Walking the Bible

by Bruce Feiler

  For all the bush’s prodigious qualities, it does occasionally require some assistance in the fickle climate of the Sinai. “When I first came here, the bush was just a few feet high,” Avner said, “and not doing very well. But with water and fertilizer they managed to nurse it back to life.”

  “Fertilizer?” I said. “You have to fertilize the holiest bush in the world?”

  “You can’t be too careful.”

  “So what kind of fertilizer do they use?”

  “Goat droppings.”

  For all the architectural wonder of Saint Catherine’s, as well as the natural wonder that comes from being wedged in a tight valley beneath Jebel Musa, by far the monastery’s greatest asset is its collection of religious manuscripts, which is said to be the second most important in the world, after the Vatican’s. Following our tour of the compound, we returned to the chapel around midday, where one of the monks, Anastasis, had offered to show us around the library, which is usually closed to visitors. Anastasis (“they call me ‘Stasis’ ”) was a young man, no more than thirty, who had a bit of baby fat on his face and a beard that was so spotty and thin it seemed almost touching in its desire to be taken seriously. As we were walking up the three flights of stairs to the library’s main floor I asked him how long he had been at the monastery. “Less than a year,” he said, though he noted that he’d been through extensive training at several other institutions in Greece. “And how long will you stay?” I asked. He seemed puzzled by the question. “The rest of my life,” he said.

  The library’s foyer was smaller than I expected, and less ornate. Remodeled in the 1940s, it had the somewhat moldy feel of an Ivy League reading room trying to seem like Oxford. According to Anastasis, the facility contained 4,570 illuminated manuscripts, 7,000 printed books from the late Middle Ages, and 6,000 new printed books. By far the most famous manuscript ever associated with the library was the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete edition of the Bible in existence. Written in Greek in the fourth century C.E., the Codex Sinaiticus contained 730 leaves and would have required 360 goats or sheep to provide their skins for parchment. The manuscript resided in the Saint Catherine’s monastery for 1,400 years, until the German scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf arrived in 1844 and borrowed three leaves for copying. He visited four times in the next fifteen years and finally, in 1859, persuaded the monks to allow him to transport the entire manuscript to Europe. In the library, on the wall, the monks display a signed copy of a letter by Tischendorf, translated into English, that says Saint Catherine’s has handed over to him, “as a loan, a translation of the Old and New Testaments, being the property of the aforementioned monastery.”

  Once Tischendorf got the manuscript to Europe, however, Czar Alexander II of Russia announced he was keeping it and offered the monastery money, gifts, and jewels in return. Though the monastery accepted the gifts, it never renounced its claim to the text. The Codex Sinaiticus remained in Russia until 1933, when Stalin, desperate for money, sold it to the United Kingdom for one hundred thousand pounds. Today it’s on display in the British Museum. In 1995, Prince Charles visited the monastery and one of the monks pointed out the correspondence and declared, “The Codex belongs here.” The prince was polite, Anastasis said, but observed that if the British started returning everything that was taken from other countries, such as the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone, there would be very little left in the British Museum. “I guess he’s right,” Anastasis said. “The most important thing is that it has been preserved and has been made available to scholars throughout the world.”

  The monastery does have a few leaves of the Codex, which were found hidden in a wall after a fire in 1975. They are large, folio-sized pages with elaborate, gold-dusted inscriptions around the edges. Following the custom in translations at the time, there are no spaces between the words, which run together in a never-ending stream that made the Bible for so many centuries nearly impossible to decipher. The library also has the Codex Syriacus, one of only two manuscripts in the world that preserve the text of the four gospels from the time when they were first translated into Old Syrian in the fifth century C.E. Perhaps the most interesting item Anastasis showed us was the copy of a letter, signed by Mohammed himself, offering protection for the monastery. The prophet never signed his name, though, and used his handprint instead as a guarantor. On the copy, his handprint is bright red and looks like one of those five-fingered hamsa amulets that many Muslims and Jews wear around their necks.

