The Search for Bible Truth Bible Hunters

Egypt.

The setting for a unique and historic quest.

The quest to find ancient scriptures in support of the largest

religion in the world: Christianity.

At stake, the faith of millions with the Bible at its heart.

But there are deep divisions between those who consider the Bible

to be the absolute word of God

and those who take a less literal view of its teachings.

200 years ago, for the first time, the historical story of Jesus

and the reliability of New Testament gospels came under attack.

What historians discovered was that the texts on which

Christianity were based were not reliable.

They weren't historically authentic.

And that meant what price the word of God?

Defenders of the faith believed the answer lay in Egypt,

a dynamic hub of early Christianity,

and a potential source of ancient biblical manuscripts.

I'm Jeff Rose, an archaeologist and historian,

and I am fascinated by Egypt and its biblical treasures.

I'm following in the footsteps of the Bible hunters,

men and women searching for ancient manuscripts in support

of the Jesus story in the New Testament.

They rediscovered the oldest bibles in the world.

But what they uncovered wasn't exactly what they expected to find.

The Bible hunters' quest would challenge how the world saw

the Bible and whether it truly was the word of God.

The story of the Bible hunters begins in Germany in the early 1830s.

German historians and theologians were heading for the country's

great university cities of Leipzig and Tubingen.

They were centres of a dispute about one of the key foundations

of the Christian faith.

European scholars were locked in a heated debate

about the reliability and the authority of the Bible.

For centuries, devout Christians had believed that the Bible was

the unchangeable word of God.

The Bible consists of the Old Testament, traditionally ascribed to

Moses, and the New Testament, with its 27 books, including the four

gospels recounting the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Suddenly, these sacred scriptures were being challenged.

This begins with the Old Testament,

so first of all you have people using the word myth to

describe things like Genesis and the creation and the flood

and then, slightly later, you have David Fredrick Strauss.

David Strauss boldly published a book that doubted

the truth of the New Testament.

He was the first scholar to argue that the miracle stories

attributed to Jesus - Christ walking on water

or the feeding of the 5,000 - were mythical.

It's absolutely predictable that what Strauss wrote would have caused

outrage but Strauss himself seemed genuinely surprised that people were

so angry and he just didn't have the guts to go through with these ideas.

He himself became a kind of outcast and tried writing much more

conservative texts to recover his reputation but the public in both

Germany and Britain were genuinely outraged by what he'd written.

Devout Christians dismissed Strauss' attack

on the miracle stories as heretical.

It was more difficult to counter the claim made by scholars

like Strauss that the Bible text itself was unreliable.

In the early days of the Bible, of course, there were no printing

presses, so the biblical text was transmitted by human beings

writing out the text and copying it again, and again,

and again and again.

And that inevitably leads to errors creeping into the process.

Therefore, Strauss and others claimed,

the Bible text couldn't be the exact and unchanged word of God.

What critical historians discovered was that the texts on which

Christianity were based were not reliable.

They weren't historically authentic.

And that meant what price the word of God?

If you can't trust the texts in which these things

are transmitted, you can't trust your own religious foundations.

This was dynamite for the majority of 19th-century Christians.

Scholars had the audacity to challenge the very word of God.

Constantin Tischendorf, an ambitious Bible scholar in the German

city of Leipzig, was alarmed by the challenge to the faith.

He was an expert in Ancient Greek,

the language in which the original Bible text was written.

When the first printed Bibles were made,

the oldest available manuscripts in Greek were from the 12th century,

over a thousand years after the life of Jesus.

Tischendorf would search for the earliest Bible texts to

show that the Bible had a solid historic foundation.

For the Christian faith, the stakes could not be higher.

Nothing in theology is as important as the careful study of the oldest

manuscripts of the New Testament to prove their genuineness.

I will reconstruct if possible the exact text of the Bible

as it came from the pen of the sacred writer.

Tischendorf left Leipzig on an epic journey across Europe.

Tischendorf the Bible expert had become a Bible hunter.

In 1844, he finally reached the port of Alexandria, the Gateway to Egypt.

Egypt in the first centuries of Christianity is a great Christian

centre and it's this reputation that leads scholars like Tischendorf

to believe that if we are going to find those early manuscripts

of the New Testament anywhere, we're most likely to find them in Egypt.

How happy I was when we anchored.

But what intense noise I was greeted by when I set foot onshore.

But Tischendorf didn't linger long.

He travelled 140 miles south to see the pyramids of Giza.

