It is one of the divinely foreordained synchronicities of history that the mountain which gave to the Israelites and, therefore, to all modern nations the Ten Commandments would be the place where the oldest copy of the Aramaic gospels would be discovered, thus becoming the source of the Original Gospels as well. When Saint Sylvia journeyed to Mt. Sinai during the reign of Theodosius between A.D. 385 and 388, she speaks of the "little church" which, though so small, "has of itself great grace. When this woman traveler visited the monastery, it was less than three centuries since John the Apostle died. The Monastery of Saint Catherine is one of great antiquity. Situated on the isolated Sinai Peninsula in the shadow of Mt. Horeb, it is among the oldest and most venerable monasteries in Christendom.

It was on Mt. Sinai in February 1892 that Mrs. Agnes Smith Lewis and her sister, Mrs. Margaret Gibson, made a sensational discovery. These sisters were quite remarkable. To begin with, these Scottish sisters were nearly identical twins. Women in nineteenth century England rarely chose to explore foreign lands. Exploration was usually the occupation of men. These two women were exceptional. Both of these twin sisters could speak Modern Greek with fluency, and Mrs. Lewis, who also spoke Arabic and Hebrew, made special preparation for this trip by studying Syriac (Aramaic), becoming thoroughly acquainted with the oldest Syriac manuscripts at Cambridge, which prepared her for the discovery she was to make at Mt. Sinai.

The most ancient of these manuscripts were kept in dark closets, and the damp leaves, which "had evidently been unturned for centuries," could often be separated only by manipulation with the fingers or by the steam of the kettle. One day in the month of February, while searching through the rare, old, unbound parchments which had probably not even been looked at for centuries, they came across a Syriac palimpsest of 358 pages whose leaves were glued together by time and so old that the "least force used to separate them made them crumble."

A palimpsest is a manuscript on which an earlier text has been effaced and the vellum or parchment reused for another. It was a common practice, particularly in medieval ecclesiastical circles, to rub out an earlier piece of writing by means of washing or scraping the manuscript, in order to prepare it for a new text. The motive for making palimpsests seems to have been largely economic--reusing parchment was cheaper than preparing new skin. The papyrus book (codex) did not come into use before the first century of our era and does not become common until two or three centuries later. The earliest books were made possible by a process of preparing the skins of sheep or calves so that they could be written upon on both sides. This process for preparing the skins was developed between 197-158 B.C. In fact, the technical distinction between parchment and vellum is that the former is made from sheepskin and the latter from calf. The finest works of antiquity are those written in gold and silver on the fine purple skins of vellum, especially that come to us from the third to the sixth centuries.

On the palimpsest the sisters discovered, the overwriting bore the date A.D. 778, and proved to be a very entertaining account of the lives of female saints. The preface to this read:

Barely visible beneath this writing was other greatly blurred writing of much greater antiquity. Though some of the words were wholly obliterated, Mrs. Lewis detected the words "Evangelion," "Mathi." "Luca," and jumped to the correct conclusion that this older writing must be an ancient Syriac text of the four gospels. They photographed this work entirely, and left the convent on the eighth of March. Having reached home, they developed their thousand photographs and showed them to various scholars.

They were unable to find anyone who could make out the blurred writing or saw that it was of any special importance until Mr. Francis Crawford Burkitt, a young scholar at Cambridge, took the photographs and showed them to Prof. R.L. Bensly, who was just finishing a new edition of the oldest Syriac version of the four gospels (the Cureton.) Bensly recognized at once that this was another copy much like the Cureton, but very much more complete and older. Almost immediately it was arranged that Professor R.L.Bensly, Mr.F.C. Burkitt, and Prof. Rendel Harris would accompany the discoverers back to Sinai where they would accurately transcribe the manuscript word for word.

