that it fails to mention the writings these 2 Victorian sisters left behind. Agnes Lewis Smith's books Eastern Pilgrims: The travels of three ladies and In the Shadow of Sinai are both still in print, as far as I know, and most entertaining reading.