Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus

Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus mostly originating in Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai[1] is an accumulation of sixteen or even eighteen Christian Palestinian Aramaic palimpsest manuscripts containing Old Testament, Gospel and Epistles pericopes of diverse Lectionaries, various unidentified homilies and one by John Chrysostom, hagiographic texts as the Life of Pachomios, the Martyrdom of Philemon Martyrs, and the Catecheses by Cyril of Jerusalem.[2] The manuscripts are recycled parchment material that were erased and reused by the tenth century Georgian scribe Ioane-Zosime for overwriting them with homilies and a Iadgari (979-980 AD). Part of the parchment leaves had been brought by him from the Monastery of Saint Sabas, south of Jerusalem, when he moved to St Catherine’s Monastery and became there librarian.[3][4][5] In the nineteenth century most of the codex was removed from the monastery at two periods. C. Tischendorf took two thirds in 1855 with the Codex Sinaiticus to St Peterburg, now stored in The National Library of Russia,[6][7][8][9] and the remaining third left on a clandestine route and found its way into various European and later also into US collections.[10][11][12][4][2][13] Only from the New Finds of 1975 in the Monastery of Saint Catherine missing folios of some of the manuscripts could be retrieved (Sinai, Georgian NF 19; 71).[14][4][2][15]