Unholy alliances

By the inter-war years, British national cultural institutions struggled financially to compete in the international art markets. Ambitions to hold the finest collections in the world remained unchanged, however, and these museums and galleries stayed active in the acquisitions market, despite the limitations imposed by economic downturns in 1930s Britain. Evidence of the difficulties faced by such institutions can be seen in the acquisition of the Codex Sinaiticus – one of the world’s oldest Bibles – by the British Museum from the Soviet Government in 1933. The Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, secretly instructed the Treasury to advance the funds to secure the manuscript before it came on to the open market, after agreeing with the trustees of the museum to meet half the costs if the museum would match them through what turned out to be a highly contentious public fundraising campaign.

The Codex Sinaiticus and Hermas: The ways of a crossed textual transmission

The Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th century biblical manuscript, offers an interesting point of view on the textual transmission of the Shepherd of Hermas, which is extremely complicate because of the fragmentary status of all its Greek sources and of the presence of several translations in different languages (Latin, Ethiopic, Coptic, Georgian and Middle Persian). New studies on some of the most significant sources like the new leaves Codex Sinaiticus (2010) and the Latin translation Vulgata (2014) enable a new reconstruction of Hermas’ textual transmission. The present article will evidence the key role of the Sinaiticus as point of contact between different textual versions of the Shepherd, which have had their autonomous life, and will offer a new reconstruction of Hermas’ textual transmission.