Oldest surviving Christian Bible to be launched online

Jul 6, 2009, 6:58 GMT

London - Some 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible have been recovered and pieced together to be launched on the internet, the British Library in London said Monday.

More than half of the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript, written in Greek on parchment leaves, have been pieced together in a joint effort between institutions in Britain, Germany, Egypt and Russia.

High-resolution digital images of the recovered pages of the 4th- century book have been made available at www.codexsinaiticus.org.

To mark the online launch, the British Library is staging an exhibition which opened Monday and will run until September 7.

The Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery for 1,500 years until it was found in 1844 and split between the four countries.

Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library, said the wide availability of the document presented many research opportunities.

'The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's greatest written treasures. This 1,600-year-old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation.'

The project has been supported by The Arts and Humanities Research Council, The Stavros Niarchos Foundation, The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and The Leventis Foundation.

The original version contained about 1,460 pages, each measuring 40 centimetres by 35 centimetres.