Nosing about the East after biblical lore in 1844 a German scholar named Constantine Tischendorf traveled through the Sinai Peninsula and up to a lonely Orthodox Greek monastery atop Mount St. Catherine.* There in a wastebasket he came across a bundle of 43 stray vellum leaves which a monk had tossed aside for lighting fires. Scholar Tischendorf recognized the vellum leaves as fragments of an ancient Greek biblical text. He asked for more. The St. Catherine monks showed him some, refused to part with them. Scholar Tischendorf took home what he had,...
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