By the early nineteenth century Egypt is drawing explorers

from all of the European states. They see these huge

monuments above the surface and connect them to events in history.

So the pyramids themselves are said to have been built by Abraham

or are said to be the granaries that Joseph built in Egypt.

Some people argue that the Sphinx has the face of Noah.

What these pyramids must have witnessed over the millennia......

The Pharaohs.

Joseph and his brothers.

Here I was, in awe of this ancient mystery.

Tischendorf spent a day at Giza then headed west

to a cluster of Christian monasteries several days'

journey into the Nitric desert near Beheira.

Egypt had some of the oldest

monasteries in the world, known for their ancient libraries.

Tischendorf knew that the English collector, Lord Robert Curzon,

had visited the very same monastery six years earlier.

Curzon bought dozens of rare Christian manuscripts from the monks.

Perhaps there were more to be found.

The world of the Bible hunters was quite small and news travelled fast.

Tischendorf came here in the footsteps of Curzon

but by then the monks were spoiled by Lord Curzon's gold,

with which poor Tischendorf couldn't compete.

Tischendorf found no Greek Bible texts in his first expedition.

But he wasn't about to give up.

Tischendorf now turned his attention to the bustling bazaars of Cairo.

For weeks, he scoured the book stalls

and libraries for biblical manuscripts.

Again, nothing of interest showed up.

Tischendorf had one last avenue to explore - the Greek Orthodox church.

They run a monastery at the foot of mount Sinai with

an unexplored library.

But to gain access to its secrets,

he would need a letter of introduction from the Greek Orthodox community here in Cairo.

Tischendorf got his letter of introduction.

But St Catherine's was almost 300 miles from Cairo, across the desert.

To get there, the Bible hunter from Germany needed reliable guides and camels.

The fundamentals of camel shopping haven't changed much in 170 years.

There are hundreds if not thousands of camels here

and I have no idea how to tell what makes a good one from a bad one.

I am trying to get some answers here on what makes a good camel.

And they say you've just got to know.

You've got to be born into it, so...

These are the experts.

So whenever I go buying camels,

the first thing to do is look underneath, to make it look like I know what I'm doing.

CAMEL GRUNTS

Do we have any mints for this guy? Some breath mints?

After lengthy negotiations, Tischendorf hired a group

of Bedouins and their camels for his two-week trek to St Catherine's.

His safety and survival in the desert would depend on them.

He was a very long way from well-ordered Germany.

No trains, no roads, just desert. And the unforgiving sun.

Tischendorf was hugely impressed by the Bedouin's survival skills.

So am I.

They live in some of the most hostile terrains on Earth.

And they are so hospitable.

Normally you don't want to see that much dust coming off your food.

We'll give it a try.

We want to give it you taste the breads.

Here we go. Moment of truth.

Yeah, bread, tea.

That's really good.

-This is wonderful.

-Yeah.

-It's cooked to perfection.

In May 1844, Tischendorf reached St Catherine's in a valley

below historic Mount Sinai.

Here, according to biblical tradition,

Moses received the Ten Commandments.

It's a remarkable monastery with a history stretching back

15 centuries.

GUIDE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Back then, St Catherine's was more of a fortress than

a monastery, with 40-foot-high walls

and no entrance other than that wooden structure there.

To gain access, you'd have to get hauled up in a basket.

So when Tischendorf arrived,

they refused to let him in until he showed his letters of recommendation.

Luckily for him, he'd done his homework and the monks hauled him up.

Inside, I meet St Catherine's librarian, Father Justin,

the first non-Greek to join the community in its 1,500 year history.

It's beautiful to see the swallows flying, especially at night.

Born in El Paso, Texas, Father Justin discovered

Greek Orthodoxy while he was at college.

It had plaster on the walls.

It was all removed when they strengthened the walls.

He's lived here for 17 years.

We can trace a Christian presence here to the late third

and beginning of the fourth century

but the great basilica that you see below us in the high

surrounding walls were all built at the command of the emperor Justinian

in the sixth century, and then you have structures added since then.

Tischendorf hoped that this ancient monastery held

some of the biblical treasures he so desired.

Sinai has a very dry and stable climate

and it's never been destroyed and never been abandoned

in all of its history and so the monastery naturally has

built up an astonishing library and an astonishing collection of icons.

Today, all the books and manuscripts are catalogued.

Back in the mid-19th century,

the collection was spread all over the many rooms of the monastery.

Tischendorf needed cooperative monks to supply him with manuscripts.

