The Sisters of Sinai

I have just finished reading Janet Soskice’s popularization of the discovery of the famous Sinai palimpsest by Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Smith Gibson (The Sisters of Sinai: How Two lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). The “Hidden Gospels” alluded to in the title refers not to non-canonical texts (as it often does) but to a fourth-century Syriac translation of the canonical gospels hidden under a seventh-century collection of tales of women saints. The palimpsest represents our earliest complete witness to the gospels, albeit in translation, and caused quite a stir upon its publication in the late nineteenth-century.

The Smith twins found the manuscript on a trip to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. Soskice documents the struggles of their various trips to the monastery to work on this and other manuscripts, and their struggles to be taken seriously as scholars in nineteenth-century England, a time when women were not allowed to obtain university degrees. Along for one of the trips to the Sinai were other famous scholars from Cambridge: Rendel Harris, Francis Burkitt, and Robert Bensly. One of the book’s most interesting stories is the infighting that took place among the expedition over the division of labour transcribing the palimpsest and over who would take the glory for the find.

Soskice also discusses the discovery of Codex Sinaiticus by Constantin von Tischendorf, who preceded the twins in his own well-known trip to Sinai and whose suspicious activities in securing Sinaiticus made it difficult for other scholars to gain access to the monastery library. But the twins were involved in other discoveries beyond the Sinai palimpsest. They were instrumental also in recovering and publishing thousands of Syriac manuscripts from Sinai and other locations, and were involved in the discovery of the Hebrew manuscripts from the Cairo genizah.

The book is an enjoyable and recommended read but admittedly has little to do with Christian Apocrypha, though it gives the reader a sense of what tribulations other scholars of the time had to endure to find and publish biblical and non-biblical manuscripts. As it happens, too, among the manuscripts published by the Smiths was another palimpsest, purchased in the Suez but originally hailing from St. Catherine’s, that contains the Protoevangelium of James and the Transitus Mariae (their edition of this manuscript is available HERE).