Oldest complete New Testament to go on display at British Museum

‘Egypt: Faith after the pharaohs’ to exhibit holy texts penned on the Nile from three monotheistic religions

Ilan Ben Zion is an AFP reporter and a former news editor at The Times of Israel.

A Codex Sinaiticus manuscript, right, the earliest complete New Testament, from 4th century Egypt or Judea on display in the 'Sacred : Discover what we share' exhibition at the British Library in London, Wednesday, April 25, 2007 (AP Photo/Sang Tan)
A Codex Sinaiticus manuscript, right, the earliest complete New Testament, from 4th century Egypt or Judea on display in the 'Sacred : Discover what we share' exhibition at the British Library in London, Wednesday, April 25, 2007 (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

The oldest complete version of the New Testament will go on display at London’s British Museum in October as part of an exhibit on the monotheistic religions in Egypt.

The Codex Sinaiticus is a 4th century CE handwritten parchment manuscript containing the Septuagint and New Testament in Greek. Throughout the text are thousands of annotations and corrections, added from the codex’s drafting in the 4th century to as late as the 12th century, scholars say.

The manuscript itself is scattered between four different institutions, the British Library, the Leipzig University Library, the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, and the Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt, where it remained until the 19th century.

The codex, the museum said, will be presented as part of the “Egypt: Faith after the pharaohs” exhibit, opening in October 2015 in order “to emphasize the readers and users of scripture” in the land of the Nile in ancient times. It will be presented alongside the Gaster Bible, a 9th-century Torah from Egypt featuring one of the oldest Hebrew illuminated texts — also on loan from the British Library — and a Quran from Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

Among the other Jewish artifacts included in the exhibit are fragments of documents from the Cairo Geniza containing Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Aramaic and Arabic texts detailing Jewish life in Cairo during the Middle Ages.

Since the British Library bought it from Soviet Russia in 1933, the manuscript has only been loaned out once, in 1990, to the British Museum (when the two institutions shared the same building.

“It is quite phenomenal [that] they are able to lend it to us,” Elisabeth O’Connell, an assistant keeper at the British Museum, told The Guardian. “We are absolutely thrilled.”

The British Museum said on its website that the exhibit will “show how Christian, Islamic and Jewish communities reinterpreted the pharaonic past of Egypt and interacted with one another” over 1,200 years.

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