Bible’s Oldest New Testament goes live in the matrix

It was written in Greek, it had travel the whole world, you can even find one in almost every hotel, but now after almost 1,600 years, one of the oldest copies of the Bible will become accessible online this week.

The University of Leipzig (one of the four curators of the ancient text) stated that starting from Thursday, all sections of the Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the oldest and the complete New Testament,high resolution images of the Gospel of Mark and also Old Testament books will be available on the Internet.

“A manuscript is going onto the net which is like nothing else online to date. It’s also an enrichment of the virtual world — and a bit of a change from YouTube. Dating from around 350, the document is believed by experts to be the oldest known copy of the Bible, along with the Codex Vaticanus, another ancient version of the Bible (Ulrich Johannes Schneider, director of Leipzig University Library). The ancient manuscript came to Europe all the way from Saint Catherine’s Monastery by Mount Sinai where German biblical scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf found a number of folios there in 1844: “The first section was clearly a gift to Tischendorf, but that’s not so clear in the case of the second portion. The monks all signed a contract at the time, but the rumor persists that they were given a raw deal.

I think it’s just fantastic that thanks to technology we can now make the oldest cultural artifacts — ones that were once so precious you couldn’t show them to anyone — accessible to everyone, in really high quality,” Schneider stated.

Source: Reuters

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