I went to London yesterday to retrieve a dear friend who was visiting for just a few days en route from Israel to Madrid. In the process I had an unforgettable experience that I had not at all anticipated.
Before I met up with my friend, I had an hour to burn in the King's Cross / St. Pancras region, so I visited the architecturally-hideous British Library. I'm going to a conference there next week, so I wanted to make sure I knew how to get there and such. Most of it is just, you know, a library, but they have an exhibition room with some amazing treasures. First-edition Shakespeare and the only existing document in (what is probably) his own hand? Check. Several copies of the Magna Carta? Check. Handwritten music by Handel, Mozart (sloppy!), Beethoven; handwritten novel editions by Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll; bits of original Leonardo da Vinci; all present. Medieval illuminated manuscripts in profusion (well, relative to the size of the small gallery) and a Gutenberg Bible. The whole thing was very dark and cool and the texts were carefully preserved under layers of plexiglass.
The real treasures, though, and not at all marked unless you read the labels beside them, were two large books over in the 'Sacred Texts' corner. One was Codex Alexandrinus--one of the three oldest extant copies of the full New Testament, though the lowest quality as far as NT textual reconstruction goes. It was neatly laid out, mildly decorated, employing several colors of ink, very readable (for an ancient Greek majuscule) and very pretty. It was open to John 1, and the first verse (before verse divisions!) was laid out in a distinctive red color. The text was actually more readable by far than a lot of the borderline-indecipherable English texts they had on display.
That was way cool. But the other was what I was there to see.
Codex Sinaiticus! The oldest, and probably the best, complete New Testament that we have, as well as much of the Old Testament in Greek! Recovered after much adventure and peril and derring-do by the adventurer-archaeologist Tischendorf! One of the most important copies of the Bible, if not the most important, in the world! And there it was, sitting quietly, with no one remotely interested.
It's a large volume, written on parchment (treated animal skin), bound handsomely in 1/4-inch thick wooden boards with an artfully made flexible spine. The writing is laid out in narrow columns, several per page, all capital Greek letters. Words that are not finished by the end of the line run on to the next. The top of each page, in tremendously small script, names in Greek the book of the NT that you're looking at. There are various little corrections in different handwriting and ink in the margins.
The handwriting is not as open and clear as Alexandrinus, but it is neat and orderly and legible. There are actually paragraphs, of a sort! At certain points, a new idea would begin with the first letter of a line protruding into the left margin. The scribes were even, I noticed, taking pains where they could to make the words end at the line endings (small vowels at the end of lines or abbreviated words) which surprised me.
It was open to the beginning of Hebrews. I peered at it. If it were in English it would have looked something like this:
LONGAGOATMANYTIM
ESANDINMANYWAYS
GODSPOKETOOURFA
THERSBYTHEPROPH
ETSBUTINTHESELA
...and you get the idea. I hovered low over the volume, straining my eyes in the low light, breath misting the plexiglass as I tried to make sense of it. 'Polu...me..ros kai polu...tropos... "Many times and many ways"... word I don't know... that's "God" there... "spoke to the fathers by the prophets..."' It was slow going, but within a minute or so, I was reading Hebrews! The same Hebrews we all know and love. Just exactly the same, really, once you got into it.
I looked around a bit more, stared lovingly at the Codices for a moment more, then checked my watch and got going so as not to be late.
It was not until I was halfway to the Underground station that I actually processed what had just happened. Here was a book that was more than 1,600 years old, written in a confusing format in a dialect of a now-dead language. And yet it was the Bible, just the same as any copy I (or you!) might have lying around the house. God's Word is God's Word, and he has preserved it throughout the centuries, and now I was reading all the way across those centuries from the book of Hebrews just as the church would have known it during the days of Chalcedon.
