The next time you hear an American Christianist offer some pronouncement on God's will, think of St. Catherine's in the Sinai desert, Christianity's oldest monastery. Imagine the intrigue and faith that's sustained and rocked that place for 1500 years... To imagine that, you'll need this website, where St. Catherine's history, architecture and icons are described and illustrated.


UPDATE, Saturday, October 25, 2008: The collection of ancient manuscripts at St. Catherine's is second only to that at the Vatican.

One of the most important manuscripts in Christianity – the Codex Sinaiticus – was preserved for many centuries at St. Catherine's, and 14 leaves of the Codex, along with fragments, are still archived there, but the bulk of the Codex is now at the British Library in London. The Codex was hand-written between 325 and 350 AD and contains the entire Old and New Testaments in Greek, along with a few books from the Apocrypha. The early date of the Codex and its complete text make it an invaluable resource for establishing the original text of the Bible.

Nowadays, when fundamentalist Christians talk about the Bible, they often refer to something they call "Biblical inerrancy," which is a concept that links Christian faith and practice to a particular view of what the Bible is and represents. A conference of evangelical Christians in 1978 codified inerrancy in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which includes the following assertions (with the highlighting mine):

The authority of Scripture is a key issue for the Christian Church in this and every age. Those who profess faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are called to show the reality of their discipleship by humbly and faithfully obeying God's written Word. To Stray from Scripture in faith or conduct is disloyalty to our Master. Recognition of the total truth and trustworthiness of Holy Scripture is essential to a full grasp and adequate confession of its authority.

The following Statement affirms this inerrancy of Scripture afresh, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial...

Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives...

Yow! Mighty strongly worded – And clearly intended to cut-off-at-the-pass any participle of protest, not to mention inquiry.

The Chicago Statement is widely endorsed by fundamentalists and is incorporated into many statements of faith, including that of the Evangelical Theological Society. The Society's doctrine includes the following formula, "The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs."

But that's the rub, isn't it? (Or at least one of them.) God may have "ghost written" the autographs – the original manuscripts penned or dictated by various priests, kings, prophets, apostles and disciples over the ages – but God neglected to preserve the originals for our edification. Instead, we've got copies, upon which Bible scholars conduct their arcane rites of textural criticism and attempt to reconstruct the text that God Himself originally moved somebody, somewhere to write down.

Biblical textural criticism is the subject of Bart Ehrman's popular survey published in 2005, Misquoting Jesus, which I recently read.

Ehrman describes how his belief in fundamentalist faith flowered in his youth and led him to study at the Moody Bible Institute, a place where he reports that he and other students celebrated 'Bible as their middle name.' From Moody, Ehrman went on to Wheaton College and then Princeton Theological Seminary. At those institutions his fundamentalist faith took a drubbing. He emerged seeing the Bible as a book authored by humans rather than by the Divine.

It's the Bible's incontrovertibly human dimension that Misquoting Jesus describes. Men of good will and of calculated good will and of good will that might have been more efficaciously articulated if they'd had another cup of coffee that morning all copied parchments of scripture onto new parchments, in a process that extended over many hundreds of years and introduced errors and variant readings to the text, which obscure the autographs.

As Ehrman points out, what we need – above all else – are the earliest extant copies of the Bible that we can lay our hands on. Which brings us back to St. Catherine's in the Sinai.

From the 1700s on, scholars collected Bible manuscripts – driven by an intellectual impulse that wasn't so different from the one driving Linnaeus to collect, catalogue and classify biota. Ehrman relates how the German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf traveled afar in pursuit of manuscripts, a quest that paid off when von Tischendorf rediscovered the Codex Sinaiticus at St. Catherine's. There's no doubt the Codex Sinaiticus brings us as close as a single manuscript can to the Biblical autographs that we all esteem and inerrants worship.

Ehrman quotes von Tischendorf's recounting of his finding the Codex:

It was at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the Convent of St. Catherine, that I discovered the pearl of all my researches. In visiting the monastery in the month of May 1844, I perceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket full of old parchments; and the librarian who was a man of information told me that tow heaps of papers like these, mouldered by time, had been already committed to the flames. What was my surprise to find amid this heap of papers a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, which seemed to me to be one of the most ancient that I had ever seen. The authorities of the monastery allowed me to posses myself of a third of these parchments, or about forty three sheets, all the more readily as they were designated for the fire. But I could not get them to yield up possession of the remainder. The too lively satisfaction which I had displayed had aroused their suspicions as to the value of the manuscript. I transcribed a page of the text of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and enjoined on the monks to take religious care of all such remains which might fall their way (Constantin von Tischendorf [1866], When were our gospels written? The Religious Tract Society, London, page 23; quoted in Ehrman, 2005).

The present monks at St. Catherine's take offence at the assertion that their predecessors intended to burn the "mouldered by time" Codex Sinaiticus. They think von Tischendorf stole the Codex from them, although the monastery's official website (which will reward your visit) states the facts more tactfully than that.

This controversy highlights St. Catherine's unique role in expressing Christian faith over the millennia. It's a role that includes God's written word and much more than that.