But none of the documents they showed him

were old enough for his purpose.

Finally, his luck took a turn.

Dr Kent Clarke is an expert on Tischendorf's mission.

He's looking just at some of the books that are here, some of the ancient manuscripts

and he actually finds a set of what he seems to think are very old

leafs or folios out of an ancient manuscript and they're just sitting in a basket.

"The librarian told me that two heaps of papers like this,

"mouldered by time, had already been consigned to the flames.

"Imagine my surprise to find amid this heap of papers

"a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek."

Tischendorf realised he had at last found something very important.

"Parts of Isaiah, Jeremiah, the so-called Minor Prophets,

"Chronicles, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs,

"which seemed to me to be some of the most ancient I had ever seen."

Tischendorf had struck gold.

If his analysis was correct,

he had in his possession one of the oldest Christian texts in the world.

It was exactly what he had been looking for.

Tischendorf saw more than 100 of these rare papers

and the monks let him take 43 leaves away to Germany.

Comparison with other ancient handwriting styles dates

the documents to the mid-4th century.

Afraid that the other Bible hunters might come upon the cache,

he was careful to cover his tracks.

When Tischendorf published his account of his journey,

he deliberately omitted where he had found the codex.

That was because he suspected there was an additional

New Testament section hidden somewhere in Saint Catherine's.

The last thing he wanted was for his rival Bible hunters to

catch wind of the find and beat him to it.

Tischendorf spent 15 years planning and scheming to get

hold of further manuscript leaves from St Catherine's.

To strengthen his cause,

he enlisted the help of the Russian Orthodox Church and even

the Tsar of Russia, who had power and influence over the monastery.

Tischendorf returned to St Catherine's in 1859.

After a 2,000 mile journey,

Tischendorf raked over everything the monks could show him.

All to no avail.

Even the leaves he had seen before had vanished.

Years of planning and careful negotiation appeared to have

been in vain.

Tischendorf had nearly resigned himself to defeat,

to leave St Catherine's empty handed,

until one evening he was having tea with the steward of the monastery.

One evening he's coming back and he's walking with one of the monks.

They just had a walk around the grounds and on the way back,

the monk explains to him that um, "I have Greek Septuagint manuscripts as well."

The monk took Tischendorf to his chamber, and handed him

an ancient codex, a collection of manuscripts in book form.

Tischendorf realises that's... "There it is - that's what I found on my first journey, the folios."

So he recognises this is the New Testament extension of his originals?

That's right and it's a big Bible in between bound covers

with beautiful very, very thin velum, a beautiful uncial scribal hand and

again he is blown away by the fact that he's never seen anything this

ancient and he's never seen anything this beautiful, he's just in awe.

Tischendorf had made one of the greatest

discoveries in 2,000 years of Christian history.

It was one of the earliest bibles and had a complete New Testament.

This discovery would make him famous around the world.

It became known as the Codex Sinaiticus, the book from Sinai.

It was dated to around 350 AD.

"I held in my hand the most precious biblical treasure in existence.

"I cannot recall all the emotions I felt in that exciting moment."

Tischendorf published the Codex Sinaiticus back in Europe.

The original codex ended up in the Russian capital,

St Petersburg, where it went on display in the Imperial Library.

After the Russian Revolution, the Soviet government

was in desperate need of hard currency and sold the Codex

to Britain for the equivalent of £5.5 million in today's money.

Half was paid by the British government,

the other half through public donations,

so great was the public desire to acquire this precious Bible.

'It is most appropriate that the most important manuscript

'of the most important book in the world, the Bible,

'should find a permanent home in the British Museum.'

To find out more, I travel to London.

At the British Library, I meet curator Dr Scot McKendrick.

Well, the Codex Sinaiticus is arguably the most important

manuscript in the entire British Library's collection.

It really is as important as that.

I mean, it's arguably one of the most important books

in the world.

The Codex Sinaiticus contained much of the Old Testament

and the 27 books of the New Testament,

reassuringly familiar to 19th-century Bible readers.

But on closer inspection, the Codex revealed some disturbing features.

Christians believed that the Bible was the unchanged

and unchangeable word of God.

Yet this earliest Bible was full of edits and corrections.

Virtually every page has corrections on it.

There are nearly 35,000 corrections in the entire manuscript.

Some of these are more obvious than others.

Now what are they?

As part of making this manuscript you have three, possibly four,

scribes who are involved in that exercise.

And one of them is a sort of chief editor, we think

and he's one of the most interventionist correctors.

