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The surviving parts of the world's oldest Bible were reunited online Monday, generating excitement among scholars striving to unlock its mysteries.
The Codex Sinaiticus was hand-written by four scribes in Greek on animal hide, known as vellum, in the mid-fourth century around the time of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great who embraced Christianity.
Not all of it has withstood the ravages of time, but the pages that have include the whole of the New Testament and the earliest surviving copy of the Gospels written at different times after Christ's death by the four Evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
The Bible's remaining 800 pages and fragments -- it was originally some 1,400 pages long -- also contain half of a copy of the Old Testament. The other half has been lost.
"The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's greatest written treasures," said Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library.
"This 1,600-year-old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation," he said.
The ancient parchments, which appear almost translucent, are a collection of sections held by the British Library in London, the Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, Egypt, the National Library of Russia and Leipzig University Library in Germany.
Each institution owns different amounts of the manuscript, but the British Library, which digitised the delicate pages of the entire book in London, holds by far the most.
The four-year joint project, which began in 2005 with the aim of "virtually reunifying" and preserving the Bible, as well as undertaking new research into its history, has shed new light on who made it and how it was produced.
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(Agencies)
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本周一，現存最古老的圣經（西奈抄本）在網上“大團圓”，這令那些一直試圖破解其奧秘的學者大為興奮。
四世紀中期，大約在羅馬君士坦丁大帝開始信奉基督教的時候，西奈抄本由四位抄寫員用希臘文寫在動物皮（即羊皮紙）上。
西奈抄本沒能完全抵擋住時間的摧殘，但是保留下來的書頁中包括新約中的全部內容以及最早版本的福音書。這個版本由馬太、馬可、路加和約翰四位福音書作者在基督死后的不同時期撰寫。
圣經中余下的800頁和殘片還包含了舊約的一半內容，另外一半已經丟失了。圣經原書有1400多頁。
大英圖書館西方手稿部部長斯科特·麥克肯德瑞克說：“西奈抄本是世界上最偉大的寫作珍寶之一”。
他說：“這份擁有長達1600年歷史的手稿為人們了解早期基督教的發展打開了一扇窗戶，讓人們能夠得到圣經如何代代相傳的第一手資料，”
這些幾近透明的古老的羊皮紙，分別由倫敦的大英圖書館、埃及西奈的圣凱瑟琳修道院、俄羅斯國立圖書館和德國萊比錫大學圖書館收藏。
每一個機構都擁有不同數量的手稿，但是大英圖書館所保存的手稿數量是迄今以來最多的，它將整本書的每一張脆弱的書頁都做了數字化備份。
該合作項目始于2005年，歷時四年的，目的是“虛擬復合”和保存圣經，并對圣經的歷史進行新的研究。這一項目為研究誰造出了圣經以及圣經是如何產生的問題提供了新的線索。
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（英語點津 陳丹妮編輯） |
