Gibson, Margaret Dunlop, 1843-1920

<p>Agnes Smith Lewis (1843-1926 ) & Margaret Dunlop Gibson (1843-1920)</p>

<p>Their mother died two weeks after they were born, and they were raised by their father, John Smith, a lawyer who firmly believed in education for his daughters. Their father died when the twins were only 23, leaving them independent – and independently wealthy. In 1868, Margaret and Agnes embarked on a year-long trip to Egypt – the first of a total of nine visits they were to make to the country – going up the Nile, and on via Jaffa to Jerusalem.</p>

<p>After their return, in 1883, Margaret married James Young Gibson, essayist and translator; but she was widowed after only three years of marriage. The sisters then moved to Cambridge, where Agnes married Samuel Savage Lewis, Fellow of Corpus Christi College and Parker Librarian, in 1887. The sisters wrote books and novels, and learned Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac; and after the death of Samuel Savage Lewis in 1891, they devoted themselves to the study of Biblical manuscripts.</P>

<p>In 1892 they visited Egypt again, and at St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai they famously discovered the Sinaitic palimpsest – the oldest known copy of the Gospels. In 1893 they returned to photograph, transcribe, and translate the manuscript, with three other Cambridge scholars, RL Bensly, Francis Burkitt, and James Rendel Harris.</p>
<p>
Following this pioneering research, the sisters also found – on a visit to Cairo in 1896 – leaves from an early 11-12th century Hebrew manuscript of Ecclesiasticus (also called Sirach or Ben Sira). Using the leaves the sisters had found, Solomon Schechter discovered the lost Cairo Genizah - an area in a synagogue for storing worn-out books and papers - and in 1897 the sisters joined Schechter in working to collect the material found there. With the permission of the Chief Rabbi of Cairo, Schechter took it back to Cambridge, and it is now housed in the Genizah Research Unit at the University Library.</p>

<p>In recognition of their achievements, and at a time when Cambridge University did not award degrees to women, Mrs Lewis was awarded an honorary doctorate from Halle in 1899, and both sisters were given honorary doctorates by the University of St Andrew’s, Heidelberg, and Trinity College, Dublin.</p>

<p>The sisters were also committed to ensuring that learning was passed on, and the motto above the door in their home in Cambridge was ‘lampada tradam’ – ‘I will pass on the torch’. On their death, their manuscripts were given to Westminster College; and the material they brought back from the Genizah has recently been reunited with Solomon Schechter’s collection at the University Library, for study by the global community of scholars.</p>

<p>As Presbyterians, another expression of the sisters’ commitment to learning was their generosity to Westminster College, then the training college for the Presbyterian Church of England. In 1896 the College moved from London to its current site in Cambridge, onto land Mrs Lewis and Mrs Gibson purchased from St John’s College and gave to the Church. The sisters gave generously to the building appeal, laid the foundation stone for the College in 1897, and endowed the Lewis-Gibson scholarship, which still runs. Westminster College opened in 1899, and still trains people for ministry today.</p>

<p>A book about the sisters by Professor Janet Soskice was published in 2009 Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels.</p>

<p>A blue plaque to commemorate the twin sisters was unveiled by Professor Soskice at a ceremony at Westminster College on 1 June 2019. The plaque was kindly sponsored by Westminster College.
</p>

<p>Agnes Smith Lewis (1843–1926)[1] and Margaret Dunlop Gibson (1843–1920),[2] nées Agnes and Margaret Smith (sometimes referred to as the Westminster Sisters) born on 11 January, were Arabic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and Syriac language scholars and travellers. As the twin daughters of John Smith of Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland, they learned more than 12 languages between them, and became acclaimed scholars in their academic fields, and benefactors to the Presbyterian Church of England, especially to Westminster College, Cambridge.[1][2]</p>