The second phase is several centuries later.

In the seventh century, you have a series of correctors

who actually change the character of the text,

often quite dramatically.

Most of the thousands of edits are tiny,

though ANY change can be regarded as significant.

And when one edit concerns words uttered by Jesus,

as he was dying on the cross, it's enormously challenging.

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Oddly, this was marked as doubtful by one of the correctors

of the Sinaiticus but reinstated by a later corrector.

There are 35,000 edits in the Codex Sinaiticus, which suggests

that the scribes were unsure about the integrity of the biblical text.

But the anomalies of the codex didn't end there.

The most intriguing - and to some, troubling - feature of the

Sinaiticus is the ending of the Gospel of Mark, which describes what

happens after Jesus is crucified and his body is put into a tomb.

So in Codex Sinaiticus, Mark's Gospel, which is our earliest gospel

ends at verse eight of Chapter 16.

So Chapter 16 tells us about the discovery of the empty tomb,

the women go to the tomb, they discover it to be empty,

they meet a mysterious angelic figure who tells them

that Jesus has risen from the dead and then he tells them

to go and proclaim that message to the disciples and to Peter.

But the women are afraid and they tell nothing to anyone.

So that's the way that the gospel ends in Sinaiticus.

The ending of Mark recounted in 19th-century bibles

like the King James Bible is simply not there.

"Then they went out and ran away from the tomb,

"trembling with amazement.

"They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

And that's the ending of the Gospel of Mark

in the Codex Sinaiticus.

In this, the King James Bible, there is an additional 12 verses

where Jesus then appears to his disciples,

providing proof of the resurrection and proof of his divinity.

The question was, why did the long ending

not appear in the Sinaiticus, the oldest known edition of the Bible.

It appears that sometime after the fourth century,

a longer ending of Mark, including the resurrection appearances,

had been inserted into the official Bible text.

The arrival of Sinaiticus was an absolute

bombshell in Victorian society

and in the world, not just of theology,

but across the whole community.

For the first time it could be demonstrated without any doubt

to the scholarly mind that the end of Mark, as people have known it

for hundreds of years, was not the end of Mark as he had written it.

That meant that there was a real doubt about all of the gospels.

If what Tischendorf and some of these other people were

saying was true, then this meant that God had allowed the Bible to become corrupted.

What this meant for a Protestant,

who believed that their self depended on a reading, and a

reaction to the word of God, was "How is myself based on a falsehood?"

It was absolutely threatening.

At the age of 59, 15 years after discovering

Sinaiticus, Tischendorf died following a stroke.

Until the end,

he remained robust about the short ending of Mark in the Sinaiticus,

delighted that this more reliable Bible text had been found.

But the questions raised by his discoveries about the original

Bible text and its transmission over the centuries wouldn't go away.

Tischendorf's achievements inspired a new generation of Bible

hunters to head for Egypt.

It included a pair of intrepid twin sisters

from the West Coast of Scotland.

Agnes and Margaret Smith were born in 1843.

Raised as staunch Presbyterians, their widowed father gave them

the best education available.

Recognising that they had a gift for foreign languages,

their father made a pact with them - every time they learned

a foreign tongue, he'd take them to the country where it was spoken.

With this incentive, they earned themselves trips to France, Spain, Italy and Germany.

And all that before they turned 21.

When their father died, he left the Smith sisters a huge

inheritance that made them independent for life.

Over the next 20 years, the twins spent considerable time travelling.

They visited the Middle East and Europe

before settling down in England.

In the 1880s, they moved to the university city of Cambridge,

smack in the middle of a religious uproar about the Bible.

By the 1880s, this raging debate had completely engulfed Cambridge,

one of the great centres of learning.

The debate was fuelled by public consternation over

the publication in 1881 of a revised version of the New Testament.

The Greek text used as the basis of the translation has been wholly

overhauled to reflect the discovery of Sinaiticus,

to eliminate as many errors, as many slips, in the original translation, as possible.

This is a publishing sensation. A million copies of the revised

edition are sold on the day of its appearance.

But sensation turns into misgiving

and in some quarters into shock as people notice that

many of the readings which had been particularly dear to their

Christian faith have been quite literally relegated to the margins.

The Revised Version of the Bible had 30,000 changes compared to the

commonly used King James Bible.

The Jesus saying "Father forgive them for they know not what they do"

was given a marginal note explaining that some manuscripts omit these words.

For most Christians, the text of the Bible

and the word of God had always meant one and the same thing.

