Description
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.
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In 1892, two sisters, identical twins from Scotland, made one of one of most important scriptural discoveries of modern times. Combing the library of St. Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai, they found a neglected palimpsest: one of the earliest known copies of the Gospels, a version in ancient Syriac, the language spoken by Jesus. This is the account of how two middle-aged ladies without university degrees uncovered and translated this text, bringing a treasure to world attention. This quintessentiallyVictorian adventure is partly a physical journey: when Westerners generally feared to tread in the region, the sisters Smith traversed the Middle East. It is also a journey of the mind: in an era when new discoveries in science and archaeology were rewriting the accepted understanding of the Bible's origins as well as those of humankind, a great contribution to knowledge was made by two whose only natural advantage was an astonishing gift for languages--From publisher description.
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