Just last month we heard about plans for digitising the Codex Sinaiticus. Now this, from The Times: Britain may have to give up oldest known Bible.
Posted on April 11, 2005 09:13 PM. Filed under: books & lit.The British Library is facing the possible loss of one of its most important manuscripts, the world’s oldest Bible, to a Middle Eastern monastery.
The fear is raised weeks after the institution was told by a government advisory panel that a 12th-century manuscript in its collection was looted from a cathedral near Naples during the Second World War and must be returned.
The backing last month by the Spoliation Advisory Panel of a 27-year campaign by the city of Benevento to be reunited with a jewel of Italy’s heritage will have given renewed hope to St Catherine’s, a desert monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, of being reunited with a manuscript that it is believed to have owned from the 6th century, if not earlier.
The 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, arguably the world’s most important Christian manuscript, entered the library’s collection in the 1930s. [continue]