Dr. Bensley's wife accompanied her husband to the monastery in the Sinai. This book is her account of their journey. In an excerpt from the introduction, Mrs Bensly tell us, "We were quite young, only just married, when we first planned to visit the lands of the Bible together. We read the accounts of Eastern travelers, we bought maps and guide-books, and we saluted each other with Bedouin phrases and gestures. My husband had been for some time an eager student of Oriental customs and languages; thirty years later, he had become one of the first scholars in Europe; yet, that early desire had not been fulfilled. The education of our children, stress of work, lack of money, the many changes and chances of this mortal life, had kept us at home. In the spring of 1892, Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, two Scottish ladies, known as great travelers, brought from the Convent of St. Catarina on Mount Sinai wonderful accounts and photographs of early Biblical MSS., especially of a Syriac palimpsest of most venerable appearance.

In olden times, before the invention of paper mill and printing press, most books were written on parchment, a preparation of goat or sheepskin. This being expensive and not always easy to get, industrious writers were sometimes driven to use what we might now be inclined to recall 'waste paper;' they took an old book, which they did not care to read any longer, or of which they possessed several copies, they scrubbed and scraped the writing off the leathern leaves, and then proceeded to write their new book on the old pages. But their predecessors had used very good ink, which would not be entirely effaced, and we can often trace the earlier writing, in faint yellow marks, between the lines, and even between the words and letters of the later work; such a doubly-filled volume is called a palimpsest.

In the early summer months, Professor Bensly's time was fully occupied with University business; but in the Long Vacation he carefully examined the photographs brought by Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, in company with his friend and former pupil, Mr. F. C. Burkitt, of Trinity College. I sat in the room where the two scholars, with their heads close together, were deciphering some of the under-writing, and I well remember their exclamations of gladness and triumph when they found it to contain the earliest Syriac translation of our Gospels, made in the Second century, and known hitherto only from fragments and quotations. Though the Evangelists wrote in Greek, Syriac was the native language of our Lord and His disciples, and whenever the actual words of Christ are quoted: 'ephphatha,' 'talitha cumi,' 'eli, eli, lama sabachthani,' they are not in Greek, but in Syriac (or, rather in Aramaic, of which Syriac is a dialect.) This early version, then, is invaluable, as giving us more nearly than perhaps any other writing, the very sound of the words which our Lord uttered.

Both Mr. Bensly and Mr. Burkitt saw that it would be impossible to recover more than a few lines here and there from the photographs alone. They at once resolved to go and see the original; their wives claimed the privilege of accompanying them. The ladies above mentioned volunteered to go a second time, to assist the party with their experience in Eastern travel and with their knowledge of modern Greek, the language of the monks on Sinai; and the six travelers arranged to start about Christmas, the early part of the year being the most favorable season for crossing the desert. A seventh traveler, a friend of Mrs. Lewis, Mr. Rendell Harris, of Clare College, joined us later on, at Suez. We all felt the importance of the undertaking; we all valued the privilege of assisting, in some way, at the recovery of such a treasure. To my husband and myself, this journey was also the realization of early dreams, the fulfillment of a never quite-forgotten fancy: and now as I sit in darkness and solitude, and remember that wonderful time, so different from the even tenor of our English lives, it seems to recede again into the realms of romance: I think of the boundless freedom of the desert, of its golden light and eternal sunshine; I listen to the sound of falling waters and to the waving of the palm trees, where I wander hand in hand with my beloved, and I hardly know: Is it a dream of the past, or is it a vision of the future?"

Arriving at the convent February 8, 1893, they found to their great delight that the experienced experts could easily trace the words in the underwriting, and after forty days of steady labor they were able to return to England bearing with them an almost complete copy of this precious document. The copy was completed in 1895. The special thing that makes this Syriac text so valuable is that it gives us the version of the New Testament used in Palestine at that early age, written in the Eastern branch of the very language which Jesus and His Apostles spoke. Dr. Agnes Smith Lewis made five more trips to Sinai after the discovery mentioned above and made several other finds of special interest. It was F.C. Burkitt, however, who took on the task of researching and bringing the discoveries of the Syriac Bible into the context of the formal Christian theology schools of the West.