The Ark of the Wilderness prepares to share its treasures online - St Catherine's Mount Sinai enters the digital age

St Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai
(c) Berthold Werner; published under a creative commons licence
(source: Wikimedia Commons)

One of the world’s oldest Christian monasteries, commonly known as
St Catherine’s Mount Sinai, is about to enter the twenty-first century by allowing scholars to read its digitalised manuscripts online.

More properly known as the Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai, its world-famous library is home to the second largest collection of early codices and manuscripts after the Vatican Library. St Catherine’s has also been in continuous use as a monastery for seventeen centuries, making it as ancient, if not more so, as the equally famous Monastery of St Antony, founded by the father of monasticism himself.

According to James Purtill, writing for the Egypt Independent, St Catherine’s Texan-born Librarian, Father Justin Sinaites, is currently in the process of digitalising all the monastery’s extremely important manuscripts, ‘which up until now have been kept under lock and key.’ These texts will soon be available on the internet for any scholar wishing to study them – quite a change from the days when it took academics, pilgrims, and relic hunters, over ten days to reach St Catherine’s from Suez. These digitalised copies of the monastery's manuscripts will also be kept in a technically advanced and specially constructed library, which should be fully operational in about five years’ time.

Purtill went on to write that the monastery’s present Archbishop, called Damianos, who was elected 39 years ago, is fully supportive of Father Justin’s efforts to use digital technology and the internet in furthering the community’s ‘ancient goals to study and preserve the manuscripts’. The article also mentioned Father Justin’s observation that ‘the monastery stuck deep in the Sinai mountains was once considered one of the safer places in the Holy Roman Empire. In internet terms, it was a backup server, and they sent their most valuable manuscripts there. The Emperor Justinian I sent 50 Greek families to defend and feed the monks. These families have become the modern Jabaliya Bedouin tribe.’

The Monastery of St Catherine’s possesses copies of the Achtiname, an extremely ancient and historically important document in which Muhammad is claimed to have bestowed his protection upon the monastery. In a well known act of nineteenth century skulduggery, though, the monastic library’s most prized possession, known as the Codex Sinaiticus, was taken – some would say ‘stolen’, though others contend that it was legitimately removed – by the buccaneer archaeologist and Biblical scholar, Konstantin von Tischendorff. (Some claim that von Tischendorff got the then librarian drunk and purchased the Codex for a bottle of Schnapps!)

This Codex, which is now fragmented and housed in four separate locations, including the British Library, is the world’s oldest near complete copy of the Bible – dated to the fourth century. In the 1970s further ancient codices came to light under the floor of St Catherine’s library, whilst a previously unseen fragment of the Codex Sinaiticus – containing text from the Book of Joshua – was discovered in the monastery's library during research carried out in 2009.

The great monastic complex of St Catherine’s Mount Sinai is also home to some of the world’s earliest and most beautiful works of Christian art. The best collection of early icons as well as liturgical objects, chalices and reliquaries, and church buildings are to be found in this ancient monastery. Some of St Catherine’s rarest icons date to the fifth and sixth centuries – thankfully, the Byzantine Iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries never reached the wilderness of Sinai! Despite the fact that the monastery is Orthodox, it owns several works of art that are Western in style – probably created by Latin monks and Crusaders who were attached to St Catherine’s prior to the Great Schism and during the Middle Ages.

Although many of the Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai’s small community of desert monks shy away from having their world shattered by the intrusions of the internet, it seems that Father Justin is really excited that this holy monastery will soon be opening a state of the art digitalised library. Whilst preserving its geographical isolation, St Catherine’s, he said, would be “keeping these texts for the whole world” – a world that is now only a click of a mouse away. In fact, the Texan-born monk is so excited about the Monastery’s new online and digital venture that he plans to blog about it! According to Father Justin, “These days everyone has a blog” – and as I pointed out last year, blogging seems to be a particularly attractive means of communication amongst the desert fathers of today!

To read James Purtill's article, called "In St Catherine, monastery seeks permanence through technology", please visit the Egypt Independent

To visit the official website for the Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai, please click here.