Contributions of the Smith Sisters in Syriac Studies

by Rev. Fr. Dale A. Johnson

One of the greatest discoveries in Syriac literature and New Testament Biblical studies was found on a butter plate in 1892, made from a scrap of calf skin leather. Agnes Smith Lewis was eating breakfast in the dinning hall of St. Catherine’s Monastary on Mt. Sinai. Greek monks regularly tore pages out of manuscripts deemed unimportant and used them to light fires, carry food, and in this case place butter. Fortunately, Agnes Smith Lewis noticed on the scrap of vellum faded Syriac letters. She demanded to know from where the scrap came and she was led to a 358 page codex.

What is interesting about this discovery is that Mrs. Lewis first noticed what turned out to be the underwriting of a palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript on which an earlier text has been nearly erased and the vellum or parchment reused for another. The motive for making palimpsests seems to have been largely economic--reusing parchment was cheaper than preparing new skin.¹

On a palimpsest there are two texts, The chiefly visible text is younger having been written over the nearly invisible subtext. The nearly erased subtext is older and usually is not able to be read except by use of infrared photography. The butter, because it is an oil actually made the subtext visible in the same way one can see the color and detail of a cut stone by wetting it. It seems to be an accident of history that this Old Gospel text was discovered at all. To have Mrs. Lewis, one of the few in the world who could read Syriac, eating breakfast in a remote Greek monastery and presented with slightly melted butter that had soaked into the parchment tray to make the Biblical text visible, is one of the most fantastic discoveries of all time. It ranks with the story about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

On the palimpsest the sisters discovered, the overwriting bore the date A.D. 778, and proved to be a very delightful account of the lives of female saints. It must have been profoundly satisfying to these brave and pioneering women to have found in this great discovery stories of other courageous women. The preface to this read: "By the strength of our Lord Jesus Christ (the Son) of the Living God, I begin, I the sinner, John the Recluse of Beth-Mari Kaddisha, to write select narratives about the holy women, first the writings about the blessed lady Thecla, disciple of Paul the blessed Apostle. Brethren, pray for me."

The author wrote of the "Blessed Eugenia" and of Phillip her father, of Pelagia the harlot of Antioch, of the blessed Onesimus, of Theodosia the virgin, of Theodota the harlot, etc., ending: "Let every one who reads . . .pray for the sinner who wrote it.

Barely visible beneath this writing was other greatly blurred writing of much greater antiquity. It was this blurry text she first recognized in the refrectory butter plate. Though some of the words were wholly erased, Mrs. Lewis detected the words "Evangelion," "Mathi." "Luca," and concluded that this older writing must be an ancient Syriac text of the four gospels. They photographed this work entirely, and left the convent on the 8th of March.

As she examined the manuscript, she was sure that it was an early copy of the Four Gospels. She and her sister decided that it must be photographed. The sisters managed their equipment and photographed every page. After a month in the Monastery, the sisters made the arduous journey back to their home in Cambridge, and set to work developing the precious glass plate negatives. When the negatives had been developed, they needed to verify that their identification of the manuscript was correct. Eventually, they located a brilliant young scholar F.C. Burkitt who was able to translate some passages, which he took to Professor R.L. Bensly, Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge. Bensly identified the manuscript as a representative of the Old Syriac version, known only in the Curetonian manuscript, discovered in 1842. This manuscript, however, was older (it is probably late-fourth century) and more complete.

Dr. Agnus Smith Lewis (PhD., LL.D., D.D., Litt.D.) and Dr. Margaret Dunlop Gibson (LL.D., D.D., Litt.D.) were born in the small Ayrshire town of Irvine in January 1843, the twin daughters of an attorney. Receiving an inheritance of more than a quarter of a million pounds when their father died, Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson visited Greece and Egypt in 1866 at 23 years of age.