<p>Agnes and Margaret Smith, twins born to Margaret Dunlop and John Smith, a solicitor and amateur linguist. Their mother died three weeks after their birth, and they were brought up by nannies, a governess, and their father.[3][1][2] They were educated in private schools in Birkenhead, Cheshire and Kensington, London (1853–62),[1][2] with travels in Europe guided by their father.[4]</p>

<p>After their father's death, they were left a large inheritance.[1][2] They settled in London and joined the Presbyterian church in Clapham Road.[5] Already conversationally fluent in German, French and Italian,[6] they continued to learn languages and travelled in Europe and the Middle East, including travelling up the Nile and visiting Palestine in 1868.[7] In 1870, Agnes wrote Eastern Pilgrims, an account of their experiences in Egypt and Palestine.[8]</p>

<p>In 1883, the twins, by then also quite fluent in Modern Greek, travelled to Athens and other parts of Greece,[9] beginning a lifelong affectionate relationship with Greek Orthodoxy, especially the monks in office at Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai.[10] On 11 September 1883, Margaret married James Young Gibson, a scholar trained for the ministry of the United Presbyterian Church, but later working on Spanish translations. In 1887, Agnes married Samuel Savage Lewis, a classicist, librarian, and fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Samuel was also a clergyman. Each marriage soon ended with the death of the husband.[2][1]</p>

<p>Margaret was buried with her husband in Dean Cemetery in western Edinburgh. The grave lies on the north wall of the main cemetery. Agnes was buried with hers in Mill Road Cemetery, Cambridge.[1][2]</p>

<p>By 1890, the sisters settled in Cambridge. Agnes began to study Syriac. Inspired by Quaker and Orientalist J. Rendel Harris's account of his discovery at Saint Catherine's Monastery of a Syriac text of the Apology of Aristides they travelled to the monastery in 1892, and discovered one of earliest Syriac version of the Old Syriac Gospels next to the earlier known Curetonian Gospels, today British Library, which gave insight into the Syriac transmission and added valuable variants to New Testament studies.[11] It was one of the most important palimpsest manuscript find since that of the Codex Sinaiticus in 1859 by Constantin von Tischendorf. The year after (1883), they returned with three Cambridge scholars that included Professor Robert L. Bensly and Francis C. Burkitt, and their wives, as well as J. Rendel Harris, to copy the whole of the manuscript[12] The palimpsest manuscript was found to have been overwritten by the Lives of Holy Women in Syriac dated to 779 CE by John the Recluse as well as also having four 6th century folios with a Syriac witness of the Departure of Mary (Transitus Mariae) underneath.[13][14]</p>

<p>Her second most valuable attribution to the field of Aramaic (Christian Palestinian Aramaic, Syriac) studies and New and Old Testament text critique was the purchase of another unique palimpsest manuscript, the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, in Egypt (Cairo 1895; Port Tewfik 1906), and the largest batch from an anonymous Berlin (Germany) scholar (1905), containing underneath several individual manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic of various lectionaries with Gospels, Epistles, and Old Testament pericopes, an early apocryphal text Dormition of Mary with the hagiographic story of Peter and Paul (5th–7th century),[15][16] and Greek with Gospels (7th/8th centuries),[17] overwritten by the Syriac translation of Scala paradisi and Liber ad pastorem by the monk John Climacus of Sinai (8th–9th century), of which now surfaced the missing quire at Saint Catherine’s Monastery.[18][19]</p>

<p>After the return from their first trip to Sinai Agnes made herself acquainted with Christian Palestinian Aramaic (Palestinian Syriac) by the help of a script table by Julius Euting (German Orientalist).[20] Margaret learned Arabic.[21] During this expedition, Agnes catalogued the collection of Syriac and Margaret of Arabic manuscripts.[1][2][22] It was also on their first expedition (1892) that they were made acquainted with two additional, complete, and dated Christian Palestinian Aramaic (Palestinian Syriac) Gospel lectionaries B and C (1104, 1118), and remnant D in the library of Saint Catherine's Monastery,[23] which they edited 1899 in a synoptic version, including the earlier published Vatican Gospel A from 1030 (Vat. sir. 19).[24]</p>

