This takes you to this 4th century books home page.
This came up in bible study on Thursday night. The basic question was one of “gender-inclusive language”, when and where is it appropriate to use human/person or other non-gendered language where man or mankind or other “the male embraces the female” traditional language is used. Part of the answer relies on the underlying language. Is the word used the broad general one, like the older english “man”, or it is the specific, “a/the man”. The particular passage we were looking at was James 1:12-18 which in the NIV is translated “blessed is the man…” I firmly expected to find the very general word in that. In that case in today’s language “blessed is the person…” would be very appropriate. And in fact the New Living Translation does something like that with “God blesses those…” We found an interesting tangent. The generally agreed greek text actually used the specific male word, but some manuscripts including a key 4th/5th century codex contained the generic man. Why would a scribe change the specific to the general? By asserting that the specific is the original, that is the remaining question.
The Holy Spirit in inspiring the writers still used their knowledge, skills and abilities. The inspired scriptures contain a human element. Did James mean to exlude women from the blessing? No. Would he have expected a woman to be reading his letter? In his time, probably not, especially with the letter addressed to the 12 tribes scattered (i.e. Jewish Christians). Would we today consider James to have been a chauvinist? From our culture, probably. From his culture, we should probably admit the the Christian apostles and writers were the most inclusive bunch present. Would a scribe in the 5th century had different cultural assumptions? Those are the types of questions to consider in gender inclusive language. Scrubbing the text completely loses part of that original writers humanity.
But back to Sinaiticus. The book was “found” in the monestery at Mt. Sinai and basically plundered in the 19th century. The majority is now in the British Library (probably next to the Elgin marbles, ha). But the link also contains a mechanism for the web viewing of this treasure. Essentially a complete bible from the 4th century in glowing vellum parchment that probably took the hides of about 360 goats to produce. It is known that Constantine ordered the production of bibles to replace those burned in the persecutions. It is surmised by the romantic that this was the first of that production effort.
