When I was at the SBL National Meeting in November, my friend at the Hendrickson booth provided a review copy of Codex Sinaiticus: New Perspectives on the Ancient Biblical Manuscript.

The book is a collection of 22 papers given at the 2009 conference on Codex Sinaiticus that corresponded with the release of high-quality images of the codex at CodexSinaiticus.com.

While I have read (and enjoyed) all of the essays, I will not recount all of them here. Instead I’ll talk about the volume as a whole.

The essays are divided into five sections, including:

1. Historical Setting
2. The Septuagint
3. Early Christian Writings
4. Modern Histories of Codex Sinaiticus
5. Codex Sinaiticus Today

For my interests, I was thrilled to see papers focusing on the LXX of Sinaiticus (Section 2) as well as discussion on the text of Hermas (Section 3). I was familiar with most of the larger issues in the Modern Histories section, though the essays contained particulars that I did not know.

I read Section 5, Codex Sinaiticus Today, with interest because it discusses issues having to do with the digitization, transcription, and reconstruction of the codex. While I appreciate the difficulty of the project and what it achieved, I wonder how it might’ve proceeded differently if they’d been able to release iteratively instead of as a complete piece.

All in all, the book is excellent — highly recommended if you’d like a deeper dive into the codex itself, its history, and its reception. Here are the basics:

• Title: Codex Sinaiticus: New Perspectives on the Ancient Biblical Manuscript
• Editors: Scot McKendrick, David Parker, Amy Myshrall, Cillian O’Hogan
• Publisher: The British Library and Hendrickson
• Date: 2015
• Pages: xix, 320 (incl. index)

Note that Hendrickson has PDF of the front matter (20 pgs) online.