Codex Sinaiticus, "Look Inside the Book" 4th Century style.

An Associated Press wire story reports that “The surviving pages of the world’s oldest Christian Bible have been reunited — digitally. The early work known as the Codex Sinaiticus has been housed in four separate locations across the world for more than 150 years. But starting Monday, it became available for perusal on the Web.”

Now scholars, and others, including, well, you, can see it all, digitally, on the Codex Sinaiticus website. As the site modestly proclaims, “Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world.”

About the book itself, the AP continues, “As it survives today, Codex Sinaiticus comprises just over 400 large leaves of prepared animal skin, each of which measures 15 inches by 13.5 inches. It is the oldest book that contains a complete New Testament and is only missing parts of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. The 4th-century book, written in Greek, has been digitally reunited in a project involving groups from Britain, Germany, Russia and Egypt, which each possessed parts of the 1,600-year-old manuscript.”

The AP quotes Scott McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library as saying it “offers a window into the development of early Christianity and firsthand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation.” And, McKendrick goes on to say, the Codex is also “a landmark in the history of the book, as it is arguably the oldest large-bound book to have survived.”

According to the Codex’s website, “The four principal partners in the Codex Sinaiticus Project are the institutions which hold parts of the manuscript: The British Library, Leipzig University Library, St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, and the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg.”

Codex Sinaiticus name means “book from the Sinai”, and was originally found in the Greek Orthodox St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in the Sinai desert. How it came to be in four different locations is part of the research the Codex Sinaiticus Project is currently undertaking.