Today, let’s look briefly at claims made by Dr. Norman Geisler about Mark 16:9-20. This shows the contents of part of the Defending Inerrancy website, accompanied by my comments. (And although the inaccuracies that are being spread by Dr. Geisler and the Defending Inerrancy website are pretty bad, the ones spread by John MacArthur are even worse. And don’t even get me started about the Credo Courses from Dallas Theological Seminary professors.)
A blog by James Snapp, Jr. about New Testament textual criticism, especially involving variants in the Gospels.
Followers
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Saturday, March 25, 2017
Ten More Reasons Sinaiticus Was Not Made by Simonides
Continuing from where I left off:
(11) Sinaiticus Has Rare Alexandrian Readings . As
Scrivener observed in his 1864 Full Collation of Codex Sinaiticus, in Matthew 14:30, after the word ανεμον, the word
ισχυρὸν is missing. The printed edition
of Codex Vaticanus’ text that was available when Simonides claimed to have made
the codex reported that Codex Vaticanus included this word. It was not until 1855 that the collation of
the text of Codex Vaticanus was revised, and it was found that the main text of
Vaticanus did not have this word; it
was added by a later corrector.
This agreement between Vaticanus
and Sinaiticus is one of many examples of the special affinity of their
contents – agreements which would not exist between Codex Vaticanus and any
artificially created composite-text based on the sources described by
Simonides. Simonides claimed to have
used a Greek Bible prepared at Moscow, and printed by the Zosima brothers; this
was understood to refer to a Greek Bible published by the Holy Russian Synod in
1821, in which the Old Testament portion is based on Grabe’s edition of the
text of Codex Alexandrinus (an edition finished in the early 1700’s by other scholars after Grabe’s death).
According to T. C. Skeat, the New Testament portion of this edition consists
of the Textus Receptus. It may thus be expected to represent a
fifth-century form of the Greek text of the Old Testament books, but the
extraction of many Alexandrian readings from its New Testament text would be
impossible.
Even if
Simonides had somehow acquired a collation of Codex L (a manuscript known from
the time of Stephanus (mid-1500’s) to have a text of Mark, Luke, and John which
often deviates from the normal Byzantine standard (because, as later
researchers discerned, its text in those three Gospels, and in the closing
chapters of Matthew, is Alexandrian)), this would not have helped him find
Alexandrian readings in the first 20 chapters of Matthew, where L’s text is
primarily Byzantine.
Yet we see many
agreements between Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in Matthew 1-20 – of which the
following are samples – which are inexplicable if the text of Sinaiticus were
put together by the process which Simonides claimed to have used:
● The
omission of Και (“And”) at the beginning of 3:2.
● The
omission of (“his”) αυτου in 3:7.
● The
omission of Ἰωάννης (“John”) in 3:14 .
● The
omission of ρημα (“word”) in 5:11 .
● The
harmonization τασσόμενοος (“placed”) in 8:9.
● The
omission of και (“and”) in 8:13a.
● The
omission of αυτου (“his”) in 8:13b.
● The
omission of αυτου (“his”) in 8:21 .
● The
omission of πολλα (“often”) in 9:14 .
● The
omission of ανθρωπον (“a man”) in 9:32 .
● The
addition of και before Ἰάκωβος (“and” before “James”) in 10:2.
● The
omission of εισίν (“are”) at the end of 11:8.
● The
omission of οχλοι (“crowds”) in 12:15 .
● The
inclusion of αυτω (“him”) in 12:38 .
● The
omission of ἀκούειν (“to hear”) in 13:9.
● The
variant φησιν (“says”) in 13:29 .
● The
omission of ανθρώπω (“a man”) in 13:45 .
● The
omission of αυτον (“him”) in 14:3.
● The
omission of τὸν in 14:10 .
● The
omission of ισχυρὸν (“strong”) in 14:30 .
● The
omission of αυτων (“their”) in 15:2.
● The
omission of αυτου (“his”) in 15:12 .
● The
omission of με (“I”) in 16:13 .
● The
addition of Χριστος (“Christ”) after Ἰησους (“Jesus”) in 16:21 .
● The variant εχει (“is ill”) instead of πάσχει
(“suffers”) in 17:15 .
● The
omission of 17:21 .
● The
omission of εις με (“against you”) in 18:15 .
● The omission
of ανθρώπω (“a man”) in 19:3.
● The omission of αυτου (“his”) in19:10 .
● The omission of αυτου (“his”) in
● The
omission of 20:16 .
The theory that anyone in the early 1800’s could happen to
create all these agreements with Vaticanus is extremely
unlikely. Most of them are agreements in
error (regardless of whether one’s standard of comparison is the Byzantine Text
or the Nestle-Aland compilation).
(12) Sinaiticus Contains Many Non-Alexandrian Readings Which Are Singular or Almost Singular. A person creating a text in the early
1800’s based on a printed Greek Bible and a few manuscripts from Mount
Athos would have neither the means nor the motive to create many
readings found in Codex Sinaiticus. Such a person would occasionally make a
mistake which at least one earlier copyist also made – but the appearance of so
many singular or almost singular readings – not just mistakes – in Codex
Sinaiticus puts very heavy strain on the theory that they were made by someone
in the early 1800’s who was attempting to produce a gift for the Russian
Emperor, because in such a setting there is nothing to provoke them. Some examples from chapters 1 and 2 of the
Gospel of Luke:
● The variant Ἰουδαίας (of Judah )
instead of Γαλιλαίας (of Galilee ) in 1:26 .
