Religious Studies Research Guide

The twenty monasteries which comprise the historic and legendary yet largely inaccessible monastic complex on Mt. Athos in Greece house a rich collection of over 11,000 manuscripts. In 1952 and 1953, the Library of Congress and the International Greek New Testament Project filmed the largest group of manuscripts in the history of Athos. This collection included 209 Greek and Georgian manuscripts of the Bible along with some 44 apocryphal writings as well as various documents on Byzantine music and letters.

The renowned Eastern Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai was constructed by the Byzantine Emperor, Justinian I, in the late sixth century AD over the relics of the martyred saint and the place of the biblical burning bush as identified by St. Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor, Constantine. It is home to reputedly the oldest continuously run library in existence today. Its holdings of religious and secular manuscripts are legendary and allegedly second only in number to the collection held by the Vatican: from bibles, to patristic works, to liturgies and prayers books, and on to legal documents such as deeds, court cases, Fatwahs (legal opinions). The greater proportion of the manuscripts were copied in Greek, and then in Syriac, Georgian, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Ethiopic, as well as Old Church Slavonic.

The twenty monasteries which comprise the historic and legendary yet largely inaccessible monastic complex on Mt. Athos in Greece house a rich collection of over 11,000 manuscripts. In 1952 and 1953, the Library of Congress and the International Greek New Testament Project filmed the largest group of manuscripts in the history of Athos. This collection included 209 Greek and Georgian manuscripts of the Bible along with some 44 apocryphal writings as well as various documents on Byzantine music and letters.