现存世界最古老圣经数字版面世

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.

本周一，现存最古老的圣经（西奈抄本）在网上“大团圆”，这令那些一直试图破解其奥秘的学者大为兴奋。

四世纪中期，大约在罗马君士坦丁大帝开始信奉基督教的时候，西奈抄本由四位抄写员用希腊文写在动物皮（即羊皮纸）上。

西奈抄本没能完全抵挡住时间的摧残，但是保留下来的书页中包括新约中的全部内容以及最早版本的福音书。这个版本由马太、马可、路加和约翰四位福音书作者在基督死后的不同时期撰写。

圣经中余下的800页和残片还包含了旧约的一半内容，另外一半已经丢失了。圣经原书有1400多页。

大英图书馆西方手稿部部长斯科特·麦克肯德瑞克说：“西奈抄本是世界上最伟大的写作珍宝之一”。

他说：“这份拥有长达1600年历史的手稿为人们了解早期基督教的发展打开了一扇窗户，让人们能够得到圣经如何代代相传的第一手资料，”

这些几近透明的古老的羊皮纸，分别由伦敦的大英图书馆、埃及西奈的圣凯瑟琳修道院、俄罗斯国立图书馆和德国莱比锡大学图书馆收藏。

每一个机构都拥有不同数量的手稿，但是大英图书馆所保存的手稿数量是迄今以来最多的，它将整本书的每一张脆弱的书页都做了数字化备份。

该合作项目始于2005年，历时四年的，目的是“虚拟复合”和保存圣经，并对圣经的历史进行新的研究。这一项目为研究谁造出了圣经以及圣经是如何产生的问题提供了新的线索。

Vocabulary:

Codex Sinaiticus: 西奈抄本，现存最古老的完整版《圣经》

shed new light: 进一步提供事实，做新的阐述

holistic: 全盘的，全面的，整体的