● The harmonization και πατριας (“and
lineage”) in 1:27 .
● The variant Και αναστασα instead of Ἀναστασα δε (both
meaning “And rising up”) in 1:39 .
● The harmonization ἐν ἀγαλλιάσει
(“in joy”) in 1:41 .
● The variant διὰ (“through,”
or, “because of”) instead of διελαλειτο πάντα in 1:65.
● The variant Θεου (“God”) instead of Κυρίου (“Lord”) in 2:9.
● The insertion of λέγοντες (“saying”)
in 2:15 .
● The omission of the last εἰς (“for”)
in 2:34 .
● The insertion of πονηροι (“evil”)
at the end of 2:35 .
● The variant ἐβδομήκοντα (70) instead
of ὀγδοήκοντα (80) in 2:37 .
● The omission of Ἰησους (“Jesus”)
in 2:43 .
● The variant Θεου instead of
παρὰ Θεω in 2:52 .
(13) Significant Parts of Sinaiticus Are Not
Extant. Simonides claimed that he
had visited Saint Catherine’s Monastery in 1852, and that he had seen his codex
there, and that it was “much altered, having an older appearance than it ought
to have. The dedication to the Emperor
Nicholas, placed at the beginning of the book, had been removed.” However, much more of the Old Testament is
not extant. No pages from Genesis were
known to Tischendorf except the small fragment he found in 1853; the parts from
Genesis 21-24 were either taken by Porphyry Uspensky, or discovered at Saint
Catherine’s Monastery as part of the “New Finds” in 1975. The entire book of Exodus is gone; only
chapters 20-22 of Leviticus are extant, and the surviving pages contain no more
than ten chapters of Leviticus; only five of Deuteronomy’s chapters are
attested on the surviving pages. Only
two chapters of Joshua are extant, and no text from Judges was known to exist
until fragments containing Judges 2:20 and Judges 4:7-11:2 were discovered
among the “New Finds” in 1975. Such a
museum of neglect and decay! And yet all
that Simonides can say upon encountering his work in such condition is that it was
much altered, and looked a little older than it should? And that the dedication-note at the front was
missing??
There is a
good reason why Simonides did not express dismay that what had been a complete
Greek Bible in 1841 had been so thoroughly damaged that only a small fraction
of the pages containing the Pentateuch had survived: he was unaware of it, having never seen the
manuscript at Saint Catherine’s Monastery or anywhere else.
(14) Sinaiticus Has a Nearly Unique Text of the Book of
Tobit. No resources at Mount
Athos , or anywhere else in the early 1800’s, could supply the form
of Greek text of Tobit that appears in Sinaiticus. As David Parker has noted, the text of Tobit
in Sinaiticus agrees with the Old Latin translation of the book more closely
than the usual Greek text does. In
addition, the fragment Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1076, assigned to the 500’s, contains
Tobit 2:2-5, and it agrees at some points with the text of Sinaiticus. (For example, both read καὶ ἐπορεύθη Τωβίας
(“And Tobias went”) and ἔθνους, “nation,” (instead of γένους, “race”) in 2:3.)
(15) A Copyist of Codex Sinaiticus Was Probably Familiar
with Coptic. Scrivener explains the
evidence for this in the Introduction to his Collation of Codex
Sinaiticus: “It has also been remarked
that no line in the Cod. Sinaiticus begins with any combination of letters
which might not commence a Greek word, unless it be θμ in Matt. viii. 12; xxv.
30; John vi. 10; Acts xxi. 35; Apoc. vii. 4.”
The letters θμ are capable of beginning words in Coptic, and this is
probably why this exception was made; i.e., it was not an exception in Coptic.
(16) One of the Later Correctors of Sinaiticus Had
Unusual Handwriting. Several
individuals – not just one or two – attempted to correct the text of Codex Sinaiticus.
One corrector not only corrected the text, but occasionally corrected earlier
correctors. This corrector’s handwriting
was somewhat unusual; he added a small angular serif at the bottom end of the
letters ρ, τ, υ, and φ.
(17) Constantine Simonides Was a
Notorious Con Artist. It may be
helpful, when evaluating Simonides’ claims about Codex Sinaiticus, to observe
his other activities that he undertook at about the same time that he published
those claims. In the same letter written
by Simonides that was published in The
Guardian on September 3, 1862, Simonides claimed that while at Saint
Catherine’s Monastery in 1852, he had not only seen the codex, but also, among
the manuscripts in the library, he found “the pastoral writings of Hermas, the
Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, and the disputed Epistles of Aristeas to
Philoctetes (all written on Egyptian papyrus of the first century).” He had mentioned this manuscript earlier, in a
book with the verbose title, Fac-Similes of Certain Portions of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and of the Epistles of Ss. James & Jude, Written on Papyrus in the First Century, and Preserved in the Egyptian Museum of Joseph Mayer, Esq. Liverpool.
