The Sinai brotherhood, wishing to offer even the smallest tribute of honour to the great Saint of the Sinai desert, the righteous John, made in 2017 the bold decision to undertake a critical edition of the text of the Ladder. In order to accomplish this goal, there was constituted, with the blessing of the Archbishop of Sinai, Pharan, and Raithou, kyr Damianos, a scholarly committee of Sinai Fathers and friends of Mount Sinai, who are working selflessly under the leadership of the Professor and at the same time an old friend of the Monastery, Panagiotes Nikolopoulos.

The Sinai brotherhood is aware of both the enormity and the extent of the demands, as well as the overwhelming costs, of the task that has been undertaken, which surpasses its strength, humanly speaking. But the longing of those (our own Myrrhbearers) who are employed with this task we trust will attract the blessing and the collaboration of our Righteous Father John the author of the Ladder, who is able to cover all of our inabilities. And this is already happening.

Recently, the Sinai Fathers came in contact and agreed to work together with the University of Leuven (the Department of Early Christian and Byzantine Studies), which also concurrently initiated in 2018 the same work in the person of the quite capable new researcher Maxim Venetskov, under the guidance of Professor Peter Van Deun. We hope that this partnership will accelerate the pace of the research, and that it will give the committee the opportunity to review all (if this is possible) of the existing Greek manuscripts, some five hundred in number.

October 2019

The Scholarly Committee for the Ladder
of the Sacred Monastery of Mount Sinai