The Codex Sinaiticus dates to the 4th century. It's our most complete early Bible manuscript, the most substantial early collection of what became codified as the New Testament. The irony? This early collection was divided up and parts are held in four locations across the globe (London, Leipzig, Sinai and St. Petersburg), and as such were not available for contiguous study. That changes on Thursday, when http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/goes live. From the 24 Hour Museum site linked above:

The initial website launch on July 24 2008 will mean that 25 per cent of the manuscript’s 800 extant pages and over 40 fragments will be available online. This will be the first time that some pages have been seen together in one place for centuries.

As well as images of the actual pages, the website will have a transcription of the manuscript’s contents along with all corrections added throughout its long history. The site will also include many interactive features, allowing scholars and enthusiasts alike to perform research and access the manuscript’s features.

This is a gold mine for students of the early church! Texts that scholars once had to beg to get access to will now be available in our browsers with a click... Hey, 25% is a start! They'll be adding to it over the next year, with the goal of having 100% up by next July.

So... where's the controversy?

Common sense and textual analysis agree on one thing. If the earliest existing source or version of an ancient book we have does not contain material that is included in later versions of the same source material, chances are that additional material was added to the book later.

This is important in the case of Sinaiticus for a few reason. The most striking? The early version of Mark's Gospel (which is the earliest gospel in the Bible)included in Sinaiticus ends with the empty tomb. There are no post resurrection appearances by Jesus in Sinaiticus' Mark. This has been well-known and well documented by scholars, who have for at least the last 200 years noted that the end of Mark was added on later, but it has not been common knowledge. Hey, not everybody reads stuff like Helmut Koester's "Ancient Christian Gospels" (It's dry stuff, cataloging the chronological development of the books of the bible early mss by early mss).

This stark ending to Mark is sure to stir up discussion over what shape the books we now have took originally. And this entire early Bible has a different shape than the one we know, as the New Testament includes the "Epistle to Barnabas" and the "Shepherd of Hermas" two early books later squeezed out of the Bible as the lineup of books was codified.

All of which raises the question of literality. If you are claiming the Bible is inerrant... to which version are you referring?

One person commented in a story online that the early Christians didn't mean for those books (Hermas and Barnabas) to be in the Bible, they just collected them with the "Biblical" books to save money. That's manufacturing conjecture, people. Occam's Razor, anyone?