Therefore the appearance of a radically revised text

and of a radically revised translation was bound to shake that belief.

Why should the public accept that this is the final revision?

If further manuscripts, earlier manuscripts,

rival manuscripts of the New Testament are discovered, will

the text on which this translation is based have to change again?

So this is a Bible which is meant to end the debate

about what the word of God is but in some ways it merely begins it.

'Almighty God who forgives all who truly repent, have mercy upon you,

'pardon and deliver you from all your sins...'

From 1881 onwards, new biblical discoveries were likely to

feature in any new edition of the Bible.

It was at this crucial moment in Christian history that the

Smith sisters entered the fray.

The twins were making plans to travel to Egypt - as tourists

and first-time Bible hunters.

In Cambridge, I meet their biographer, Janet Soskice.

They decided to fulfil this long-lived dream of going to

St Catherine's Monastery - footsteps of Moses.

Sinai, from their point of view, was again the Bible lands,

it was where Moses was addressed by God from the burning bush,

where Moses was given the Law,

so I think they initially wanted to be in the footsteps of Moses.

But then they learned that there were fabulous manuscripts there

and that enchanted them as well.

The Cambridge scholar, Professor Rendel Harris, had told the

twins about a mysterious manuscript that he had seen at the monastery.

And he told Agnes that in a dark closet, underneath

the Archbishop's rooms, was an old chest full of manuscripts

he'd not fully had time to examine.

And he thought those might contain some of the very earliest

manuscripts in Syriac which is more or less Aramaic, the same language

spoken by Jesus and the Disciples - that hadn't been examined.

Rendell Harris's tip-off inspired the twins.

Agnes even took lessons in Syriac.

"We both looked forward to our journey with the brightest expectations.

"For several weeks I constantly dreamt of the dark closet

"so vividly described in which lay the mysterious two chests full of manuscripts."

For Victorian women travelling on their own,

the trip was full of hazards and danger.

Before leaving Cairo for St Catherine's,

Maggie and Agnes went shopping to prepare for the trip.

You had really to take everything with you.

They took all their water, they took corn and feed,

they took ducks and chickens and turkeys,

they took wine, they took silver, they took tablecloths.

You had to take all your provisions for staying there and your coming back.

Not to forget the most important of items in a British household, the teapot.

This whole market - finally I've found somewhere that sells kitchen equipment.

As-salam alaykum.

I am going to be going to the desert and I just need a few things,

so some pots, a pan and maybe something to make some coffee.

Yeah, that's perfect.

-Nice to meet you.

-Really nice meeting you.

Nice to meet you. I hope I see you in future.

-In Sha' Allah.

-In Sha' Allah.

The Smith sisters followed the same route that Tischendorf had

first taken more than 50 years earlier.

But they carried a valuable new gadget -

a camera and hundreds of glass plates for photographs.

So it was a major feat to reach the monastery

and they'd been warned, "The monks are not going to let you in because

"you're Protestants, you're women - how are you going to succeed?"

But they were confident that they would and that confidence

impressed the monks that they had come such great distance

out of love for the manuscripts and love for the scriptures

and because they could speak modern Greek, they impressed the monks.

DEVOTIONAL SINGING

Maggie and Agnes were invited to attend the traditional service

which has been celebrated here since the beginning of Christianity.

DEVOTIONAL SINGING

And after going to a service which lasted from a Presbyterian

point of view far, far too long with far, far too many Kyrie Eleisons

they were asked, "What would you like to see?"

And Agnes said, "All your oldest manuscripts in Syriac."

Since the tip-off by the Cambridge scholar Rendel Harris, Agnes's

knowledge of Syriac had improved enough for her to understand

the basics of the Syriac language.

She was shown down and they brought out of this dark closet this chest,

brought a number of volumes up to light,

and her eyes quickly fell on this book.

She was looking at it. It was very unpromising but it was in Syriac.

The book was an ancient codex that hadn't been opened for many years.

When the twins first found the codex, the pages had fused

together and they couldn't read it.

Ever so resourceful, Maggie and Agnes used steam from their teapot

to unstick the pages and tease open the codex.

Written in bold letters,

the codex contained an unspectacular Christian text.

But underneath it,

Agnes made out some faint writing that could be extremely interesting.

Peering at it, she could see at the top of the pages

"According to Luke, According to Matthew."

And she knew from this that it was a palimpsest.

"I had never before seen a palimpsest,

"but my father had often related to us how the old monks, when velum

"became scarce and paper was not yet invented, scraped away the writing

"from the pages of their books and wrote something new on top of it."

