I've now spent the more relaxing hours of Christmas and Boxing Day reading Sisters of Sinai, by Janet Soskice. It's the story of two women, twins born in Irvine in 1843. Their early years were spent in Kilbarchan before moving to London and then Cambridge. It's the story of two Bible-hunters, scholarly sleuths with brilliant linguistic gifts matched only by a capacity for hard work that's nothing short of stunning. Combine that with an adventurous appetite for travel, personal courage, infuriating determination and sheer intellectual obstinacy and you begin to get the picture.

The book reads like a novel but is deeply rooted in meticulous research; it deals with an area of my own interest over many years, the textual criticism and reception of the New Testament; it champions two women whose story deserves more than one telling while exposing the sheer weight of prejudice and social convention against which they (and subsequent generations of women) have had to struggle towards recognition. My enjoyment of this book goes alongside the similar feelings I had on first reading Stephen Neil's History of New Testament Interpretation which places the discovery of key NT manuscripts in the 19th century against the larger background of palaeontology and archaeology.

Janet Soskice is a philosophical theologian in Cambridge University. This isn't her usual kind of book at all - but if it has been a mere diversion then it has been a very worthwhile one. This isn't a review of the book. It's a plug for the book;

if you care about how the New Testament text has been shaped by scholarly investigation, wheeling and dealing both honest and dishonest

if you care about the marginalisation of women in the academy and the sheer injustice of gender discrimination that arises from male sponsored small-mindedness

if you care about the stories of Scottish people who made their mark against the odds

if you care about those who care about ancient cultures, and who respect and learn deeply from cultures unsettlingly dissimilar to our own

and yes, if you care about history as the truth that isn't always told, but should be - get this book and read it.

(You might want to wait for the paperback - due late Spring 2010) 

Here's just one example of why this is such a readable and important book. Soskice is helping us understand the initial collision but eventual collusion of two radically opposed views of sacred text, what it is and what we do with it. The Scottish Presbyterian widows, for whom the Bible is the text not the artefact, encounter in St Catherine's monastery, a procession of Orthodox monks following behind a jewel studded Bible, complete with incense and acts of adoration. The black, leather bound bible of Protestantism which the Scottish Presbyterian sisters revered, is contrasted with an Orthodox work of religious art, executed in gorgeous colour, copied with painstaking neatness, jewel studded and bound in the most expensive material, and then handled only with elaborate ceremony and unabashed adoration by the community.

"The monks at Sinai did not just honour but venerated their icons, regarding them almost as members of their community at prayer. For related reasons they also reverenced the physical form of their bibles and religious manuscripts, as well as the contents. For the Western visitors, the idea of processing with a Bible whose covers were studded with jewels and whose pages were illumined with gold, of incensing it and bowing before it was abhorrent. But to the monks, the Bible processed in church and embellished with leaf of gold was, metonymically, the Word incarnate present to their community...

Prior to the invention of printing, the reproduction of a book was a costly, lengthy and- for the monastic scribes - a devotional matter...For those who first wrote and read the manuscripts at Sinai, the formed strokes of ink that made up the words of the Gospels in a handwritten manuscript, the words laid laboriously letter by well formed letter on sheets of precious vellum, or the paints laid on wooden boards that were the images of saints, were emblematic of a God who indwelt the physical world as man."

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

She is speaking here (University of Victoria BC) next month - I will look forward to the lectures after this plug!

[Baptist Bookworm]

Hi - thanks for the recommendation... I'll be visiting St Catherine's Monastery in a few weeks' time, so I've ordered the book to read when I'm out there.

[Jim Gordon]

You'll enjoy the lecture I'm sure Bob. And Simon, I am now teetering on the brink of one of the seven deadly sins - but you enjoy your visit - are you on sabbatical?

[Bob MacDonald]

I see that the four lectures are based on this book - and I found it here in a local bookshop today - what a delightful style!