Just a quick post to alert you to the fact that the Library of Congress has put its collection of photographs of manuscripts from St. Catherine’s Monastery online. For example, here you will find 1,081 Greek manuscripts (!). Heavenly.One policeman was killed and four injured during an exchange of gunfire at a checkpoint about half a mile from the monastery entrance. Police were eventually able to gain control and force the militants to flee, according to the Ministry of Interior as reported by Ahram Online.If anyone has any additional information on the state of the monastery, please post it in the comments. And do pray for the safety of the monks and others who live near or frequent the site.
ISIS claimed responsibility in a terse statement via their official news agency, Amaq. However, local speculation suggested it may have been a result of skirmishes between disgruntled tribes and the government.
A Greek student conservator who is studying for his PhD in Britain, Mr Sarris had been involved in the British Library's project to digitise the Codex and quickly recognised the distinct Greek lettering when he saw it poking through a section of the book binding. Speaking from the Greek island of Patmos yesterday, Mr Sarris said: "It was a really exciting moment. Although it is not my area of expertise, I had helped with the online project so the Codex had been heavily imprinted in my memory. I began checking the height of the letters and the columns and quickly realised we were looking at an unseen part of the Codex."
Mr Sarris later emailed Father Justin, the monastery's librarian, to suggest he take a closer look at the book binding. "Even if there is a one-in-a-million possibility that it could be a Sinaiticus fragment that has escaped our attention, I thought it would be best to say it rather than dismiss it."
Only a quarter of the fragment is visible through the book binding but after closer inspection, Father Justin was able to confirm that a previously unseen section of the Codex had indeed been found. The fragment is believed to be the beginning of Joshua, Chapter 1, Verse 10, in which Joshua admonishes the children of Israel as they enter the promised land.
Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Father Justin said the monastery would use scanners to look more closely at how much of the fragment existed under the newer book binding. "Modern technology should allow us to examine the binding in a non-invasive manner," he said.
Mr Sarris said his find was particularly significant because there were at least 18 other book bindings in the monastery's library that were compiled by the same two monks that had re-used the Codex. "We don't know whether we will find more of the Codex in those books but it would definitely be worth looking," he said.
As I reported from the Codex Sinaiticus conference in July, Father Justin, librarian at St Catherine's monastery, announced in his presentation on the new finds of 1975 that most probably a new leaf of Codex Sinaiticus has recently been discovered in the binding of another codex by a scholar who is working on the bookbindings of the monastery. 
Father Justin showed two different images of the new discovery. This second, if I remember correctly, is an enhanced image revealing more clearly the text from Joshua 1:11 (the text may have been enforced). On this poor photo at least the following text is visible:
