Woman in Science / With an Introductory Chapter on Woman's Long Struggle for Things of the Mind

by J. A. Zahm

[223] One passage in this codex bears so strongly on a leading argument of this work that I cannot resist the temptation to give it with Mrs. Lewis' own comment:

"The piece of my work," she writes, In the Shadow of Sinai, p. 98 et seq., "which has given me the greatest satisfaction, consists in the decipherment of two words in John IV, 27. They were well worth all our visits to Sinai, for they illustrate an action of our Lord which seems to be recorded nowhere else, and which has some degree of inherent probability from what we know of His character. The passage is 'His disciples came and wondered that with the women he was standing and talking'....

"Why was our Lord standing? He had been sitting on the wall when the disciples left Him; and, we know that He was tired. Moreover, sitting is the proper attitude for an Easterner when engaged in teaching. And an ordinary Oriental would never rise of his own natural free will out of politeness to a woman. It may be that He rose in His enthusiasm for the great truths He was uttering; but, I like to think that His great heart, which embraced the lowest of humanity, lifted Him above the restrictions of His race and age, and made Him show that courtesy to our sex, even in the person of a degraded specimen, which is considered among all really progressive peoples to be a mark of true and noble manhood. To shed even a faint light upon that wondrous story of His tabernacling amongst us is an inestimable privilege and worthy of all the trouble we can possibly take."

[224] Mrs. Gibson, unaccompanied by her sister, has since made two more visits to Mt. Sinai in order to complete the work so auspiciously begun.

[225] The following partial list of the works of these erudite twins on subjects connected with Scripture and Oriental literature gives some idea of their extraordinary attainments and of their prodigious activity in researches that are usually considered entirely foreign to the tastes and aptitudes of women.

Some Pages of the Four Gospels Retranscribed From the Sinaitic Palimpsest, with a translation of the whole text by Agnes Smith Lewis.

An Arabic Version of St. Paul's Epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians and part of Ephesians. Edited from a ninth century MS. by Margaret Dunlop Gibson.

Apocrypha Sinaitica. Containing the Anaphora Pilati in Syriac and Arabic: the Syriac transcribed by J. Rendel Harris, and the Arabic by Margaret Dunlop Gibson; also two recensions of the Recognitions of Clement, in Arabic, transcribed and translated by Margaret Dunlop Gibson.

An Arabic Version of the Acts of the Apostles and the Seven Catholic Epistles, from an eighth or ninth century MS., with a treatise on the Triune Nature of God and translation. Edited by Margaret Dunlop Gibson.

Apocrypha Arabica, Edited by Margaret D. Gibson, containing 1, Kitab al Magall or the Book of the Rolls; 2, The Story of the Aphikia Wife of Jesus Ben Sira (Carshuni); 3, Cyprian and Justa, in Arabic and Greek.