  After about an hour of looking at manuscripts, we ended up in a dark corner of the library, and I asked Anastasis what was his favorite book in the collection.

  “I’ve seen relatively few of them,” he said. “Most of what I’ve seen is when we’ve had important ambassadors visiting and I look over their shoulder.”

  I asked him about the morning service, and why it started at 4:30. He mentioned that he and the other monks had work to do around the monastery, and that if they started at 9:00 they would never have time. “Also,” he said, “it’s been this way for a long, long time.”

  “The service seemed more meaningful in the dark,” I said. “When the sun came up the mood changed.”

  “I prefer the dark,” he said. “From when I was twelve years old, I liked night better than morning. It’s the same with prayer. It’s better in the dark.”

  “And what about praying here?” I said. “Do you feel closer to Moses because you live here.”

  “It feels a little bit strange,” he said. “Because when Moses met God, he did it on this spot. ‘This is holy ground,’ God said. The ground is much more important than the bush.”

  “So do you feel closer to God, too?”

  “No,” he said. “Wherever you are, if you are close to God, you are close. If you are far away, you are far away. It doesn’t matter where you live. It matters what you feel.”

  By the time we got outside the library and Anastasis locked the door, Avner had begun chatting with an elderly gentleman who was waiting to see one of the monks. I went over to join them. Jerry Bracken was from Ireland, a retired farmer, who was making his third trip to the Sinai. He was neatly dressed, in khakis and a green striped shirt, and exuded a casual friendliness, which his sprightly brogue only made more appealing. “I’m bringing some books to Father Justin,” he explained. “They are replicas of some of the oldest copies of Genesis ever found.”

  We leaned against the banister, near where I’d sat the night before, and began talking about the Bible. The conversation had the same effortless intimacy I had experienced at so many times, and in so many places, along my trip. It was as if the Bible were its own kind of lingua franca that opened up instant lines of communication among people who had little in common but a shared interest in the text. Considering that the international language of travel has changed so frequently in the last 2,500 years—Greek, Latin, French, English, American English—and that the stories of the Bible have not changed at all, one could argue that for much of the Western world, those stories form a collective language. Certainly in the Middle East today, with so much suspicion and hostility, a common interest in the Bible can be an immediate source of kinship, much stronger than nationality, denomination, age, or wealth. This is the power of pilgrimage: a willingness to place the spiritual lessons of the past over the political divisions of the present, a desire to connect to a place not for its food, art, golf courses, or even beauty, but for its meaning.

  “My principal interest here,” Jerry said, “is that we have many early monastic sites in Ireland. I’ve been trying to see the extent of influence from here on Irish Christianity, which flowered in the seventh and eighth centuries.”

  We had known each other less than three minutes.

  “So what’s your conclusion?” I asked.

  “That there is a very sound, very strong connection. The style of living, the hermit’s way of life, was obviously copied from here. A book by Saint Anthony in the fourth century was widely circulated in Eur
ope and may have been the stimulus for Irish monasticism.”

  “I can understand the idea of coming to the Sinai to get closer to God,” I said. “But how does this work in Ireland?”

  “It works the same.”

  “But Ireland is green and lush,” I said.

  “Not always. There are many remote islands off the west coast that are difficult to reach. They nourished the hermits’ way of life. In fact, Christianity, which almost died out in Europe at one point, was preserved in Ireland because of its remoteness. Then it filtered back again.”

  “But how did these hermits nourish Christianity?” I said. “They seem like such a limited group of people.”

  “Because they studied Scripture. Because they copied Scripture. These monks were the main source of literature and culture all across Europe.”

  I asked him how he got interested in this topic. Did he have a monastic streak in him?

  “I’m married and have a family,” he said. “I wouldn’t make much of a monk. For me it was visiting these little islands off the western coast that stimulated my interest, because you find these early monastic remains—little stone cells, small enclosures—that are right in the middle of nowhere. It’s fascinating.”

