The discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus at the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai in 1859 was a major archaeological event. Created 1600 years ago, it contains the earliest complete copy of the New Testament, and, arguably, the entire Bible, making it the direct ancestor of all subsequent editions of the Bible. How this priceless treasure came to be, how it managed to survive for so long, and what’s next for this cornerstone of Western civilization is the absorbing story Scot McKendrick spins in In a Monastery Library.
The fabrication and binding of the Codex was, as McKendrick shows, a hugely ambitious project necessitating a complex, time-consuming, and costly production process. Separate leaves of the Codex now reside in Egypt, Russia, Germany, and England, and the history of its dispersal is as intriguing as the story of its origin. McKendrick ends with a look at the book’s future, detailing plans to bring the surviving pages back together and to make them available digitally. The only book to accessibly relate the dramatic tale of this rare artifact, In a Monastery Library is a bracing account of a critical piece of world history.