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Zusatztext 51816407 Informationen zum Autor Janet Soskice Klappentext Agnes and Margaret Smith were not your typical Victorian scholars or adventurers. Female, middle-aged, and without university degrees or formal language training, the twin sisters nevertheless made one of the most important scriptural discoveries of their time: the earliest known copy of the Gospels in ancient Syriac, the language that Jesus spoke. In an era when most Westerners-male or female-feared to tread in the Middle East, they slept in tents and endured temperamental camels, unscrupulous dragomen, and suspicious monks to become unsung heroines in the continuing effort to discover the Bible as originally written. CHAPTER ONE Cambridge, 13 April 1893 On 13 April 1893, the London Daily News brought an extraordinary story-fresh from its Berlin correspondent. Two ladies, a Mrs. Lewis and her sister, Mrs. Gibson, had travelled to Mount Sinai in Egypt and discovered an ancient manuscript of the Four Gospels. Although Sinai had been searched for written treasures many times since von Tischendorf, the present discovery had "remained hidden from former investigators." Professor Rendel Harris of Cambridge, on first hearing the news, had set off for Mount Sinai where, for forty days, he and the two ladies had sat in the convent deciphering the manuscript, and they were now on their way home with the results. "It is a palimpsest manuscript," wrote Professor Harris in a letter to a German friend (the source of the Berlin correspondent's scoop), and "When Mrs. Lewis first saw it, it was in a dreadful condition, all the leaves sticking together and being full of dirt." She had steamed its pages apart with her camp kettle and, finding that the underwriting of the manuscript contained a very early text of the Gospels, had photographed the lot- some 300 to 400 pages. As to who this Mrs. Lewis and her sister might be, or what credentials they might have for the study of ancient books, the Daily News said nothing other than that both were fluent in Arabic and Greek and that Professor Harris had instructed them in the photographing of handwriting. A further letter from Professor Harris, posted from Suez and published that very day in the British Weekly, had the same exciting story, but an equally frustrating lack of explanatory detail. It was left to the Cambridge Chronicle of the following morning, in its coverage of the breaking story, to say that "as our readers are aware, Mrs. Lewis is the widow of the Rev. S. S. Lewis"-sufficient information to identify the two ladies to the insular world of 1890s Cambridge. An undergraduate, cracking open his Cambridge Chronicle in the Central Coffee Tavern, might recognise the Reverend S. S. Lewis as the very recently deceased Latin tutor at Corpus Christi College, and suppose his widow to be one of the two remarkably similar-looking ladies often to be found awaiting him at the college gates. The shopkeepers on the King's Parade could report to customers that they were indeed well acquainted with Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, for few Cambridge ladies had Paris frocks and bonnets, let alone a private coach and coachman. The two were alike in most every way-trimly built, not in their first youth, but fine-looking and energetic, with brown eyes and chestnut hair piled on their heads à la mode. They would often stop by for gloves, hats or hose, ordering their goods in brisk Scottish accents, and not occasionally countermanding each other as they spoke. The two ladies had been prominent features of the town for the last few years as well as good customers, recently fitting out a grand house they had built for themselves at the foot of Castle Hill. Members of the town's Presbyterian congregation remembered well the first appearance amongst them of the two sisters in January of 1887, both wrapped in furs and one in deep mourning. They were tw...