In that book, Simonides claimed
that in the antiquities collection of a resident of Liverpool ,
England named Joseph Mayer (a silversmith who was also an antiquities-collector), there were five papyrus fragments containing text from the Gospel of
Matthew. After a long defense of the
view that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Greek, rather than in Hebrew – and in
this part of Simonides’ work there is some genuine erudition on display –
Simonides described, complete with a transcription and notes about textual
variants, this item. (The book even has pictures of the papyri.)
He claimed,
for instance, that its text of Matthew 28:6 read “the Lord over death,” rather
than simply “the Lord,” and he stated, “I prefer this text of Mayer’s
codex over the others.” He also stated, “The
8th and 9th verses of the received version [i.e., the Textus Receptus] are extremely defective
when compared with the text of Mayer’s’ codex.”
Simonides belittled the usual readings of the passage [Matthew 28:9b] repeatedly,
calling them incorrect and defective, “while Mayer’s codex gives the passage
pure and correct, Καὶ ἰδοὺ ἐν τῷ πορεύεσθαι αὐτάς, ἀπήντησεν αὐταις ὁ Ἰησους
λεγων Χαίρετε.”
As Simonides described the text of
Matthew 19 on one of Mr. Mayer’s papyrus fragments, he remarked upon its text
of verse 24: “ΚΑΛΩΝ is the reading I
found in a most ancient manuscript of Matthew, preserved in the Monastery of
Mount Sinai (Vide fac-simile No. 8,
Plate I. p. 40.) This remarkable and
precious manuscript, which I inspected on the spot, was written only 15 years
after Matthew’s death, as appears from a statement appended by the copyist
Hermodorus, one of the seventy disciples mentioned in the Gospel. It is written on Egyptian papyrus, an
unquestionable token of the highest antiquity.”
Max Müller,
in the journal The Athenaeum, in an
article written on December 7, 1861 , harshly reviewed the career of Simonides before declaring that “not one of these
pretended documents is genuine.”
Simonides, Müller wrote, had once visited Athens
and had claimed that among the manuscripts at Mount Athos ,
he had found “an ancient Homer,” but when examined, this document “turned out
to be a minutely accurate copy of Wolf’s edition of that poet, errata included!” That is, the supposedly ancient handwritten
text was based on a printed edition of Homer.
Müller proceeded
to list several more attempts by Simonides to defraud people with false
antiquities. After Simonides had been repeatedly
exposed as a charlatan, Müller contended, he “came soon afterward to Western
Europe , bearing with him a goodly stock of rarities, and a
reputation which the Cretans of the Apostolic times would have envied.” [The meaning of this remark is that the
Cretans were notoriously dishonest, a la
Titus 1:12 , but Simonides’
reputation was far worse.]
Müller also
mentioned that at a meeting of the Royal Society of Literature in May of 1853,
Simonides presented what he claimed to be “four books of the Iliad from his
“uncle Benedictus of Mount Athos,” an Egyptian Hieroglyphical Dictionary
containing an exegesis of Egyptian history,” and “Chronicles of the
Babylonians, in Cuneiform writing, with interlinear Greek” – but by the end of the day, it was pointed out
that “the so-called cuneiform characters belonged to no recognized form of
these writings, while the Greek letters suspiciously resembled badly or
carelessly formed Phoenician characters.”
Müller’s
summary of Simonides’ career as a huckster of forgeries stopped with his
mention of “the explosion of the Uranius bubble.” By this phrase, Müller was referring to an earlier
incident in which Simonides had offered to sell to the German government what
he claimed to be an ancient palimpsest, containing the remains – 284 columns of
text – of a work by a Greek historian named Uranius about the early history of
Egypt, over which, it seemed, other compositions had been written in the 1100’s.
The members of the Academy of Berlin were
persuaded, except for Alexander Humboldt, that it would be worthwhile to make a
scholarly edition of this newfound text, and this task was undertaken by K. Wilhelm
Dindorf. Eventually, however, a closer
examination of the document, by Constantine Tischendorf and others,
was undertaken, and with the help of chemicals and a microscope it became clear that the document was a fake (or half-fake – the forged ancient writing which,
chronologically, should have had the medieval writing written over it, was above
it instead). In 1856, Simonides was
arrested, as reported on page 478 of the National Magazine. The case was not
pursued in the courts; instead, Simonides left the country.
Tischendorf, in a letter written in December of 1862, responding to Simonides’ claim to have made Codex Sinaiticus, reminded his readers about that incident: “He contrived to outwit some of the most renowned German savants, until he was unmasked by myself.”
Tischendorf, in a letter written in December of 1862, responding to Simonides’ claim to have made Codex Sinaiticus, reminded his readers about that incident: “He contrived to outwit some of the most renowned German savants, until he was unmasked by myself.”
This should
provide some idea of the nature of Simonides’ career, and how he worked: he created fraudulent manuscripts, using
genuinely old – but blank or already used – papyrus or parchment on which to
introduce his own work. He also occasionally
acquired genuine manuscripts (including several Greek New Testament minuscules), in the hope that the affirmation of their
genuineness would rub off on his own creations.
He was guilty of fraud many times
over.
After Tischendorf had helped
expose the fraud that Simonides had come very close to pulling over on the Berlin
Academy , Simonides may have
afterwards harbored a strong desire to embarrass, or at least distract,
Tischendorf. This may be why he later claimed that the
most important manuscript Tischendorf ever encountered was actually the work of
Simonides himself – a claim which, had it been true, would have drawn into
question the accuracy of Tischendorf’s earlier appraisal of the Uranius
palimpsest.
