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The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels
The Sisters of Sinai How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels Author:Janet Soskice In 1892, two sisters, identical twins, made one of the most important scriptural discoveries of modern times. Combing the library of St. Catherine?s monastery at Mount Sinai, they found a palimpsest: beneath a life of female saints, they detected what remains to this day among the earliest known copies of the Gospels, written in ancient Syriac, ... more »the language of Jesus.
In this enthralling book, Janet Soskice takes us, via the lives of Agnes and Margaret Smith, on a quintessentially Victorian adventure. It is in part a physical journey: devoted to languages, travel, and their faith, the sisters traverse a Middle East that few Westerners visited, sleeping in tents, enduring temperamental camels and unscrupulous dragomen. But it is also a journey of the mind in an era when science put faith in question, new findings reshaped the understanding of the Bible?s creation, and Europeans were rediscovering the East. Finally, and most movingly, it is a journey of the human spirit: unwilling to let their sex or lack of formal training stand in the way, Agnes and Margaret became world-renowned scriptural authorities, living fully through their lifelong passions for adventure and learning. Here, vividly recounted, is the story of two unlikely and unsung heroines of the effort to discover the Bible as originally written.« less