Here’s a curious piece of Bible history I wasn’t aware of: over a hundred years ago, two remarkable women—the twin sisters Agnes and Margaret Smith—made an amazing discovery. While visiting a monastery at Mount Sinai, they discovered the oldest known Syriac Gospels. The Evangelical Textual Criticism blog posted a short video telling the story of these two “Sisters of Sinai.” It’s largely an interview with the scholar Janet Soskice, who published a book in 2009 about the sisters:

For more information, see a further interview with Soskice about the sisters and the importance of their discovery.

As Soskice explains, the sisters’ discovery was particularly significant because it provided evidence that the four familiar Gospel accounts were circulating together very early in Christian history. The sisters (who knew a dozen languages between them) also made a splash in the world of theological studies: they received the first theological doctorates awarded to women. Wikipedia has a short entry on the sisters and their published work.