Commenting on an invaluable document that she personally found, Agnes Smith Lewis expresses her professional insights on this earliest extant version of the Syriac Gospels. This fourth century document, erased and written over, was discovered in the library of St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai in 1892. After introducing the manuscript, Lewis boldly discusses the issues of variants in biblical manuscripts and their origins. She deftly applies these observations to the four canonical Gospels, specifically focusing on the role of the Sinai Palimpsest. Based on the variants she produces, Lewis makes suggestions for emendations in the Revised Version of the Bible, in wide usage at the time. Sensing that issues of faith have been broached, she concludes her study with a consideration of how science and the teaching of the Bible might work together. In this sense, as well as in others, the work of Lewis was clearly ahead of its time.

Agnes Smith Lewis (1843-1926) was a truly remarkable scholar. A woman well versed in ancient languages, she traveled intrepidly during the "age of men." Speaking Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, she set off for the Sinai with her twin sister Margaret Dunlop Gibson. There she discovered the oldest Syriac manuscript of the New Testament. She made five further trips to the Sinai during her lifetime.