John 21:24-25 in Codex Sinaiticus, viewed under ultraviolet light. |
(18) The Last Verse of John Was Initially Omitted
in Codex Sinaiticus. Although
Tischendorf insisted that there was something weird about the final verse of
John in Codex Sinaiticus, this was doubted by subsequent researchers, since
even in photographs nothing seemed amiss.
When the scholars Milne and Skeat, studying the manuscript in the early 1930’s for the British Museum, applied ultraviolet light to the passage,
however, Tischendorf was vindicated: the
copyist at this point finished the text at the end of 21:24 , and drew his coronis, and wrote the closing-title
of the book – and then he erased the closing-title (gently scraping away the
ink) and the coronis, and the closing title.
Then he added verse 25 immediately following verse 24, and remade a new
coronis and closing-title. All this is
as plain as day, as long as one has an ultraviolet light handy to examine the
manuscript.
A thoughtful copyist
could decide to reject the final verse, regarding it as a note by someone other
than John. And his supervisor could
overrule his overly meticulous decision.
But Simonides would have had no reason to stop writing at the end of verse
24, add the coronis and closing-title, and then undo his work and remake the
text with verse 25 included.
(19) The Lettering on Some Pages of Sinaiticus Has Been Reinforced. On page after page, the lettering that
was first written on the page has been reinforced; that is, someone else has
written the same letters over them, so as to ensure the legibility of what was
once faded. The first page of Isaiah is
a good example. This reinforcement was
not undertaken mechanically, but thoughtfully; the reinforcer did not reinforce
letters and words that he considered mistakes; he introduced corrections, such
as in 1:6, where the reading καιφαλης is replaced by κεφαλης. Inasmuch as it is highly unlikely that the
writing of a manuscript made in 1841 would be so faded that it would need to be
reinforced within a few years, this weighs heavily against Simonides’
story.
(20) Pages from Near the End of the Shepherd of
Hermas in Codex Sinaiticus Are Extant. When
Simonides wrote his letter for The Guardian
in 1862, he very clearly stated he concluded it with “the first part of the
pastoral writings of Hermas,” but his work then ended “because the supply of
parchment ran short.” Such a description
plausibly interlocked with what one could discern at the time about the contents of Codex Sinaiticus by reading
Tischendorf’s description of it. At the time, only the first 31 chapters
of the text of Hermas were known to be extant in Codex Sinaiticus; that is all
that Tischendorf had recovered from Saint Catherine’s Monastery. However, in 1975, when the “New Finds” were
discovered, they included damaged pages from Hermas – to be specific, from
chapters 65-68 and chapters 91-95. The Shepherd of Hermas has a total of 114 chapters. In no sensible way can Simonides’ statement that he wrote “the first
part” of Hermas and stopped there be interlocked with the existence of pages
containing the 95th of its 114 short chapters.
The clear
and incriminating implication of this evidence is that Simonides’ report about
how he produced the codex, including the prominent detail that he wrote the
first part of Hermas but stopped there because he ran out of parchment, was
shaped by his awareness of Tischendorf’s description of the codex, which stated
that there was no text of Hermas extant after that point. If Simonides had actually written the codex,
he would have said something to the effect that a large part of his work was
missing.
More evidence against the plausibility of Simonides’ story could be accumulated: indications that the copyists of Sinaiticus at least occasionally wrote from dictation, and the existence of textual variants (in Matthew 13:54, Acts 8:5, and First Maccabees 14:5) which suggest that a copyist was working at or near Caesarea, and the remarkable similarity between the design of the coronis applied by Scribe D at the end of Tobit and after Mark 16:8 in Sinaiticus, and the design of the coronis at the end of Deuteronomy in Codex Vaticanus, and the drastic shift in the text’s quality in Revelation, and more. But enough is enough.
Simonides’ motives for
spreading the false claim that he made Codex Sinaiticus may be a mystery till Judgment
Day, but his guilt is not hidden at all.
He was a well-educated charlatan, and his claims about Codex Sinaiticus
were false, as Tischendorf, Tregelles, Bradshaw, Scrivener, Wright, and others, equipped with the skill to evaluate the evidence, and the wisdom to evaluate the
accuser, have already made clear.
Labels:
Codex,
Constantine,
Joseph Mayer,
Muller,
New Finds,
Scrivener,
Simonides,
Sinaiticus,
Tischendorf,
Tobit,
Vaticanus
Friday, March 24, 2017
Ten Reasons Why Sinaiticus Was Not Made By Simonides
Today, we shall explore reasons why Codex Sinaiticus was not made in 1839-1841. I intend to
provide twenty such reasons; today I will settle for ten.
(1) Bits of Codex Sinaiticus Were Discarded or Recycled. Fragments from Codex Sinaiticus were used to
reinforce the bindings of other manuscripts at Saint Catherine’s
Monastery. While part of Codex
Sinaiticus (the part taken by Tischendorf in 1844) resides at Leipzig ,
and a larger portion resides at the British Library, a few pages and fragments
are at the National Library of Russia.
