If You Have Some Millions to Spare …: The Sale of Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus

1. “If you have some millions to spare, the bidding starts in less than an hour!” In this and similar ways, many colleagues drew attention on social media to Christie’s Live Auction 23056 on 11 June, which was entitled: “Manuscript Masterpieces from the Schøyen Collection”. This auction comprised 62 lots. Among them were enormously important manuscripts, such as the so-called Crosby-Schøyen Codex, a Coptic Bible manuscript that is viewed as one of the oldest surviving examples of the codex format of the book. For this reason the auction was already the subject of much discussion in advance. The Crosby-Schøyen Codex was sold for an astronomical sum of over £3 million. Another manuscript that broke the million barrier originally came from St Catherine’s Monastery, which is why I would like to offer some reflections on its sale here.

2. The manuscript in question is known as Codex Sinaiticus (Zosimi) Rescriptus (fig. 1). It is a palimpsest (or part thereof) with Georgian upper writing and Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA) undertext. The Georgian upper text was copied by the scribe Ioane Zosime (hence the name “Zosimi Rescriptus”) in the year 979 CE in the Sinai Monastery. Ioane also worked as a bookbinder and restorer there. In this manuscript, he assembled biblical and monastic texts. The CPA texts in the lower layer come from lectionaries or are patristic texts and homilies. They have been dated to the 5th-7th centuries CE. The manuscript’s former shelfmark was Oslo/London, Schøyen Collection, MS 35-37, but the part that was now sold is only MS 35. MS 36, consisting of a folio and a bifolio, was already auctioned by Christie’s in 2019.¹ It did not originally belong to the palimpsest created by Ioane Zosime, but it was added to it in earlier collection contexts and also acquired in this way by Martin Schøyen.² MS 37, a single folio, appears to stay in the Schøyen Collection for the time being.

3. At the auction, Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus realised a sale price of GBP 1,250,000. This is currently the equivalent of 1,483,400 euros or 1,594,387 USD. In total, 41 lots were sold at this auction at a profit of over £7.5 million, which is almost 8.9 million euros or 9.5 million USD. Referring to the Crosby-Schøyen Codex, Brent Nongbri noted in a post on his blog that the book “seems to have been a sound financial investment”. The same applies to the Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus. I do not know at what price Schøyen acquired the manuscript from Hans Peter Kraus (1907-1988) or his descendants in the 1980s. But when it first came on the market in the 1930s, it was offered for £800 (which today corresponds to a value of several thousand GBP). We should perhaps pause here for a moment and consider how such a monetary value is generated in the first place.

4. The monetary value of cultural artefacts is determined by numerous factors. These include age, origin, historical significance, rarity and availability, i.e. how many artefacts of the same type can be purchased on the market. Of course, trends and fashions in collecting can also play a role. No one will deny that in the case of Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus, the age (of the lower and upper texts), the origin from St Catherine’s Monastery and the cultural and historical significance were decisive for the price achieved. In addition, Sinaitic manuscripts have been rarities for decades, which collectors or collections can only acquire in absolutely exceptional cases.

5. When Sinaitic manuscripts were up for sale in recent years – for example in the case of Schøyen’s MS 36 or the so-called Codex Climaci Rescriptus, which the Museum of Bible in Washington acquired from Westminster College in Cambridge in 2010 through Sotheby’s – I have always been irritated by the way in which value is created through the provenance from a still existing institution, whose cultural heritage and history these manuscripts belong to. In my opinion, economic injustices are still being reproduced here that are based on the economic disparity between the global North and the global South and that favored and enabled the export of cultural artefacts from the global South to Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

6. There is another irritating aspect. Value is also created by using the results of academic research, which to a very large extent is what brings facts such as origin and historical significance to light in the first place. For example, you will notice that Christie’s website lists numerous publications by Christa Müller-Kessler, who has made an outstanding contribution especially to the study of the undertexts of Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus. As scholars, we naturally want to work with and understand these artefacts. And we have little to no control over the purposes for which our work is used. But this case clearly shows one of the ethical dilemmas you can get into when working with material from a private collection. By finding out about its historical and cultural value, you can unwittingly increase its monetary value. This can be an incentive to sell and it was used for sales purposes in the present case. For this reason, some voices advise against working with private collections altogether (I think this has to be decided on a case-by-case basis and the circumstances or attitude of private collectors may also change over time). In the case of Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus, its owners relied on scholars in order to be able to assess its monetary value from the very beginning. This also gives me the opportunity to point out the not unproblematic provenance history of the manuscript.