A palimpsest is a text that has been overwritten by a more recent text.

Today, scientists can bring out the under-text with

the help of multispectral imaging.

A technique not available in the 1890s.

The twins suspected that the underlying Bible text

contained the four gospels and that it was extremely old.

To transcribe the under-text of the palimpsest correctly,

they would need the help of more experienced Syriac readers.

Armed with photographs of the palimpsest,

Maggie and Agnes returned to Britain.

The Smith sisters are pioneers.

Not just because they have discovered a new biblical text,

but because they're studying it in radically new ways,

and one of those radically new ways involves photography.

What had previously perhaps been a rather impressionistic

argument about what you THOUGHT the text said can now be

strengthened by the objective evidence of the photograph.

The photographic evidence persuaded two Syriac language experts

from Cambridge to join forces with the Smith sisters.

Within a year, the twins were back at St Catherine's, together

with the experts and their wives.

Everyone was sworn to secrecy.

They were worried about the Germans.

You know, the perennial German threat.

Germans were at the time the world leaders in the study

of ancient manuscripts.

And it was felt that once a clue got out, the Germans might get there,

and pip them at the post, as it were.

In their tents, Agnes and the two Syriac experts struggled hard to decipher the hidden writing.

But the twins had come prepared.

Maggie and Agnes knew the Codex was a palimpsest.

So they acquired an experimental chemical called

hydro-sulphite of ammonia, to bring out the under-text.

When Agnes applied the chemical, it did the trick

and brought out the hidden text.

After 40 days of intense work,

the transcription was completed.

They had indeed found a complete set

of the four Gospels of the New Testament.

The twins returned to Britain,

where news of their discovery was already getting newspaper attention.

'Twin sister explorers turn new light on the four Gospels.'

Experts dated the Codex, now known as the Syriacus,

back to the late 4th century AD...

..the same century that Tischendorf's Codex Sinaiticus,

the world's oldest complete Bible, was compiled.

But like the Codex Sinaiticus,

the Syriacus also included some features

that were deeply unsettling for the faithful.

Like Tischendorf's Sinaiticus,

the Codex Syriacus also had the short ending of Mark.

There's no mention of Jesus' appearances to his disciples

after the crucifixion.

When the Codex Syriacus is discovered,

it has after the short ending the words,

"This is the ending."

Right? And then, "Here begins the Gospel of Luke."

After that, there can be no debate.

It shows that the short ending was authentic.

The ending of Mark is profound... troubling.

The threat is there's no resurrection.

There's no good news! It ends, "For they were terrified."

It's the opposite of good news,

they didn't tell anybody anything about it!

This was a very frightening ending for the Victorian Christians.

Evidently the long ending with the resurrection appearances

was only added to the Gospel of Mark later,

centuries after the death of Jesus.

Even after Maggie and Agnes had discovered the Codex Syriacus,

the questions surrounding the ending of Mark wouldn't go away.

The central event of Christianity, the resurrection,

had been called into question.

Perhaps new discoveries by Bible hunters

could provide further clues.

Maggie and Agnes, for their part,

didn't regard the short ending of Mark as a problem

because the resurrection appearances are included in the other Gospels

and in the Epistles of Paul.

And here we see their portraits.

We have on our left, Agnes.

And on our right, Margaret. Wearing their academic gowns...

The Smith sisters went on to gain academic honours.

They were trail blazers in a city

where most colleges still excluded women from academic life.

..the Isle of Skye is an old travelling trunk of Agnes's...

At the end of their lives,

the twins bequeathed much of their fortune

to Westminster College in Cambridge.

Here, one of their travel chests takes pride of place.

Back in Egypt,

following the Smith sisters' discovery of the Syriacus,

the hunt for new biblical manuscripts intensified.

By the turn of the century, the manuscript trade had shifted

from the desert monasteries to the antiquity shops here in Cairo.

By then, everybody wanted a piece of the action -

the Germans, the Italians, the French, the British...

Until a new contender came on the scene -

American millionaires.

In 1906, Charles Lang Freer, an American businessman,

was on his first trip to Cairo.

He came to buy ancient ceramics.

But his trip would be a turning point

in the story of Bible hunting in Egypt.

Freer's story began in the American capital, Washington DC.

It involved the American government,

even the president of the United States...

..and of course, Charles Lang Freer himself.

Freer was an accountant,

who made his fortune in railroad box cars.

But for him, that was just a means to an end.