These portions were obtained by the researcher Porphyry Uspensky when he
visited Saint Catherine’s Monastery, no later than 1846. Simonides’ claims would thus require that the
monks of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, after receiving a pristine Greek
manuscript of the entire Bible in 1841, recycled several of its pages as
binding-material in the next few years.
(2) Codex Sinaiticus Is Huge. Simonides claimed to have made the manuscript
in a relatively small amount of time, beginning “About the end of the year
1839” and finishing some time before August of 1841. Those who have seen the manuscript, or
facsimiles of it, can testify what a massive project this would be for one
person to undertake: when in pristine
condition, the codex consisted of over 740 leaves (i.e, 1,480 pages). To complete that amount of space with uncial
lettering would be a massive undertaking:
reckoning that each page had approximately 2,500 letters, the writing of
over 3,700,000 letters would be required to complete the codex.
(3) Codex Sinaiticus Has a Note About An Ancient Manuscript Made at Caesarea .
After the book of Esther, a note in Codex Sinaiticus states, “Checked for
accuracy using a very old copy corrected by the hand of the martyr
Pamphilus. At the end of this ancient
book, which begins with the First Book of Kings [i.e., First Samuel], and ends with Esther, is the
handwriting of Pamphilus himself; it says:
‘Copied and corrected against the Hexapla of Origen as corrected [or, made accurate] by
him. Antoninus the confessor cross-checked it;
I, Pamphilus, corrected the volume in prison, by the great grace and ability
from God. And if it is not an overstatement, it would not be easy to find a manuscript like this one.” A similar note appears at the
end of the book of Second Esdras. Had
Simonides made the manuscript as a straightforward transcript of the Greek
Bible, with no intent to deceive, he would have no motivation to create this
feature, or the 160 corrections added by the “Pamphilian Corrector” in Second Esdras and Esther.
(4) Codex Sinaiticus Has Arabic Notes. As David Parker observes in his book on Codex Sinaiticus, Arabic notes appear in Codex Sinaiticus at Isaiah 1:10 , and at Zechariah 14:8, and in parts of
Revelation. The scenario described by
Simonides provides no motive for the creation of this feature (nor is there
evidence that Simonides knew Arabic when he was 19 or 20 years old.)
One of the
Arabic notes, as David Parker has pointed out, probably refers to the approach
of seven thousand years of earth’s existence, as calculated via the Byzantine
Anno Mundi calendar, which reckoned that the universe was created in 5,509
B.C. The completion of 7,000 years was
thus expected to come in the late 1400’s, and the fall of Constantinople in
1453 probably caused the Arabic-writing annotator to interpret part of
Revelation chapter 8 (by which the note appears in the margin) as a prophecy
about Islamic conquests – the star in 8:10 being called, in the note, a star
“of the Arabs” – after which he expected persecution to begin.
If Codex
Sinaiticus was extant in the second half of the 1400’s, as the existence of
this note implies, then it cannot be the work of Simonides in the 1800’s.
(5) Codex Sinaiticus Has Clear Demonstrations of
Teamwork Among Scribes. Whereas
Simonides claimed to have written the codex from beginning to end, the
manuscript shows that three or four copyists produced the manuscript itself,
and that other copyists introduced later corrections (or attempted corrections)
at much later times. The evidence for
this includes the following:
● Different orthography, i.e.,
spelling. Among three copyists – known
as Scribe A, Scribe B, and Scribe D (Scribe C was withdrawn from Tischendorf’s
initial appraisal that there were four copyists, but some researchers posit
that Scribe B’s work was really the work of two copyists) – Scribe D had
reasonably good spelling; Scribe A had bad spelling, and Scribe B’s spelling
was atrocious; as Milne & Skeat stated in Scribes & Correctors of Codex
Sinaiticus in 1938, “The habits of B [i.e., Scribe B] are difficult to describe
in moderate language; still more difficult is it to understand how a scribe so
careless and illiterate came to be chosen for such a manuscript. He seems to have had no firm visual
impression of Greek, so barbarous and grotesque are the forms which his
misspellings can present to the eye, and with such utter inconsistency does he
sway from correct to incorrect. His
aberrations extend over the whole field.”
The worth –
or rather, worthlessness – of Simonides’ story can be obtained by considering that
he had no motive to use accurate spelling in one part of the manuscript (those
parts made by Scribe D, including six cancel-sheets) and very inaccurate
spelling in other parts. Who can believe
that with a printed Greek Bible as one of his sources, anyone making a
handwritten replica would introduce quirks such as writing κε in place of και
(“and”) in Isaiah 22:24, Jeremiah 7:25, and twice in Hermas?
● Scribe D,
besides having handwriting and orthography discernibly superior to that of the other two copyists,
often lined up the right margin of the columns of text that he wrote by adding
small “>” symbols to the ends of lines that did not quite extend to the
right margin. This symbol is never used
by Scribe A.
●
The copyists used different decorative designs at the ends of the books they
copied. Milne & Skeat, referring to
such a decorative design as a “coronis,” observed that “The coronis, in fact,
amounts to his signature, so distinctive is the design (or designs) adopted by
each and so restricted by the range of individual variation.”
