Sinaitic Syriac Palimpsest: Old Syriac Gospels

Lewis and her twin sister Margaret Dunlop Gibson visited Sinai with growing expertise in Semitic languages and photography. After Lewis identified the erased Gospel text, a scholarly expedition including Rendel Harris, Robert Bensly, and Francis Burkitt transcribed and photographed it. Reagents and the limitations of early photography helped recover readings but also affected the leaves. The Sinai Palimpsests Project has since used noninvasive multispectral imaging to separate wavelengths and make erased ink more legible. The story is therefore both a nineteenth-century recovery and a twenty-first-century re-reading, not a single moment of discovery.

A palimpsest is reused parchment: the lower Gospel hand was deliberately effaced, the leaves rearranged, and a later Syriac text written across them. Faint strokes, offset stains, holes, folds, and competing lines make reading difficult. The underwriting represents separate Gospels rather than a surviving continuous harmony, though its wording is related to early Syriac traditions associated with Tatian and Ephrem. Because the recycled leaves no longer preserve their first binding intact, reconstruction depends on Gospel sequence, quire evidence, earlier photographs, and imaging. What survives is substantial but far from a pristine four-Gospel codex.

Palaeographers usually date the lower Gospel writing to the late fourth or early fifth century, while the overtext belongs centuries later. The translation itself may preserve earlier Syriac wording, but the date of a copy is not automatically the date of its underlying version. Syriac-speaking Christianity developed east of the Roman Mediterranean in sustained contact with Greek, local oral traditions, harmonized Gospels, and later the Peshitta. Saint Catherine's dry environment preserved the reused parchment, yet its Sinai custody does not establish the location where the lower text was originally copied or translated.