His true passion was collecting fine art.

Freer's magnificent collection

centred around the art of America and East Asia.

Freer was a man who believed in the therapeutic nature of art -

art as a healer, art as a redemption.

But he also believes, very strongly,

that there are beauties

that transcend different cultures.

'My great desire has been to unite modern work

'with masterpieces of certain periods of high civilisation.'

Today, The Freer Gallery, with his collection,

is one of the centrepieces

of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

In 1902, Freer first considered

offering his art collection to the Smithsonian,

as a gift to the American people.

But the Smithsonian, a largely scientific institution, hesitated.

Freer wouldn't give up easily.

Freer was so intent to donate his collection to the Smithsonian,

he enlisted the aid of the US President himself to make it happen.

I think that says a lot about his character, his philanthropy,

and most of all his determination.

It isn't actually until 1905-1906,

that there's the intervention of President Roosevelt,

in fact encouraged by his wife.

And it's Roosevelt

who persuades the Smithsonian

and above all Congress to accept this gift.

With the deal struck, Freer would continue to expand his collection.

In Washington, I meet up again with Bible expert, Dr Kent Clarke,

who I last saw at St Catherine's in Egypt.

This becomes his concentrated years of collecting

and so as part of that process,

he makes five independent trips to the Far East

and basically world travels.

So the first time that he reaches Egypt is in 1906.

Freer's first port of call were the bazaars of Cairo.

His mission was to buy rare Egyptian ceramics.

Today, the Egyptian antiquities market

is subject to stringent legal controls.

At the time, regulation was more relaxed.

The old market here was Freer's hunting ground.

He'd spend his time in and out of shops,

looking to buy antique pottery,

until he was tipped off about something far more intriguing.

Freer was introduced to a local dealer, Ali Arabi,

who invited the American to Giza just outside Cairo.

Here Freer visited the Mena House Hotel.

Next to the pyramids, it was a magnet for well-heeled Western travellers.

Inside the hotel, Ali Arabi had his shop.

Freer was invited to see some ancient biblical manuscripts.

Other buyers were already interested in acquiring them,

including several European Bible hunters.

There's some cloak and dagger involved in this story,

because perhaps a German has seen the manuscripts before, almost certainly.

The famous Grenfell and Hunt, the Englishmen, have seen the manuscript before

and for some reason neither has bought it.

The price seems to be too high.

When Freer saw the manuscripts, he was dumbfounded.

They included an ancient Greek codex with the four New Testament gospels,

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

According to Freer, he was swept off his feet.

Now, normally, Freer was a really cautious collector,

but on that day he acted totally out of character.

He'd seen the manuscript in the morning

and without verifying with any other specialists,

by that afternoon he shelled out a huge amount of money for it.

SHIP'S HORN

Freer took his codex to America.

The gospels and other manuscripts had cost him 7,750,

but it seemed money well spent as the discovery hit the headlines.

The newspaper clipping here just shows you

the popular sensationalisation of these manuscripts.

These were significant finds.

-He's even got the Pith Helmet.

-And at the top you can read,

"bartering for the precious biblical manuscripts,

"Charles Lang Freer

tells the story of his great finds in Egypt's sands."

I mean, this really is the Indiana Jones of the day.

The codex was extraordinary.

Written on parchment and bound between wooden covers,

it would eventually be determined

to be the third oldest gospel collection in the world,

dated around the 5th century AD.

And there was something unique about this gospel collection

known as the Washington Codex,

the ending of the Gospel of Mark.

The principal element only found in this manuscript

is what's known as the Freer Logion.

This is actually a passage at the very end of Mark

that appears in no other manuscript

out of thousands of Greek copies of the Bible.

Unlike the Sinaiticus and Syriacus,

the Washington Codex has the long ending of Mark

with the resurrection appearances.

But inserted into this long ending

is a whole new passage... the Freer Logion.

So this is a paragraph in which Christ appears to the Disciples.

And he berates them for not believing in him and his resurrection.

And they say, "Excuse us, but we're misled by Satan."

And he says, "Actually, Satan's days are over,

"but there are horrors still to come."

The Jesus saying declaring the end of Satan

had been mentioned by the early church fathers,

but for the first time

the passage was confirmed as part of a biblical text,

fresh evidence of various attempts to provide

a more "suitable" ending for the Gospel of Mark.

Freer brings this gospel manuscript home and, lo and behold,

here in a Greek manuscript of the gospels,

from the 5th century maybe,

er...you have it there. So it was phenomenal.

