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Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels

Author: Janet Martin Soskice
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
$27.95 Cloth (314 p.)
ISBN: 9781400041336
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Reviewed by Marcia Lusted, Statusing

It sometimes seems like all the major discoveries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were made by dashing male explorers, along the lines of Indiana Jones. Yet in Janet Soskice’s book Sisters of Sinai, the two people making an amazing discovery couldn’t seem less like the stereotype.

Agnes and Margaret Smith were two middle-aged widows, twins, who had enough money and courage to journey to Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai. There they befriended the resident monks and ultimately uncovered a rare version of the early gospels written in an ancient language known as Syriac, supposedly the language spoken by Jesus himself.

Margaret and Agnes did not stop at simply making this amazing discovery. They photographed the fragile manuscript—which had been nearly obliterated by another piece of writing written over the scraped pages—and took the photographs back to their home in Cambridge, England. There they attracted the interest of other (male) scholars and organized another expedition to St Catherine’s, to further examine and transcribe the palimpsest.

The discovery alone would have been enough for most women, especially during a time when women were not even allowed to receive degrees from Cambridge University and their scholarship would be questioned. But Margaret and Agnes dedicated themselves to learning ancient Syriac so that they could translate the manuscript, while enduring the cold shoulder from other Cambridge scholars and bitter fallout with the other members of their expedition as to who should actually be credited with the find and its translation. Ultimately, though, their work was recognized, and the two sisters would return to Egypt and the Holy Land several times to rescue additional manuscripts. It is regrettable that they would be nearly forgotten in later years.

The story of the Smith twins, their unusual and privileged lives, short happy marriages, and adventures, is extremely well-told by Soskice and reads more like an adventure tale than the story of a scholastic find. It is also a reminder that it hasn’t been that many years since women, no matter how smart and well-educated, were still seen as second-class citizens in the world of higher education and historic discoveries. It is both a close look at two Victorian era women, and an adventure that should never have been forgotten for so long.