7. First of all, I noticed that in this auction a great deal of information was given, at least for some of the manuscripts, especially with regard to their provenance history. With Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus one might get the impression that everything is completely documented and there is no room for questions. However, as Sophia Dege-Müller pointed out on X with respect to a Gǝʿǝz manuscript (lot 61) that was also sold during this auction, we simply don’t know whether the manuscript reached Europe in the 1600s or the 1990s. In other words, there is a huge gap of roughly 400 years for which documentation is simply missing. The extensive information on Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus hence to me rather seemed like a smoke grenade.

8. It is true that we are very well informed about the more recent biography of this manuscript, but there are still some questionable points in it. In 1888, Alexandre A. Tsagareli created a catalogue of the Georgian manuscripts of the Sinai Monastery, in which Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus is listed as no. 81.³ Some forty odd years later it was privately owned by Käthe Grote-Hahn (1894-1976) who had inherited it together with many other manuscripts and manuscript fragments from her deceased husband Friedrich Grote (1861-1922). As I recently pointed out in a publication, in 1929 the Georgian scholar Grigol Peradze (1899-1942) made the (probably surprising) discovery that this privately owned manuscript was Tsagareli’s no. 81.⁴ However, the manuscript appeared publicly a few other times between 1888 and 1929. As is well known, the German Semitist Hugo Duensing (1877-1961) published some of the CPA undertexts in 1906.⁵ Interestingly, he writes in the introduction to his book that the manuscripts with which he worked belonged to a private collector who had “permitted me to publish them in response to a favour I had given him with the identification of these and many other manuscripts and manuscript parts”.⁶ That collector was Friedrich Grote, as Duensing revealed decades later. Grote clearly had contacted the scholar to consult him on determining the monetary value of his collectibles. Now, how did Grote himself come into the possession of Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus? This is where things get interesting.

9. The dealer Erik von Scherling (1907-1956), who owned the manuscript after the Grotes, states that the “precious volume had been offered in pawn about 1893 together with other Syriac mss. to a German traveler [i.e. Grote, PT] who had lent money to the monastery of St. Catherina [sic]”.⁷ While this statement is extremely unlikely due to the precarious situation Grote was in at the time, at least the date seems to be correct. For Grote himself went public in 1894 as the discoverer of the manuscript.⁸ He apparently intended to follow in Constantin Tischendorf’s (1815-1874) footsteps as a Bible hunter and present a find just as spectacular as the Codex Sinaiticus. Grote managed to identify a small excerpt of the CPA undertext as a Bible text and thus praised the manuscript as probably the oldest Bible manuscript in existence (Christie’s also used the same narrative in a display of the manuscript in a TikTok video; fig. 2). This news went through the German and international press. It is worth comparing the different reports, as they sometimes differ from each other.⁹ So, for instance, the Literary Digest adds a highly interesting bit of information on 1 September 1894, namely that Grote “‘obtained permission from the Turkish Government to copy the manuscripts”, but that he “was, of course, not allowed to acquire any of the manuscripts”. In spite of that, all of the manuscripts mentioned by Grote along with Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus were later in his possession.¹⁰

10. What these reports indicate is nothing other than illicit acquisition. And it is perhaps not entirely irrelevant that the Fathers of Sinai themselves accused Grote of stealing manuscripts at the time.¹¹ This has hardly any bearing on current ownership rights. But it illustrates the point I made above about the global North-South disparity: it allows a private collector today to make millions from a manuscript potentially stolen from St Catherine’s Monastery.

