When I worked in the library at Dallas Theological Seminary, I would hear people mention a codex or manuscript of early Biblical texts. I knew they existed but little else. I also saw the term palimpsest but never took the time to find to what that referred. Now I know thanks to Agnes and Margaret.
I recently read The Sisters of Sinai : how two lady adventurers discovered the hidden Gospels by Janet Soskice. Agnes and Margaret Smith were born in Scotland in 1843. With the death of their mother within weeks of their birth, their father took over their nurture. John Smith's ideas about the raising and educating of girls was quite different from the average home of that time. His daughters received excellent schooling in a coed school. They showed facility for learning languages and studied modern European ones as well as classic ones like Greek. He promised to take them to countries that spoke the languages they learned as an incentive. He soon found himself planning numerous trips.
Mr. Smith died when the twins were 23 years old. He had inherited money and also invested funds that made him a very rich man. This money allowed the women to travel to the Middle East. Margaret became an expert in Arabic; Agnes conquered Syriac. They had no college degrees as most universities would not grant them to females. When they finally lived in Cambridge, they attended some classes with permission but with no hope of a degree. They did become acquainted with scholars of Biblical manuscripts.
As staunch Presbyterians, they decided to use their riches to explore some manuscripts they had been told were housed at the monastery on Mount Sinai. These manuscripts were purported to be earlier than the ones that had been used to make the Bible editions they read. They wanted to defend the Bible in a time of criticism. They each had married and been widowed; they were in their fifties as they set out on this project.
Travel to the Ottoman Empire and Egypt was not for the faint-hearted. Reliance on dragoman for providing supplies and personnel had risks. They slept in tents and rode camels through the desert. The scholar who told them about the manuscripts on Mount Sinai had made a good impression on the librarian and monks. This enabled the twins to find gracious reception in their pursuit. It also helped that they spoke modern Greek, the language of Saint Catherine monastery. They hauled with them photographic equipment which they had to learn to use.
Agnes was the one to recognize that one of the manuscripts she handled that was dirty with the pages stuck together was a palimpsest. The scribes would scrape down vellum that had text to reuse the vellum on another text. The lives of women saints definitely had beneath it Syriac Biblical New Testament text peeking through. It proved to be older than other known existing manuscripts of the New Testament.
When Agnes returned to England, she shared the photographs of the texts with other academic scholars who specialized in the field and languages. Agnes and Margaret and these scholars and spouses returned to Sinai. There was a lot of jockeying to gain glory and reknown and to leave out the importance and contributions of the sisters to the successful trip. The transcription and translation of the main manuscript was to be a joint effort, but there was secrecy and competition.
In spite of the challenges, the Codex palimpsestus Sinaiticus was printed and was seen as an important contribution to the understanding of early New Testament texts.
The twins were a bit eccentric especially as they aged. They lived together as specified in their father's will. They owned an auto but did not use it on Sundays because their chauffeur was to have a day of rest. They could be seen in their fur coats walking to the Presbyterian Church. Presbyterians were considered oddities in the Anglican university town of Cambridge anyway.
They acknowledged that their travels and findings were due to God's provision of funds they inherited and a gift of grasping and learning languages, but they did want some credit for their work and investments. Little was given in Britain. They did receive some honorary degrees from some European universities.
Reading of the bulky camera equipment and the discovery and use of a smelly reagent that brought out the hidden texts reminded me of our acquaintance Dan Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary. He founded The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. He has very sophisticated digital photographic equipment, but the task of making connections with the guardians of manuscripts and placating their whims is as tricky as it was for the Sinai Sisters.
