MORE SYRIAC MANUSCRIPTS DISCOVERED - Conclusion

 The second manuscript that has survived to our day is the Sinaitic Syriac. Its discovery is linked with the adventurous twin sisters mentioned at the start of this article. Although Agnes did not have a university degree, she learned eight foreign languages, one of the Syriac. In 1892, Agnes made a remarkable discovery in the monastery of St. Catherine in Egypt. 

There, in a dark closet, she found a Syriac manuscript. According to her own account, "it had a forbidding look, for it was very dirty, and its leaves were nearly all stuck together through their having remained unturned" for centuries. It was a palimpsest manuscript of which the original text had been erased and the pages rewritten with a Syriac text written about female saints. However, Agnes spotted some of the writing underneath and the words "of Matthew," "of Mark," or "of Luke" at the top. What she had in her hands was an almost complete Syriac codex of the four Gospels! Scholars now believe that this codex was written in the fourth century. 

The Sinaitic Syriac is considered one of the most important Biblical manuscripts discovered, right along with such Greek manuscripts as the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. It is now generally believed that both the Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts are extant copies of old Syriac Gospels dating from the second or early third century. 

Next time: THE WORD OF GOD ENDURES

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