11. A further question now is who can even raise such a sum and where the manuscript will end up after it’s being sold at auction. Already on 11 June, national news outlets such as Georgian Public Broadcaster reported that Codex Sinaiticus Zosimi Rescriptus was purchased by the Georgian politician Bidzina Ivanishvili, who said he wants to donate it to the Georgian National Museum. First of all, it is very welcome that the manuscript, in contrast to MS 36 (or the Crosby-Schøyen Codex), does not disappear into the safe of an anonymous private collector. Some Georgian colleagues have expressed enthusiasm for this important cultural heritage returning “home”. However, one X-user also warned that “actions like these often carry deeper implications”. It would not be the first time that cultural artefacts, including those from the Sinai Monastery, were used for political purposes (the acquisition of Codex Climaci Rescriptus by the Museum of the Bible would be another example). It was instructive to follow some of the reactions on social media immediately after the auction was closed. For example, notions of nationality and ethnicity were also quickly associated with the manuscript, clearly intending political implications.

12. I would therefore like to close this post with an observation that I had to make already in several respects in my work with the dispersed manuscripts from Sinai: namely, that different agents or constellations of agents use them to create value and meaning as well as to support or exploit certain ideological assumptions. We may intuitively assume that an object such as a manuscript carries with it a fixed meaning or value. But they depend a lot more than we think on what we do with this object.

Published: 12 June 2024. Last updated: 7 October 2024. Licence: CC BY-NC. Download PDF

1. See e.g. Christa Müller-Kessler, “Piecing together Christian Palestinian Aramaic Texts under Georgian Manuscripts (St Petersburg, NLR, Syr. 16; Sinai, Georg. NF 19, 71; Oslo, Martin Schøyen, MS 35, 37; Princeton, Garrett MS 24; Göttingen, Syr. 17, 19, 23, 25)“, Digital Kartvelology, 1 (2022), pp. 24-49, at p. 26, n. 23. [↩]
2. See Müller-Kessler, “Christian Palestinian Aramaic Texts”, p. 26. [↩]
3. Alexandre A. Tsagareli,  Памятники грузинской старины в Свѧтой землѣ и на Синаѣ, Православный Палестинский сборникъ, IV/1 [Monuments of Georgian Antiquity in the Holy Land and on Sinai, Orthodox Palestinian Collection 4/1] (Saint Petersburg: Orthodox Palestinian Society, 1888), p. 233. [↩]
4. See Peter Tarras, “The Collector’s Heir: Käthe Rehfeld (Previously Grote, Née Hahn)“, COMSt Bulletin, 9 (2023 [2024]), pp. 115-128, at p. 121. [↩]
5. Hugo Duensing, Christlich-palästinisch-aramäische Texte und Fragmente nebst einer Abhandlung über den Wert der palästinischen Septuaginta (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Rupprecht, 1906). [↩]
6. Duensing, Christlich-palästinisch-aramäische Texte, p. 1; Eng. tr. mine. [↩]
7. Quoted from Peter Tarras, “From Sinai to Munich: Tracing the History of a Fragment from the Grote Collection“, Comparative Oriental Manuscripts Bulletin, 6/1 (2020), pp. 73-90, at p. 82. [↩]
8. See “Kunūz Sīnāʾ aw al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya fī Ṭūr Sīnāʾ [Treasures of the Sinai or the Arabic Books on Mount Sinai]“, al-Muqtaṭaf, 18/6 (1 March/Adhār/23 Shaʿbān, 1894), pp. 365-368. [↩]
9. For this, see my forthcoming article: “The Legacy of a Failed Amateur Enthusiast: Friedrich Grote’s Sinaitic Manuscripts ‘Discoveries’ and Their Post-Sinaitic Fate“. [↩]
10. See again Tarras, “Legacy”. [↩]
11. See Alba Fedeli, “Manuscript Acquisitions and Their Later Movements: A Further Note About the Case of the Lewis Quranic Manuscript“, in: Boris Liebrenz, Christoph Rauch (eds), Manuscripts, Politics and Oriental Studies: Life and Collections of Johann Gottfried Wetzstein (1815-1905) in Context, Islamic Manuscripts and Books, 19 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), pp. 228-247, at p. 233-234. [↩]

---

---