Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world

Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript – the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity – is of supreme importance for the history of the book.

The name ‘Codex Sinaiticus’ literally means ‘the Sinai Book’.

It reflects two important aspects of the manuscript: its form and a very special place in its history.

‘Codex’ means ‘book’. By the time Codex Sinaiticus was written, works of literature were increasingly written on sheets that were folded and bound together in a format that we still use to this day. This book format was steadily replacing the roll format which was more widespread just a century before when texts were written on one side of a series of sheets glued together to make a roll. These rolls were made of animal skin (like most of the Dead Sea Scrolls) or the papyrus plant (commonly used for Greek and Latin literature).

Using the papyrus codex was a distinctive feature of early Christian culture. The pages of Codex Sinaiticus however are of prepared animal skin called parchment. This marks it out as standing at an important transition in book history. Before it we see many examples of Greek and Latin texts on papyrus roll or papyrus codex, but almost no traces of parchment codices. After it, the parchment codex becomes normative.

During its history – particularly its modern history – parts of Codex Sinaiticus were also known by other names. The 43 leaves which are now at Leipzig University Library were published in 1846 as ‘Codex Frederico-Augustanus’ in honour of Frederick Augustus II, King of Saxony, who was the patron of the German Biblical scholar and editor of Codex Sinaiticus, Constantine Tischendorf. The 347 leaves now in The British Library were previously known as ‘Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus’, as they were kept in St Petersburg between 1863 and 1933.

source:http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/

• Kimberly Brooks’ Technicolor Summer at Taylor De Cordoba was extended and ends this Saturday (June 21).

• Culver City bar The Mandrake (and my favorite bar in L.A.) is on Facebook. You should be their friend - just search for Mandrake Bar.

• In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor opens at the Laguna Art Museum this weekend. The press release states that this “is an exhibition that presents the work of 150 artists and posits that there has been a huge, but unacknowledged art movement taking place in this country for the last 40 years.” While I don’t really know if we can call this movement unrecognized anymore (especially considering many of the artists in the show are house-hold artist names), it’s worth checking out.

One of the (many) things I adore about Los Angeles is the murals…the bizarre, incredible, so-bad-they’re-good murals like the shark biting into the Corona bottle on Beverly or the woman with the crazy hand and nails in the Adams district. We drive by them everyday and sometimes don’t notice them until, well, you can’t NOT notice them. This happened to me yesterday on the way back from lunch. Driving on Santa Monica Boulevard just after Vermont I saw this…Frieda Kahlo. And it’s so awesome I had to share. These murals are without a doubt the aesthetics of L.A. that I will miss dearly.

I always come back to something figurative. I am always reminded of those scenes in the movies that I saw as a kid where there would be a train approaching that would suggest people traveling. The train would start at the lower, right hand corner and then in two or three seconds it would zoom in with the noise of a train and cover the entire area of the screen. That experience seemed to stick with me. The diagonal for me is like the zoom of a train, it has affected me and I have based several paintings on those sensations. I will see where it takes me from here.

The interview coincides with the opening of Ruscha’s special exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art. His show features works that I recently saw at Gagosian in London (the diptych Azteca and Azteca in Decline as well as his new wood prints). This is somewhat similar to what Tyler Green has been discussing on MAN.