It was only in 1891, at age 49, that the twin sisters, now both widowed, set off for St. Catherine's Monastery at Mt. Sinai, a journey of eleven days by camel from Cairo. Reaching Cairo in January 1892, they won the good will of the Greek archbishop of Mt. Sinai, who gave them permission to examine the Sinaitic Library on Mt. Sinai. In Margaret Gibson's account of their journey to Mt. Sinai, which she published in her book, How the Codex was Found, a narrative of two visits to Sinai, from Mrs. Lewis's Journals 1892-1893, she describes their journey across the desert and their first sight of the Mount of God which, "rose against the sky like a huge altar, visible against the sky in lonely grandeur from end to end of the whole plain." At length they came in sight of the massive walls of the stately convent of Saint Catherine. Mrs. Smith and Gibson were about to change the course of Biblical studies forever.

Eventually, ‘with nothing to relieve the monotony save occasional variations in the scenery of the desert’ , they arrived at the Convent on 7 February 1892.

At last the Convent of St Catherine was in sight in the gorge by Jebel Musa; we could see its cypresses and its walled enclosure; it looked (as it ever looks to travellers who approach it) like a strange anomaly, a garden in the desert, a house of habitation set amidbare, barren mountain ranges…

The Smith sisters were not the first women to visit the monastery. Saint Sylvia journeyed to Mt. Sinai during the reign of Theodosius between A.D. 385 and 388, she speaks of the "little church" which, tho so small, "has of itself great grace. When this woman traveler visited the monastery, it was less than three centuries since John the Apostle died. The Monastery of Saint Catherine is one of great antiquity. Situated on the isolated Sinai Peninsula in the shadow of Mt. Horeb, it is among the oldest and most venerable monasteries in Christendom.

The early history of the Monastery of St. Catherine is difficult to trace. According to old legends and inscriptions the Emperor Justinian, built the outer walls about A.D. 530. The outer walls were built 20-30 feet high forming an irregular square some 200 feet in extent. The walls were built of solid granite. As recently as 1822 there were no doors into the Monastery. Visitors and monks alike were hoisted in large baskets to an opening in the upper part of the wall. Justinian built the Monastery as a stronghold to protect the pass leading from the plain of Er-Rakkeh in the north (where the children of Israel are said to have encamped) across as shoulder of the mountains into the Wady Tarfa, that slopes to the south. It was first occupied by a garrison of Roman soldiers, sent to protect the inhabitants of an earlier Monastery dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and the pilgrims and anchorites that flocked to the site from Egypt and Syria in the early centuries of the Christian era from the Saracen tribes.

Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson described their arrival; "The kindness of the librarian, who can never be forgotten by any of us who ever visited this ancient sanctuary, opened everything in the convent to our inspection, and on February 8, 1892, we began our work, examining, copying, and photographing such works as appeared to be especially valuable."

A letter of introduction from Semitic language scholar James Rendell Harris admitted them to the famous library. Their ability to read the manuscripts (they were accomplished scholars in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew) impressed the librarian.²

Having reached home, they developed their thousand photographs and showed them to various scholars. Not only are these sisters pioneers in Syriac and Biblical studies, but their accomplishments in photography and photographic development places them in history as multi-disciplined savants. They were the first to use photography in the field of Biblical studies to preserve biblical materials. Agnes Smith Lewis and her sister experimented with ways to separate vellum leaves that had fused together. They developed chemical processes to make subtext visible before the age of infrared photography.³

Back in Cambridge, after developing their photographs, they were unable to find anyone who could make out the blurred writing or saw that it was of any special importance until Mr. Francis Crawford Burkitt, a young scholar at Cambridge, took the photographs and showed them to Prof. R.L. Bensly, who was just finishing a new edition of the oldest Syriac version of the four gospels (the Cureton.) Bensly recognized at once that this was another copy much like the Cureton, but very much more complete and older. Almost immediately it was arranged that Professor Bensly, Mr. Burkitt, and Prof. Rendel Harris would accompany the discoverers back to Sinai where they would accurately transcribe the manuscript word for word.