I don't know how to describe it to you. It probably just sounds impossibly nerdy, and I don't blame you if it does, but it was the most profound spiritual experience I've had in months if not years. I spent the whole Underground ride weeping and laughing under my breath. I'm misting up now as I write about it. The few minutes I spent with this book somehow summed up God's faithfulness to his Church over two milennia, his faithfulness to his Word to preserve it, and his faithfulness to me in bringing me to faith and giving me (O undeserving!) the kind of training needed to be able to read this ancient volume as though it were as perfectly current as the Word remains today.
If this makes no sense still, I can't explain it any better than I've done, except just to say this: if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you can read ancient Greek, this is a pilgrimage you really must make.
(The conference I'm attending next week, by the way, is on the subject of Codex Sinaiticus. Too nerdy to be allowed? Quite possibly. I'm very excited, and I'll bet that a small percentage of my readership are now secretly envious, even if the rest of you think I'm mad.)
So after all that, as I said, I met up with my friend at Russell Square (don't go into phone booths in Russell Square, by the way, unless your life depends on it). We didn't see much there; largely just a very hasty trip through parts of the British Museum, which is massive and jam-packed with things that the British have... er... happened upon. In lands that they have... er... visited. With ships. And armies.
Which means it's an amazing archaeological trove. In several places they casually flank the entrances to hallways with giant lion statues that once flanked great Assyrian gates. They have a reconstruction of a whole (small) Greek temple right there on the premises, with only small gaps in the original stonework. They have all kinds of old artifacts and things from all over the world, including the Asian and African exhibits that we didn't really even touch. It's amazing.
The Rosetta Stone is there, and smaller than you expect. I thought it would be as big as a man, and it's only about the size of a stocky 10-year-old. Three copies of one text: in Hieroglyphic, Demotic (not 'demonic'), and Greek. I only caught about one or two words ('tou basileou') in the weathered, all-capital, spaceless Greek text, but hey, I was still reading the Rosetta Stone, so give me a break.
Then we ate meat pies and drank ale in a pub, and then we came back.
Today, several of us went on a tour of little villages in the area, principally Thaxted. Thaxted is an impossibly picturesque little town with a breathtaking church and a magnificent old windmill, both high on the hill overlooking the town in the valley. We went up, explored around, took pictures (I'll have them, and some of Chelmsford where I live, up soon) and went in the church, which was gorgeous on the inside too and had a list of ministers there reaching all the way back to 1300.
The town of Thaxted has a gorgeous hymn tune named after it, the tune to which 'I Vow to Thee, my Country' is set; the tune comes from 'Jupiter' from The Planets, a suite of music by Gustav Holst, who lived in Thaxted for a period of years. The house he lived at is right in the town centre and has a little plaque on it.
It was great fun, and it somehow felt much more like 'real England' ought to feel than the new suburban sprawl of Chelmsford. Very charming.
On the way back we swung quickly through a very tiny little village. It was quite pretty. We only swung by because the name of the village is Ugley.
No, really.
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3 comments:
I laughed, I cried, I had to repent of envy...you NERD. (so jealous.) :)
I do know what you're getting at. When I was at university, I was assigned to read an excerpt from some European tribal law concerning family. Early medieval stuff (8th or 9th C). As I was reading it, I was suddenly struck by the fact that I was reading a primary source, and that source was incredibly old -- one of the oldest I'd read up to that point. And while I was getting all excited about this, I suddenly realised that the Bible is actually a primary source, and one considerably older than from the 8th or 9th century A.D.
And it still strikes me, from time to time, that it's the ultimate primary source we've got, and that unlike all the others, we don't need to worry about its level of accuracy because of some bias from the Author, and we don't need to wonder if its incomplete, or any of the other concerns that follow historians (and historians-in-training) as they (we) consider primary sources. It really is an amazing thing.
Yes, that's very true. It's such a relief to be able to trust the Scriptures implicitly. It seems to me as though life must be much harder for people who deny inerrancy.
Of course, then you get to throw out the parts you don't like.
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