In the Shadow of Sinai: Stories of Travel and Biblical Research

In the Shadow of Sinai: A Story of Travel and Research from 1895 to 1897, and How the Codex was Found: A Narrative of Two Visits to Sinai from Mrs Lewis’s Journals, 1892–1893 – published here in a new one-volume edition – were originally published in the late 1890s, to great acclaim. Taught the rudiments of photography, and having studied various languages, including Aramaic, they organized a caravan from Cairo to the Monastery of St. Catherine, at the foot of Mt Sinai. In the library they discovered, and photographed, most of the text of the hitherto undiscovered Syriac version of the Four Gospels, in a fourth-century palimpsest. Their work was widely acknowledged, and they were popular members of the Cambridge set of this period. … For the Scholar, this book is a welcome reprint of two worthy texts, with their focus on the vagaries and excitement of historical, biblical research. For the Traveller, it is a record of the hardships and rewards of travel one hundred years ago. And for the Christian, there lies within the discovery of a very remarkable variant of the reported spoken word of Jesus Christ (Matthew xii:36).