  “So what is the connection to the Sinai? Ireland is the greenest place on earth. This is one of the bleakest.”

  “Sure, the contrast couldn’t be more vivid,” he said. “This place is so dry my voice has dried up. You hang out washing here and it will dry in half an hour. You hang it out in Ireland it could take a couple of days.”

  “Then how do you take the lessons of the desert back to Ireland?”

  “Look, I couldn’t survive here,” he said. “I think the people who come to live here are faced with a bleak lifestyle and it shows the strength of their commitment. But the desert is everywhere. There’s desert in the cities. There’s desert in the countryside. It all depends on your outlook. Christ lived and died in the Holy Land. If you want roots, that’s where you go. But the message is universal and applies everywhere. Should. If it doesn’t, it’s not being received properly.”

  We said good-bye warmly, and Avner and I walked downstairs. The monastery closes to tourists at noon and the monks return to prayer. An echoing solitude hovered over the complex as it had the night before. A swallow sat chirping on a beam. As we found a shaded corner and took a break for lunch—bread, cheese, tuna, honey—I was struck by the ways in which Saint Catherine’s, this tiny monastery in one of the remotest parts of the Middle East, a place probably visited by fewer than ten thousand people in its first 1,500 years of existence (before being opened to tour buses in recent decades), embodies so many of the issues, charms, and contradictions I had experienced in other places along the biblical route.

  Saint Catherine’s is perhaps the best example of not only the living tradition of the Bible but also the living challenge it poses to people who wonder if the text is true. The facility has existed for fifteen centuries largely on the basis of some bedouin traditions, endorsed by Byzantine monks, that it was the place Moses met Zipporah, the site of the burning bush, and the gateway to Mount Sinai. Undoubtedly, most of the monks who ever lived here, and most of the pilgrims who visited here, believed those links were true. Now, of course, we know, through history, botany, geography, and archaeology, that those links may not be true. Certainly most of the visitors who come here today, and certainly most of the scientists who study these matters, believe those links are untrue. But the reality is, neither side knows for sure. For all the scientific exploration of the stories of the Bible—especially Exodus—no one has been able to prove them; but no one’s been able to disprove them, either. We simply don’t know.

  One is left, instead, in a seemingly unbridgeable chasm, away from the firm ground of certitude, faced with the bottomless breach of doubt. About halfway through my journey now, I felt that gap more than ever. Should I dismiss the faithful claims of the monks about their connection to the Bible? Should I marvel at them as at an anachronistic curiosity? Or should I take, from them, a different lesson: that the Bible is somehow deeper than faith or science? That it’s something different, a set of stories that transcends most traditional ways of thinking, that somehow finds a way to have something to say to bedouin shepherds, Irish farmers, Israeli archaeologists. Indeed, as I was coming to believe, the power of the Bible to reinvent itself, to withstand the often withering glare of skepticism, to withstand even the sometimes crushing weight of belief, was a beautiful thing, a thing to admire. Maybe that thing is the essence of being divine; maybe it’s the essence of being human. Maybe those are the same thing. I didn’t know.

  I was in the gap now, in that space between where the latent spirit in the places we were visiting and the emerging spirit in me had still not fully connected. I was still in the zone of fear. And the one thing I knew for sure was that I had less and less interest in voices that had all the answers, in people who were sure of their beliefs, who never questioned, or rediscovered. I was drawn instead to a manner of speaking, a tone, a sense of exploration. I was attracted, most of all, to people who wanted to engage the text in a dialogue, in an ongoing conversation. It’s what had drawn me to Avner, to Fern Dobuler in Bethel, to Gabi Barkay in Jerusalem. It’s what made my conversations with Basem, with Professor Nurel Din, with Jerry Bracken, so satisfying. It’s what had made my trip so unexpectedly rich: the contemporary people who lived their lives in perpetual contact with the people of the Bible.