● A gap was left between two sections
written by different copyists. Codex
Sinaiticus was not produced by starting at one end of the text of the Bible and
finishing at the other end. Instead, one
copyist was assigned one portion, and another copyist was assigned a different
portion, and they worked simultaneously, with the intention that the separate
sections would, after being proof-read, be bound together. This meant that the copyists had to estimate
how much space each assigned portion of text would occupy – and they didn’t
always get it right. They expected that
the books of Tobit and of Judith would take up a little more space than they actually did in Scribe D’s
handwriting. This is why Scribe A, when
he began writing First Maccabees, began in the second column, expecting that
Scribe D would place the last bit of the text of Judith in the first column,
when he did the proof-reading.
Meanwhile, what reason would any copyist working alone have to skip a
column in this way, at the beginning of a page?
(6) The Eusebian Sections in Codex Sinaiticus Are
a Mess. In many Gospels-manuscripts,
numbers appear in the margins. These are
part of a cross-reference system devised by Eusebius of Caesarea, in which a
chart – the Canon Tables – listed parallel-passages (first, passages found in
all four Gospels, followed by passages found in different combinations of
Gospels, such as Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and concluding with the tenth
canon-table, which listed passages found exclusively in one Gospel) and each
passage was given a number, along with the number of the table in which its
number was found.
In Codex
Sinaiticus, we do not have the Canon Tables, and in the margins, the section-numbers
are frequently mismatched, and are incomplete:
the section-numbers for Matthew were begun but no more was initially
written beyond section 52; another copyist continued the numbering (and wrote
over the earlier copyist’s numbers) but he stopped in Luke at section 106. Simonides would have no reason to make such a
quirky feature, and at Mount Athos there were (and are)
many resources where a complete form of the section-numbering could be
found. Meanwhile, this phenomenon is
accounted for by the use of the Eusebian Canons by copyists in the 300’s to
whom it was a puzzling novelty.
(7) Codex Sinaiticus Does Not Have Second and
Third Maccabees. There would be no
motive for Simonides to omit these books, if he were intending to make a
complete Bible for the Czar. Copies of Second Maccabees, at least, would be readily available in the
resources of Mount Athos . Yet these two books are not in the codex. (Baruch is not there either, but it probably
was present when the codex was in pristine condition.)
(8) Sinaiticus Has Marginalia In Acts Shared Only
By Vaticanus. In the margins of the
text of Acts in Codex Vaticanus there are two different sets of
chapter-divisions. In the second set,
the text is divided into 69 chapters. Each
chapter’s beginning is indicated by the appearance of a Greek numeral
(represented by characters of the Greek alphabet). These numerals are not in the same script
used in the text, and appear to have been added centuries after the manuscript
was initially made. Many other
manuscripts also have numbered chapter-divisions (the “Euthalian Sections”),
but until the discovery of Codex Sinaiticus, the form of chapter-divisions in
Acts in Codex Vaticanus was unique. When
Tischendorf’s publication of Codex Sinaiticus was released, however, it did not
take long for researchers to notice that in the margins of Acts in Codex
Sinaiticus, chapter-divisions appear which very closely resemble the
chapter-divisions which are otherwise unique to Codex Vaticanus.
A
side-by-side comparison of the chapter-numbers in Acts in Vaticanus, and the
chapter-numbers in Sinaiticus, can be found by consulting the detailed and
interesting (but highly technical) essay Euthaliana,by J. Armitage Robinson, which appeared in 1895 in the journal-series Texts and Studies. The author’s observance bears heavily on the
question of whether Codex Sinaiticus can have been made in the 1800’s:
“Where did
this system of numbers, common to א [Aleph,
i.e., Sinaiticus] and B, come from? The
two codices have got hold of it quite independently of one another. It cannot have been copied from B into א, for א has one number (Μ) [that is, 40] which is
not found in B; nor can it have been copied from א
into B, for nearly a third of the numbers (from ΜΒ [i.e., 42] onwards) are not
found in א. We
must go back to a common source – some MS which gave its numeration to them
both – and this seems to imply that א and B were, at an early
stage of their history, lying side by side in the same library.”
Robinson may have overstated his case, for it is equally possible that the source of this marginalia met each codex separately. But this does not erode the point that Simonides not only had no access to data about Codex Vaticanus’ marginalia, but he also had no motive to imitate it, nor to do so incompletely; the chapter-numbers in Codex Sinaiticus stop at Acts 14:40.
(9) Sinaiticus Is Missing Exact Lines of Text. Occasionally, a copyist’s line of sight drifted from the beginning or end of a line to the beginning or end of the next line (or, of a nearby line further down the page), causing him to accidentally omit the intervening letters. Where the amount of absent text corresponds to a particular line-length, it indicates that an exemplar was in use which had lines of that length. Simonides, however, claimed to have worked from a printed Greek Bible, which would not elicit this kind of omission.
(10) Sinaiticus’ Text-Type Shifts in the First Eight Chapters of John. As Gordon Fee showed in a detailed paper, although the Gospels-text of Codex Sinaiticus is mainly Alexandrian, in John 1:1-8:38 it is Western. Whereas Simonides had no motive to suddenly change exemplars (and gave no indication of ever possessing an exemplar with a Western text of John), and then change back, this is accounted for by a scenario in which copyists in Caesarea in the mid-300’s were transferring texts from decaying papyrus onto parchment – a scenario confirmed to be historical by Jerome in De Viri Illustribus and other sources; the organizers of this project were Acacius and Euzoius.
