All photographs courtesy of Unsplash
In the British Museum in London is one of the most wonderful of ancient manuscripts and it is a copy of the Bible known as Codex Sinaiticus. Today it is carefully preserved by the experts of the Museum but during its history, it was very close to destruction.
A German scholar named Tischendorf discovered it and incredibly he spotted the Codex amongst waste material that was being used for lighting fires in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai in 1844 and he saved it from being burnt and destroyed. The monastery presented the codex to the Czar of Russia in return for certain favours and decorations. Later it fell into the hands of the Soviet government following the Russian revolution. As an atheistic regime, they had no interest in Biblical material and were prepared to sell the codex and so it was purchased for the British Museum through public subscription in 1933 for £100,000.