St Catherine's Monastery, Egypt
The Greek Orthodox monastery of St. Catherine's in Sinai was the site of two major "Bible Hunter" discoveries.
In the 1840s, German theologian Constantin Tischendorf (later granted the aristocratic "von" before his surname by Tsar Alexander II) exhausted his search for ancient witnesses to the Bible in European libraries and determined to find ancient Bibles in "the East." He visited Saint Catherine's monastery multiple times in the 1840s and 1850 where, as he later recounted, he "discovered" the fourth-century Greek Bible he gave the scientific name Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus ("Sinai" after its place of "discovery"; "Petersburg" after its new home after Tischendorf's negotiations between the monks and the Tsar, who financed his work). For Tischendorf, this early Greek Bible affirmed the reliability of the received text of the Bible against the deconstructive work of more skeptical German text critics.
The Codex resided in St. Petersburg until the 1930s when it was sold to the British Museum; most of the codex is still there, although some pieces remain in St. Petersburg and some leaves remain at St. Catherine's. The codex exists as a whole online: https://codexsinaiticus.org/en/.
A generation later, wealthy Scottish twins Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson visited the same monastery under different circumstances. Of independent means, they didn't require the sponsorship of a wealthy European monarch. While they lacked the formal credentials of a man like Tischendorf, they gained access to the monastic library by befriending the local monks and treating them as fellow Christians and colleagues (they learned to speak modern Greek before their travels). Having learned Syriac and (eventually) Arabic and Aramaic, the sisters were able to examine the undertext of various palimpsests and discover ancient Christian texts underneath. Among their most spectacular "discoveries" were some of the oldest Syriac biblical texts, which predated by centuries some of the best Greek manuscripts (apart from rare finds like Codex Sinaiticus). Both sisters published critical editions of their "discoveries," as well as accounts of their journeys (both fictional and factual).
(Click here to return to the Colonialism and the age of Bible Hunters page.)