Codex to London

Nosing about the East after biblical lore in 1844 a German scholar named Constantine Tischendorf traveled through the Sinai Peninsula and up to a lonely Orthodox Greek monastery atop Mount St. Catherine.* There in a wastebasket he came across a bundle of 43 stray vellum leaves which a monk had tossed aside for lighting fires. Scholar Tischendorf recognized the vellum leaves as fragments of an ancient Greek biblical text. He asked for more. The St. Catherine monks showed him some, refused to part with them. Scholar Tischendorf took home what he had, published it as the Codex Friderico-Augustanus for his patron, King Frederick Augustus of Saxony. He returned twice to Sinai, the second time under the patronage of Tsar Alexander II Oi Russia. He was shown more manuscript, including the Epistle of Barnabas which was not previously known to exist in Greek. This he spent a whole night frantically copying, exclaiming, "It is a crime to sleep!" Before long he had induced the St. Catherine monks to give the manuscript to the Tsar as protector of their church. In return the Tsar gave the monastery $3,500, the abbot and other dignitaries decorations. Last week this trash basket manuscript, now the famed Codex Sinaiticus, was bought by the British Museum for $511,250 (-L-100,000) from the Soviet Government. Under secrecy and heavy guard, it was moved from Moscow to London.

The Codex Sinaiticus. dating from the 4th Century, contains all the New Testament, scraps of the Old. In antiquity it vies only with the Codex Vaticanus which has been in the Vatican's possession for centuries. Next oldest biblical text is the Codex Alexandrinus of the late 4th or 5th Century, now possessed by the British Museum.

In Manhattan last week Bibliophile Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach said that $511,250 for the Codex Sinaiticus was the largest sum ever paid for a book or manuscript, that the U. S. S. R. had offered it to him last year for $1,250,000.

The purchase was important enough to be announced in the House of Commons by Prime Minister MacDonald who explained that His Majesty's Government would match private contributions pound for pound. Thereupon the Laborite Daily Herald growled: "It is the most vulgar ostentation of the most vulgar rich. . . ."

*Some scholars believe that this peak rather than the modern Mt. Sinai, is the site of the burning bush through which God spoke to Moses. Because Mount St. Catherine is high, dry and dustless, the Smithsonian Institution now has a solar observatory thereon.

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