People... It hit newspaper headlines around the world.

Realising how important his purchase was,

Freer was keen to retrace his steps.

In 1908, he makes a second trip to Egypt.

The primary purpose of him coming

is to find out the provenance

of where the Freer manuscripts were discovered,

because there's pretty strong speculation

that there'll be more materials that can be found there.

And so in discussions with Arabi,

Freer recognises that Arabi is trying to protect the so-called "digger,"

the person who found the manuscripts. He's never named,

he's only ever called the "digger" in the correspondence right from beginning to end,

so we never know the name.

Eventually, Arabi suggested the gospels had been found

at an abandoned desert site at the Fayoum Oasis south of Cairo.

But in public, Freer promoted the view that the manuscript

came from the famous White Monastery near Sohag, 200 miles further south.

It was a ploy to throw rival Bible hunters off the scent.

Freer was loving the adventure.

"I am enjoying the quest greatly.

"Poker and all other games are nothing.

"It's real living, real experience,

"and beats winning a big contract for box cars out of sight!"

Freer spent huge amounts

to investigate the Fayoum Oasis location suggested by Ali Arabi.

Freer's search lead to the ruins

of an abandoned site here on the edge of this ancient lake.

His team excavated all around the site,

but failed to locate any old biblical manuscripts.

The trail...had gone cold.

In America, the Washington Codex

had become a key part of the Freer Gallery collection.

Excitement continued to surround the discovery.

The unique ending of Mark

isn't the only feature that stands out in the Washington Codex.

Forensic analysis gives us a rare glimpse

into how the Bible was understood,

its status in everyday Christian life.

Emily Jacobson is the Paper Conservator

for the Freer and Sackler Galleries.

There are pages that have wax splatters on them,

-possibly from the text being read with a candle.

-Can I see?

-Sure.

As we move to this opening,

you can actually see these wax drops.

So if you can imagine...

-A monk with his candle.

-Exactly, reading by candle light.

-Wow!

In the front page of each of the four gospels,

the opening page of each of them, there are curious spots,

only on the front page not in the rest of the gospels.

They are tallow, they're drippings from candles.

And so this gospel Codex early on

became the prize possession of some monastery or group

that was probably kept in a vault or someplace in the dark and then brought out.

And perhaps when visiting dignitaries like bishops or someone

would come they would show them their prize possession.

And the bishop would be most interested in seeing

the holy gospels associated with the Apostles.

Clearly, this biblical text had taken on iconic status.

And something else seems to have happened

200 years after the codex was written.

Specialists have suggested

that in the 7th century the way it was bound was changed,

and it was painted with these figures on the exterior.

So possibly it was put on the altar upright,

so that you would see not the contents....not the written word,

but the writers.

So it's no longer functional, it's now an object to be worshipped.

Yes. It's the symbol of a gospel.

PRIEST CHANTS

It was a key moment in the development of Christianity.

Rather than be locked away... a biblical codex was revered.

It suggested that the Bible text

had taken on a sacred and divine character of its own.

PRIEST CHANTS

Freer's discovery marked the highlight

of 60 years of Bible hunting.

With the discovery of Sinaiticus and the discovery of Syriacus,

and the Washington Codex,

where does that put our understanding of early Christianity?

Well, it shows that with regard to the New Testament writings,

it shows that the copiers and readers

accidentally and deliberately in some cases altered what they were copying.

In some cases through deliberate attempts to sort of try to improve

the text or make it more readable.

How do you think that's changed the face of Christianity as a result?

If you demand a verbally inherent Bible with no problems,

you have problems.

If, on the other hand, your Christian faith says,

"I don't need an inherent Bible, all I need is a Bible

that basically puts me in touch with the core teachings

of the Christian faith," you're OK.

If you demand a perfect set of circumstances, you're in trouble.

For nearly 2,000 years,

the Bible had been a source of certainty for the faithful.

The discoveries of the Bible hunters

began a controversial reassessment of Christianity's sacred scripture,

hailed by some, dismissed by others.

But by the early 1900s, the focus of the Bible hunters was shifting.

Discoveries elsewhere were changing the nature of the debate.

In the sands of the Egyptian desert,

archaeologists had unearthed scriptures

that no humans had set eyes upon in 1,500 years!

Lost gospels that never made it into the official Bible.

Lost Christianities branded as heretical.

The controversy over the Bible as the word of God

was only just beginning.

Go on, boy! Good, boy/girl.

HE LAUGHS