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The Sisters of Sinai - How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels
Agnes and Margaret Smith were not your typical Victorian scholars or adventurers. Female, middle-aged, and without university degrees or formal language training, the twin sisters nevertheless made one of the most important scriptural discoveries of their time: the earliest known copy of the Gospels in ancient Syriac, the language that Jesus spoke.
Armed with a crash course in Syriac, a dialect of Jesus’ own Aramaic, and 1,000 photographic plates, the sisters made their way across the forbidding Sinai wilderness. It was high adventure, although for wealthy Victorians, the circumstances were more comfortable than for the ancient Israelites, as the sisters’ retinue included a butler, a cook and a team of Bedouin porters carrying tents, bedding, a fully-equipped kitchen and 40 days’ worth of fresh food.
For example, the late 19th century saw great advances in textual criticism, leading up to the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus. But The Sisters of Sinai offers barely three pages on the textual contributions of the Sinai Palimpset, and only brief references to how those discoveries related to the general flow of textual criticism of the age. As another example, we learn that the sisters played an important role in Solomon Schechter’s discovery of the manuscript horde in the Cairo Genizah, but surprisingly, there is no mention of perhaps the two most important documents discovered by Schechter, the tenth century and the 12th-century fragments of the so-called Damascus Document that ultimately came to be identified as a foundational work of the Qumran Essenes.

Arriving at St. Catherine’s, the sisters quickly ingratiated themselves with their hosts and asked to examine the monastery’s most ancient manuscripts. One codex in particular caught Agnes’s attention. Filthy, with its leaves stuck together, it had probably not been touched for centuries. At first, it appeared to be an unexciting document, a synopsis of the lives of female saints, of which there were many known copies. But on close examination, Agnes discovered that it was a palimpset—that is, a document over-written upon an even more ancient document, and the latter turned out to be the oldest copy heretofore discovered of the Four Gospels in Syriac.
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/r...


The Remarkable Story of the Sinai Palimpsest
Janet Soskice recounts the incredible discovery of the Sinai Palimpsest, one of the most important ancient Biblical manuscripts ever found
Janet Soskice then explains how Agnes, while studying one of the ancient Biblical manuscripts, identified the palimpsest. She found that a later and relatively common account of the lives of the female saints was actually written over an older and much more important text. This older text, writes Janet Soskice, was written in Syriac and was eventually discovered to be the oldest account of the Four Gospels written in this ancient language. As far as ancient Biblical artifacts go, the palimpsest was an astonishing discovery that would eventually become known as the Sinai Palimpsest.
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/d...

When, then, Agnes and Margaret arrived at St. Catherine’s, having traveled nine days by camel through the desert, they were specifically intent on examining the contents of this closet. At Harris’s suggestion, they had also come prepared to photograph manuscript finds they would not have the opportunity to transcribe on site — preparations that give evidence of both their seriousness of purpose and their expectations of success. And successful they were. Handling a dirty wad of vellum, sharp-eyed Agnes saw that its text, a racy collection of the lives of female saints, was written over another document. When close scrutiny revealed the words “of Matthew,” and “of Luke,” she realized she was holding a palimpsest containing the Gospels. Written in Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic Jesus had spoken, the Sinai Palimpsest, or Lewis Codex, as it came to be called, would prove to date to the late fourth century; the translation it preserved was even older, dating from the late second century A.D. — “very near the fountainhead” of early Christianity.

Soskice follows the aftershocks of this extraordinary discovery as they reverberate both through the twins’ lives and through the world of biblical scholarship; among other things, the new codex’s Book of Mark lacked the final verses describing Christ’s Resurrection.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/bo...