Robinson may have overstated his case, for it is equally possible that the source of this marginalia met each codex separately. But this does not erode the point that Simonides not only had no access to data about Codex Vaticanus’ marginalia, but he also had no motive to imitate it, nor to do so incompletely; the chapter-numbers in Codex Sinaiticus stop at Acts 14:40.
(9) Sinaiticus Is Missing Exact Lines of Text. Occasionally, a copyist’s line of sight drifted from the beginning or end of a line to the beginning or end of the next line (or, of a nearby line further down the page), causing him to accidentally omit the intervening letters. Where the amount of absent text corresponds to a particular line-length, it indicates that an exemplar was in use which had lines of that length. Simonides, however, claimed to have worked from a printed Greek Bible, which would not elicit this kind of omission.
(10) Sinaiticus’ Text-Type Shifts in the First Eight Chapters of John. As Gordon Fee showed in a detailed paper, although the Gospels-text of Codex Sinaiticus is mainly Alexandrian, in John 1:1-8:38 it is Western. Whereas Simonides had no motive to suddenly change exemplars (and gave no indication of ever possessing an exemplar with a Western text of John), and then change back, this is accounted for by a scenario in which copyists in Caesarea in the mid-300’s were transferring texts from decaying papyrus onto parchment – a scenario confirmed to be historical by Jerome in De Viri Illustribus and other sources; the organizers of this project were Acacius and Euzoius.
To be continued . . .
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Sinaiticus Is Not a Forgery - Setting the Stage
Codex Sinaiticus, one of the most important early
manuscripts of the New Testament, is over-rated. Even though it is often heralded as “The World’s Oldest Bible,” having been produced in the mid-300’s, its text is so
riddled with scribal errors that many much younger manuscripts can be shown to
be more accurate – whether one uses the Byzantine Text, or the primarily
Alexandrian Nestle-Aland compilation, as the basis of comparison. It does not really deserve the description
that so often appears in Bible footnotes that cite “The most reliable
manuscripts” when referring to its readings. Its text-critical importance lies
in that it constitutes early confirmation of readings found in Codex Vaticanus, which,
besides being slightly earlier, was written much more carefully.
Saint Catherine's Monastery (Photo: Joonas Plaan) |
In May of 1844, the textual critic Constantine Tischendorf visited Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai , and there, “in the
middle of the great hall,” he saw “a large and wide basket full of old
parchments.” According to Tischendorf,
the librarian informed him that the monks had “already committed to the flames” two
heaps of papers like these. Tischendorf
examined the contents of the basket, and found there “a considerable number of
sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek,” and he was then allowed to
take “a third of these parchments, or about forty-three sheets,” which, if it
had not been for his intervention, “were destined for the fire.”
Those 43 sheets [more accurately, leaves] containing text from the Greek Old Testament
were published in 1846 by Tischendorf as “Codex Frederico-Augustanus,” so-named
after Frederick, king of
That, at least, is the way Tischendorf tells the tale, in a
special chapter of his little book When Were Our Gospels Written?. The monks
of the monastery later insisted that Tischendorf’s account was wrong, that the
basket was simply a basket used for carrying detached manuscript-pages, and
that they were not disposing of the ancient contents of their valuable and
extensive library by tossing legible parchments into any fire. Indeed, J. Rendel Harris, who visited the
monastery later in the 1800’s, claimed to have seen the basket to which
Tischendorf referred, and after investigating the matter, he considered the
monks’ protests to be entirely justified, and regarded Tischendorf’s version of
events as an amusing myth. (Tischendorf’s
view of the monks at Saint Catherine’s Monastery may be deduced from a comment that he wrote in a letter in 1844, when he was at the monastery: “I have now been in the St.
Catherine Monastery eight days. But oh, these
monks! If I had the military strength
and power I should be doing a good deed if I threw this rabble over the walls.”)
Tischendorf might have lied so as to depict himself as a
sort of hero, rescuing the manuscript in the nick of time. Or he might have misunderstood what he had
been told, and misunderstood why the pages were in the basket – like someone
who sees a library’s book-return box for the first time and assumes that people
are throwing away their books in a small dumpster. In any event, he returned to the monastery in
1853, and found no more intact pages of the manuscript – only a fragment from
the book of Genesis.
In
1859, Tischendorf again visited Saint Catherine’s monastery, hoping to find the
rest of the manuscript of which he had acquired 43 sheets in 1844. (Although he had published the contents of
those pages, he had not revealed where they had been acquired.) According to Tischendorf’s account, on
February 7 of 1859, “the steward of the convent” showed Tischendorf “a bulky
kind of volume wrapped up in a red cloth,” and when it was opened, Tischendorf
recognized that its pages included some of the pages that he had seen, but not
obtained, in the basket in 1844:
“I
unrolled the cover, and discovered, to my great surprise, not only those very
fragments which, fifteen years before, I had taken out of the basket, but also
other parts of the Old Testament, the New Testament complete, and, in addition,
the Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the Pastor of Hermas.” (These last
mentioned books are compositions from the early 100’s.) Inwardly Tischendorf was “full of joy,” but
he strategically asked in a casual way if he could borrow the manuscript to
look at it more closely. His request was
granted, and once he was alone with the manuscript, “though my lamp was dim and
the night cold,” he writes, “I sat down at once to transcribe the Epistle of
Barnabas.”
