The Sisters of Sinai on Learning Ancient Greek as a Living Language

I recently finished reading Janet Soskice’s biography of the twin sister scholars, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, who in their 50’s joined the ranks of the world’s finest Western scholars of Syriac and Arabic, discovered one of the most important manuscripts of the Gospels, the Syriac Sinaiticus, and played an instrumental role in Solomon Schechter’s discovery of the Cairo Geniza.

All this was due, Soskice suggests, to the sisters’ decision to learn ancient Greek as a living language. As children, Agnes and Margaret’s father had made a deal: Learn a foreign language, and we’ll travel to that country. “On this happy plan, and with a twin as a constant practice partner, the sisters mastered French, German, Spanish and Italian while still quite young” (9).

When their father died suddenly in 1866—leaving “his twenty-three-year-old daughters entirely alone in the world, and very rich” (21)—Agnes and Margaret celebrated his memory by traveling up the Nile (in 1869) and determining to learn Arabic.

A decade later, in 1879, the still-single sisters, “threw themselves into the study of [ancient] Greek, … imposing on themselves the discipline of speaking only Greek to each other for days at a time” (56). Instead of the medieval pronunciation system reconstructed by Erasmus, the sisters adopted the current modern Greek pronunciation, following the advice of J. S. Blackie, Professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh. This enabled them to kill two birds with one stone: By 1883 the sisters, “now quite fluent in Greek,” had embarked on a tour of Greece, which resulted in Agnes’s second published travel memoir (56-57).

Marriage intervened for both sisters in the 1880’s. Margaret was married to James Gibson for three years before his untimely death in 1886. Agnes was married to Samuel Lewis for just over three years before his untimely death in 1891. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “to lose one spouse, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

“[O]nly a couple months after Samuel’s death,” Agnes read that J. Rendel Harris had discovered a complete copy of the Apology of Aristides in Syriac at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai peninsula. “Agnes was so interested in this book that she began to study Syriac—not so difficult, she said, if one already had Hebrew and Arabic” (101).

“In January of 1892, less than nine months after Samuel’s death, Agnes and Margaret were in Cairo.” The sisters were able to secure permission from the Archbishop of Sinai to visit St. Catherine’s Monastery “not least because he had, early in their interview, formed the impression that the twins were on a mission to convert the whole of England to the correct pronunciation of Greek” (114). Once at the monastery, they befriended the Greek-speaking monks and were soon granted access to the monastery’s Syriac manuscripts, one of which turned out to be the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the oldest extant Old Syriac manuscript of the Gospels.

Back in Cambridge in 1893—and simplifying a more dramatic story—the 50-year-old sisters “threw themselves into the study of Syriac” (191). By 1894, “[a]fter what must count as one of the most remarkable of middle-aged retraining exercises, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson stepped onto the world stage as oriental scholars of international repute” (200).

Quotations from Janet Soskice, The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (New York: Vintage, 2010).