  And it happened again with Father Justin.

  Even before we arrived at Saint Catherine’s, I had heard word that there was an American monk at the monastery, the first in the institution’s 1,500-year history. I had asked Father Paulo about him, and Anastasis. Both of them said I was most likely to catch him in the afternoon, before the evening service, when he was doing his chores. We were sitting in the office later that day, Avner reminiscing with one of the monks, when a tall, thin monk in his late thirties walked into the courtyard. I recognized him as the one who had sprinkled the incense in the morning service. I went and introduced myself, and he invited us to join him for a cup of tea in a small antechamber near the basilica.

  “Living here has been a profound revelation,” Father Justin said. “Especially for an American.” He was close to six-five, with long flowing black robes that accentuated his otherworldliness. His face was gaunt, with a gnarled black beard dusted with gray that seemed like a piece of Spanish moss attached to his chin; he wore thin round spectacles. With his earnest manner, deep-set eyes, and his black skullcap, he looked like a character out of The Brothers Karamazov.

  “Just the services alone,” he continued. “If you think that ever since the sixth century they have been going on here. Not just in this place, but within these very walls. There are so many places where you see a few tumbledown stones and you wonder what this place must have been like over the years. What the way of life was like. What were their goals?”

  We were sitting in a small stone room with a wooden icon of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus. On the opposite wall was a picture of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on top of Mount Sinai, along with a picture of Saint Catherine being carried to burial by angels. The setting, again, as spiritual forge.

  “What’s amazing,” he said, “is that I see the bedouin girls walking through the mountains, feeding the goats, and I think to myself, ‘That’s exactly what Zipporah would have looked like twenty-three centuries ago.’ Even to this day, the bedouin are building primitive homes and bringing in all the amenities of modern life, but you still see tents. And these tents are exactly like the ones that would have been used in the time of Moses.”

  “And do you feel isolated by all this tradition?” I asked. “There’s a whole world out there you never hear about.”

  “Who says we never hear about it?” he said. “Some Americans came here about a year ago and said, ‘You people need e-mail, because you need to be in touch with scholars all over the world.’ ”r />
  “You have e-mail!” I said.

  “They gave us computers and we hooked them up. And they pointed out some Internet search engines where you can look for used and rare books. So all I did was type ‘Sinai’ for the subject, but so many thousands of books came up that after sixty seconds it just cut off.”

  “So what’s your e-mail address?”

  “Sinai@gega.net,” he said, spelling it out. “The problem is that sometimes for days on end you can’t get through with a telephone or a fax. That’s why e-mail has become the easiest way. But usually the telephone lines are so poor that if you try to open up a Web page it will take you two minutes or longer. The worst is when people send us these mammoth files and then you sit there for a whole day and try to get a connection!”

  I was stunned: downloading problems at Mount Sinai, the place of the most famous download in history. The irony was too rich to contemplate. “In Jerusalem, they have this service where you can fax a message to the Western Wall,” I mentioned. “Can you e-mail a message to Mount Sinai?”

  “Why not? What’s amazing to me is that I can sit up there in the library working on the computer and look out the window and there’s Mount Sinai to my left, a sixth-century basilica to my right, and it’s thirty-four centuries between me and Moses.”

  I asked how he came to be at the monastery, and he began to sketch the story. Like many young believers, Father Justin first visited Jerusalem as a young adult and was transformed. He studied Hebrew, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Modern Greek and joined a Greek Orthodox monastery near his home in Massachusetts. After a decade of service he made a pilgrimage to Saint Catherine’s and told the archbishop he would like to become a member.

  “He just gave me this icy look,” Father Justin recalled. “It’s like I asked the wrong question. And then that night he left for Greece. I didn’t know what my status was.” After three weeks the archbishop returned. “Now that you’ve seen the monastery without rose-colored spectacles,” he said, “do you still want to become a member?” Father Justin said yes.