<p>In their travels to Egypt, Agnes S. Lewis and Margaret D. Gibson were able to acquire among other unique manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic as e.g. an hagiographic palimpsest manuscript The Forty Martyrs of Sinai, and Eulogios the stone-cutter from the 6th–7th century (1906) overwritten by a Christian Arabic text (8th century);[25][26] a nearly complete eleventh-century lectionary in 1895[27] of Christian Palestinian Aramaic with noteworthy biblical pericopes, and later 1905 some of the missing folios from a German collector (Westminster College, Cambridge);[28][29] several leaves under Syriac Christian homilies where Agnes detected separate 7th and 8th century Qu'ranic manuscripts, which she and Alphonse Mingana dated as possibly pre-Uthmanic.[30][31][32] These palimpsest folios were lent to the exhibition “Internationale Ausstellung für Buchgewerbe und Graphik" in Leipzig 1914, and due to the outbreak of the First World War they were only returned in 1936 after the successful intervention by Paul Kahle.[33] They collected about 1,700 manuscript fragments and books including the acquisition of Eberhard Nestle library with rare editions,[1] now known as the Lewis-Gibson collection, including some formerly of the Cairo Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, the earliest Hebrew fragments of a Ecclesiasticus manuscript, identified by Solomon Schechter.[34][35][36] The sisters continued to travel and write until the First World War when they slowly withdrew from their activity as scholars due to ill health.[1][2]</p>

<p>Though the University of Cambridge never honoured the two scholarly twins with degrees, they received honorary degrees from the universities of Halle, Heidelberg,[1][2][37] Dublin, and St Andrews,[1][2][38] and both were honoured in addition with the Triennial gold medal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the blue riband of oriental research in 1915.[1]</p>

<p>At Cambridge, they attended St Columba's Church.[39] They were generous hostesses at their home, Castlebrae, which became the centre of a lively intellectual and religious circle.[40]</p>

<p>The sisters used their inheritance to endow the grounds and part of the buildings of Westminster College in Cambridge.[1] This was long after Nonconformists were allowed to become full members of the Oxbridge universities by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts; and that Presbyterian college moved from Queen Square, London to a site acquired from St John's College, Cambridge in 1899. They also helped the establishment of the Presbyterian chaplaincy to the University of Oxford, now at St Columba's United Reformed Church, Oxford.</p>

<p>gSCOTTISH TWINS AGNES AND MARGARET Smith were the last people you’d expect to discover one of the earliest known copies of the gospels, but in a dusty closet in an Egyptian monastery in 1892–without a university education or formal language training between them–the God-fearing twins uncovered the Syriac Sinaiticus. </p>

<p>The latter half of the 19th century was a time of huge anxiety of the Bible’s veracity, and the importance of such a find cannot be overestimated. Overnight, the newspapers turned the middle-aged sisters into public figures, much to the chagrin of the leading Biblical scholars who had dreamed of making such a find for decades.</p>
<p>Born in 1843 and raised by their father, the twins were inseparable from a young age. And they were privileged: Educated as if they were boys, for every language they learned, the girls would be taken to that country by their father. And so it was that the twins had mastered French, German, Spanish, and Italian by their teens.</p>

<p>The twins’ father died when the sisters were 23, and they received a huge inheritance of about a quarter of a million pounds. Alone in the world and now exceptionally wealthy, the young women took a trip–not to fashionable Paris or the Italian Riviera–but to Egypt. As would become characteristic of the women, they refused to follow the mores of the time: Instead of having a male chaperone, they let themselves be accompanied only by a young female teacher.</p>
<p>
This was hardly a pleasure trip–dysentery, cholera, and other infectious diseases were rife, and at points the twins did not know if they would return from their journey down the Nile. The voyage was a small disaster; they were supposed to visit various religious sites along the route, but their dragoman, Certezza, kept the sisters as virtual prisoners on the rat-infested sailboat he’d convinced them to rent. Following the river trip with a visit to Jerusalem, the sisters were in the Middle East for nearly a year.</p>

