Book review: Sisters of Sinai

Published on Friday 27 March 2009 14:06

Janet Soskice Chatto & Windus, £17.99

THIS rattling tale appears to come straight from an Indiana Jones adventure. A party of western adventurers face fiendish adversaries, grotesque and poisonous creatures and relentless sandstorms as they try to retrieve a long-lost biblical treasure. Yet this real-life expedition was not led by a whip-cracking archaeologist, but by two God-fearing Ayrshire twins.

Agnes and Margaret Smith were born in Irvine in 1843, a community so ferociously Presbyterian that one minister held Sunday School on a Saturday so as not to desecrate the Sabbath. And so quiet, one wag dryly noted: "At most hours of the day a cannon ball might be fired along the High Street without peril to life or limb".

Yet this sleepy outpost spawned the indefatigable Smith siblings, who scandalised their douce neighbours by exercising, unabashed, on parallel bars in their back garden in their bloomers. Their pioneering spirit sent the pair on a series of remarkable expeditions which took them to Cairo, Jerusalem and Cyprus.

Travelling without a male escort, the doughty twins headed for lands which were considered to be populated by "Mohammedans and barbarians".

Clad in bonnets and heavy, full-length skirts and left nauseous by camel rides, the pair appeared to be the embodiment of the most callow of colonial explorers. Yet, their steely determination, fluency in several tongues and respect for local cultures paid dividends when they gained entry to St Catherine's monastery, an isolated outpost of Christianity, occupied by Greek Orthodox monks, in the Sinai desert. There Agnes discovered chests of unexamined ancient parchment in a "dark closet of a dark chamber".

The pair had unearthed New Testament manuscripts dating back to the second century, one of the earliest known intact biblical scripts. The finding of the "hidden gospels" caused a sensation, especially when it emerged that its version of Mark's gospel was seemingly without the final verses describing the resurrection and appeared to suggest that Joseph was Jesus's biological father.

Janet Soskice has done an excellent job in piecing together the lives of two remarkable, and largely forgotten women who, like Moses, made a discovery at Mount Sinai that would transform their lives forever.