Arriving at the convent February 8, 1893, they found to their great delight that the experienced experts could easily trace the words in the underwriting. Working in shifts, ‘the three scholars agreed to the following division of labour: Mr Rendel Harris to read the first hundred and four pages of the palimpsest, Mr Burkitt the second hundred or more… and Professor Bensly the remainder…’

'scored another triumph by bringing a reagent which could be painted on the manuscript, bringing up the most obscure sections of the underwriting in a brilliant shade of green. This success sent Rendel Harris ‘pirouetting round the tents, in a little solo dance of ecstasy’.

After forty days of steady labor they were able to return to England bearing with them an almost complete copy of this precious document. They managed to transcribe all but 42 for Cambridge. Agnes and her sister made several more journeys to Mount Sinai, to finish the final 42 pages, and to carry out further research.

The copy was completed in 1895.

It was F.C. Burkitt, however, who took on the task of researching and bringing the discoveries of the Syriac Bible into the context of the formal Christian theology schools of the West.

In Cambridge, in 1896, twin sisters Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson showed several Hebrew manuscript pages they had acquired to Dr. Solomon Schechter, then the Reader in Talmudic and Rabbinic literature at the University of Cambridge, and later the President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Recognizing the value of the materials Lewis and Gibson had found, Schechter, together with Dr. Charles Taylor, Master of St. John’s College, journeyed to Old Cairo where he secured the contents of the Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue so that they could be transported to England for scholarly examination.

From the Ben Ezra Synagogue Genizah, came thirty-two of the thirty-four known palimpsest fragments. Originally published in 1900, Gorgias Press has reprinted the edition of Lewis and Gibson’s Palestinian Syriac Texts From Palimpsest Fragments in the Taylor-Schechter Collection.

The discoveries were widely reported in the press and they were in great demand as a lecturers. They also wrote several books about their discoveries, and gave many lectures to various clubs and learned societies. There was more to both the sisters than manuscripts and travel. They were devout Presbyterians, founders of authors of several novels and other scholarly works. 

The pioneering research and publications of Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson mark them a permanent place in scholarship. Their scholastic achievements were recognized by many universities, and they received doctorates from Halle (1899), St. Andrews (1901), Heidelberg (1904), and Trinity College Dublin (1911). It is strange that although they lived in Cambridge and contributed to academic debate in the field of Syriac studies, their scholarship did not receive any official recognition by the University of Cambridge.

Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson encouraged young scholars, and endowed Westminster College, which opened in 1899 as a training place for Presbyterian ministers. Mrs. Gibson died in January 1920, Mrs. Lewis in 1926. Their portraits, (shown at the top of this page) where they are shown robed in doctoral gowns, still hang in the Hall of Westminster College



Notes

1. This process for preparing the skins was developed between 197-158 B.C. In fact, the technical distinction between parchment and vellum is that the former is made from sheepskin and the latter from calf. The finest works of antiquity are those written in gold and silver on the fine purple skins of vellum, especially that come to us from the third to the sixth centuries.) The earliest books were made possible by a process of preparing the skins of sheep or calves so that they could be written upon on both sides. This process for preparing the skins was developed between 197-158 B.C. In fact, the technical distinction between parchment and vellum is that the former is made from sheepskin and the latter from calf. The finest works of antiquity are those written in gold and silver on the fine purple skins of vellum, especially that come to us from the third to the sixth centuries

2. James Rendel Harris, then Professor of Biblical Languages and Ecclesiastical History at Haverford College, USA, and later to be first Director of Studies at Woodbrooke and a founding father of theological studies in Birmingham

3. ‘we developed a few… with Eastman powders in a rough way, pinning them to the sides of our tent to dry’.Thiis quote and others that follow are from the work of Anna Riggs Project Archivist, Special Collection Cutting from the London Quarterly Review, Apri 1899, of a review of ‘In the Shadow of Sinai’, by Agnis Smith Lewis (University of Birmingham, Special Collections, DA61/2, p. 12). And see Allan Whigham Price, The Ladies of Castlebrae, (Allan Sutton, 1985), p.13.