<p>Back in Britain after their adventure, the twins dedicated themselves to mastering more languages, including ancient and modern Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic.</p>


<p>The twins settled in Cambridge in 1890. Even though the university was barred to women students, the scholarly city should have been a perfect spot for these self-taught linguists. However, Janet Soskice, who wrote the seminal biography of the twins, The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels, notes that the insular Cambridge set cast the twins as outsiders with their gaudy home, their lack of husbands, their expensive dresses, bonnets and private coach. The twins’ eccentricities, like exercising in the back garden in their bloomers, didn’t help.</p>

<p>But they eventually shed their ‘spinster’ label: Margaret married a renowned Scottish minister named James Gibson when she was 40; Agnes married the Cambridge scholar Samuel Savage Lewis four years later, in 1887, a match that helped the women’s entry into Cambridge society. Tragically, both men died after just three years of marriage.</p>

<p>Once again, the twins only had each other, and so in 1892 they decided to venture to Egypt’s Sinai Desert, armed with a tip from the Cambridge-based orientalist James Rendel Harris to search out a dark closet off a chamber beneath the archbishop’s rooms at St. Catherine’s–perhaps the world’s oldest Christian monastery –where there were chests of Syriac manuscripts that Harris had noticed but hadn’t been able to inspect on his last trip to the monastery.</p>

<p>They were all hoping these manuscripts might contain early versions of the gospels, as the western Christian world was clamoring for finds that could disprove some of the questions Darwin had raised about the veracity of the Bible.</p>


<p>And so Agnes and Margaret Smith braved an area where, ten years before, Cambridge’s leading Arabic professor was murdered by bandits. Together with their guide, a Syrian Christian called Hanna, and 11 Bedouin helpers, the sisters rode temperamental camels and camped in tents for weeks on end–no small test for two wealthy women used to living in luxury.</p>

<p>
Agnes had been learning Syriac–a branch of Aramaic, the language Jesus would have spoken–in the six months before the trip. Just as well, because she managed to do what so many male professors and scholars had failed to do in their searches of the monastery–she found what appeared to be an ancient manuscript of the four gospels. </p>

<p>The twins couldn’t be sure of their find, but nevertheless they were convinced enough to use almost all of their film on photographing the palimpsest.</p>

<p>Back in Cambridge, when they tried to show the photographs to the university’s eminent professors, they were ignored as dilettantes…until the professors got a proper look. It looked like Agnes Smith really had discovered something of worth. Yes, the Syriac Sinaiticus dated back to the mid-4th century, and the translation it preserved went back to the 2nd century, very close to the fountainhead of early Christianity.</p>


<p>A group of scholars, including three world-class transcribers–Professors Robert Bensly, Francis Crawford Burkitt, and Rendell Harris– was hastily put together to go back to the monastery and transcribe the manuscript.</p>

<p>Everyone on that trip expected to leave the Sinai to a burst of fame and glory, but the newspapers only had eyes (and column inches) for these eccentric twins who’d come out of nowhere. Bensly and Burkitt were livid–they saw the women as uneducated upstarts who had stolen their claims to fame. Sure, the male professors did not dispute that Agnes had physically come upon the manuscript, but they refused to credit her with much more. </p>

<p>While the men stewed, the twins became public figures who were finally accepted into scholarly society: There were invitations from eminent professors across the country, and honorary degrees from St Andrews and Heidelberg, Trinity College and Halle.</p>

<p>Margaret died in 1920, and Agnes in 1926. During their lifetime, the University of Cambridge never recognized the sisters for their monumental scriptural find of the Syriac Sinaiticus. But that isn’t wholly surprising from a university that denied women full degrees until 1948. </p>