Did the church really safeguard the bible for us?

[Guest Kurt]

Agnes Smith Lewis(1843–1926)

"There, in a dark closet, she (Agnes) found a Syriac manuscript. According to her own account, “it had a forbidding look, for it was very dirty, and its leaves were nearly all stuck together through their having remained unturned” for centuries. It was a palimpsest manuscript of which the original text had been erased and the pages rewritten with a Syriac text about female saints. However, Agnes Smith Lewis spotted some of the writing underneath and the words “of Matthew,” “of Mark,” or “of Luke” at the top. What she had in her hands was an almost complete Syriac codex of the four Gospels! Scholars now believe that this codex was written in the late fourth century."

How the Codex was Found: A Narrative of Two Visits to Sinai, from Mrs. Lewis's Journals 1892-1893

A translation of the four Gospels, from the Syriac of the Sinaitic palimpsest