Victorian Conviction, Victorian Tolerance

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“On 13 April 1893, the London Daily News brought an extraordinary story . . .” So begins Janet Soskice’s The Sisters of Sinai, an account of the adventures of Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, two wealthy, indomitable Victorian widows from Cambridge, England. Twin sisters in their late forties, they set out on a private journey to Mt. Sinai in the winter of 1892, through one of the world’s most forbidding and infrequently traveled landscapes, where only recently the Cambridge professor Edward Palmer had met his death while engaged in research (and espionage).

At St. Catherine’s, an all-but-inaccessible Eastern Orthodox monastery at the foot of the mountain, reached by camel and foot, the women unearthed a book that had lain forgotten, in a dark closet, in an old chest of decaying Syriac manuscripts. Steaming apart the disintegrating pages, they discovered what was arguably the earliest known copy of the four Christian Gospels, overwritten by a much later 7th-century text. The foolhardiness of their journey, and their astounding discovery, would have made Indiana Jones envious.

Photographs show two serious-visaged women in Victorian clothing, hair pinned up, looking ready for anything. They thought nothing of living in tents and recklessly using local guides of questionable reliability. Their intellectual fearlessness was equally impressive. After a near disaster in Egypt in the winter of 1868-69, when their guide turned out to be a genuine scoundrel, they vowed never again to travel without first learning the local languages and dialects. For this gifted duo, that was not a rash promise. They eventually mastered not only the French, German, Spanish, and Italian they had acquired as children but also classical and modern Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and several Aramaic dialects, including the Sinaitic dialect of Syriac. With no formal higher education except for finishing school (universities did not admit women), Lewis and Gibson were confident that they could acquire any scholarly skill necessary to identify, evaluate, transcribe, and translate significant manuscript material and introduce it to a world where new discoveries about the Bible could be controversial.

Born in Scotland in 1843, the sisters had grown up in a rigid religious tradition. Their Scottish Calvinism preached a demanding God who knows every person, holds human beings responsible for their own behavior, and expects them to be unflaggingly industrious and useful. Their denomination frowned on the ritual, ostentation, and “idolatry” of Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. Early in her travel journal, Agnes referred to icons precious to the Eastern Orthodox Church as “dirty old pictures, painted on boards.” With such views of fellow Christians, what would the sisters make of Muslims?

Travel taught them, however, that the world is complicated and that the differences among people and religious beliefs are subtle and nuanced. According to Agnes’s journal, in Jerusalem they felt happier visiting a harem than in the over-decorated churches. They were not offended when their Muslim hostess remarked that “since [the sisters] did not worship pictures or kiss crosses or any such thing, she could not bear to think of Protestants under so insulting a title as ‘Christians,’ but thought they must be Mohammedans of another sect.” In Greece, where most men would not converse with female travelers, it was possible to have wonderful conversations with the highly educated Greek monks, even with the necessity of sometimes “tiptoeing around doctrinal differences with stately platitudes” and defusing an awkward moment by mentioning a common enemy, the Pope.

They were impressed that their Muslim guide near Suez read the Koran and the Christian New Testament daily, and thought the differences between the two faiths were slight. Agnes noticed a Muslim chanting as he maneuvered a boat and another prostrating himself in prayer even while contending alone with dangerous wind and waves. “I should like to know,” she wrote, “why it is the Moslems bring their religion, imperfect as it is, into their daily life so much more than Christians do.” Of Eastern Christians she was moved to write that, though there “is no hiding the fact” that they “persist in image or idol worship,” the Greek Church “has life in it.”

A transformation had begun that would make the sisters at home in this alien world, and in love with it and its people. At the same time, with all this increasing admiration and affection for those whom they met, and fading prejudice, Agnes and Margaret never gave an inch when it came to their personal faith and tradition. They kept the Sabbath wherever they were, never working or allowing anyone in their entourage to work on that day. In 1899, they funded and helped to found Westminster College in Cambridge, a bold Presbyterian outpost in a largely Anglican community.

The example of these Victorian ladies holds a lesson for our ostensibly more cosmopolitan and open-minded times. Imagining a world at peace — a utopia of mutual understanding and compassion — most of us might picture an enlightened global society where men and women have reached agreement about formerly divisive issues, where they have relinquished or softened strong and potentially inflammatory ideological and religious convictions, where there is a sort of hazy homogeneity of thought and belief, or where everyone has “sensibly” come to think and act more like “us.”

The extraordinary tale of Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson presents a different model for a world that has not relinquished its pluralism. It suggests that peace among individuals and societies very different from one another might exist where men and women still hold rather unbending beliefs. There are individuals, like the Westminster Twins (as they were sometimes called), who defy the stereotype that links unyielding convictions with insularity and prejudice, individuals who seem, in fact, uniquely positioned to appreciate the strong faith and ideas of others, discovering not agreement but a profound kinship. Fruitless discussions of who was right were not part of Lewis’s and Gibson’s way of dealing with the world, nor was diluting their beliefs part of their peaceable kingdom.

My Oriental literature professor in college frequently would mount his soapbox and proclaim: “All your lives, you are going to hear the rhetoric that we are all the same under the skin. But I tell you, the wonder of it, the glory of it, is how different we are. Don’t pretend the differences don’t exist and don’t let them alienate you from other people. Hold fast to your own moorings, and treasure the differences!” Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson would have applauded.

The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels, by Janet Soskice, Alfred A. Knopf, 316 pp., $27.95.

Kitty Ferguson is an author and lecturer on science, the history of science, and the interface between science and religious faith. The most recent of her many books is The Music of Pythagoras: How an Ancient Brotherhood Cracked the Code of the Universe and Lit the Path from Antiquity to Outer Space.