Not long after this, the manuscript was transferred to Cairo ,
and it was eventually deposited in the Russian library at Saint
Petersburg , where it was regarded as a gift to Czar
Alexander II. Tischendorf studied the
manuscript there. A sample of its script
was released in 1860, and the full contents were published in 1862, in a
special Greek font that resembled the uncial handwriting of the copyists. Once again, Tischendorf’s account of how this happened contradicts the claims of the monastery’s monks, for some of them
insisted that Tischendorf had promised to return the manuscript upon request.
This brings us up to the time when Constantine Simonides
enters the picture. In a letter that was
published in The Guardian newspaper
on September 3, 1862, Simonides claimed that he had produced Codex Sinaiticus
in 1839, while he had resided at Mount Athos (an important monastery-center in
Greece which has a vast manuscript-library), using, as its basis, the contents
of a printed copy of the text of Codex Alexandrinus, three manuscripts from
Mount Athos, and a printed Greek Bible published by Zosima, based
in Moscow. He claimed to have obtained
the required amount of parchment from an ancient codex at Mount
Athos that consisted almost entirely of blank pages.
Simonides claimed that after finishing this large project, he
donated it to a retired church-leader, Constantius, whose home was
on the Greek island of Antigonus . Constantius, in turn (again – it is claimed
by Simonides), after sending a contribution to Simonides, donated the codex to
Saint Catherine’s monastery, and that, according to Simonides, is how its pages
turned up there in 1844, when its pages were first encountered by
Tischendorf. Simonides also claimed that
he himself had visited Saint Catherine’s monastery in 1844 and 1852, and had
seen the codex there.
With all this in the background, we shall test Simonides’
claims. But first, it should be pointed
out that some well-distributed versions of the history of how Tischendorf
encountered Codex Sinaiticus are far from accurate. Let us remove these boulders from the field
today, or at least one of them.
Specifically, James White, in his book The King James Only Controversy, on pages 56-57 of the 2009
edition, describes Tischendorf’s 1844 visit to Saint Catherine’s monastery very
differently. White claims that
Tischendorf “noticed some parchment scraps in a basket that was to be used to
stoke the fires in the monastery’s oven.”
And in a footnote, White says, “If you’re wondering why these scraps
would be in a trash can, the answer is that ancient books, be they made of
papyri or vellum, decay over time. Bits
of pages, the final or initial pages in a codex, were very subject to loss;
they would, over time, find their way to the floor and need to be picked up or
pose a real fire hazard.”
In some online comments, White categorically denies that Codex Sinaiticus was found in a trash can. Yet, with equal confidence, he describes Tischendorf’s 1844 visit to Saint Catherine’s monastery as follows:
“So, they have someone from the outside world there
amongst them; that makes them a little bit nervous, and so there’s this monk,
and he’s just, you know, carrying a basket with him with some old scraps of
stuff that they don’t need anymore, and von Tischendorf looks in there and
realizes, ‘That’s a page from the Septuagint.’
And he stops him, and he goes, you know, ‘This freakish guy from Europe
is grabbing my trash can, and he’s all excited about the trash in my trash can,
and he’s telling me, “Don’t burn this!
Don’t burn this!”’”
White continues, moving on to describe the 1859 visit: “On the final night
of his visit, in 1859, he decided to be a nice guy. And he had published a version of the
Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. So he had an extra copy with him. And he
decided to be nice to his steward, who had been taking care of him, and he
said, ‘I’d like to give this to you as a present. And the monk looked at it, and said, ‘Oh, I
have one of these. Let me show it to
you. So the monk takes him into his
room, and in what we would call a closet, he reaches up, and he pulls something
down that is wrapped in a red cloth.
Now, monks do not wrap garbage in red cloths. They don’t keep garbage wrapped in red cloths
in their closets. And so he pulls this
thing out, and he unwraps the red cloth, and there von Tischendorf is staring
at Codex Sinaiticus.”
In the same lecture, White says about Codex Sinaiticus: “It was not found in a trash can, despite how
many times D. A. Waite or Dave Hunt or anybody else says that it was. It was not.”
It is no credit to D. A. Carson, John MacArthur, Mike Baird,
Norman Geisler, and the others who have recommended White’s book, that this
twisted version of events not only made it through the initial editing of The King James Only Controversy in 1995,
but also survived to be reprinted in the second edition. For in real life, what White refers to as
“scraps” were the 43 parchment sheets that Tischendorf
published as Codex Frederico-Augustanus. That
is, they were (and still are) pages from the Old Testament portion of Codex
Sinaiticus.
The stamp of Leipzig University Library is still on the pages of Codex Sinaiticus that Tischendorf took in 1844. |
White, in a 2006 online article, says,
“Any “scholar” who can’t even get this story straight is not really worth
reading, to be honest.” Okay, if you say
so, professor. It is White who needs to
get the story straight: he repeatedly
affirms that Tischendorf found “scraps” in a “trash can” and then says that
Codex Sinaiticus was not found in a trash can.
He does not realize that the pages which Tischendorf saw in a
basket were pages from Codex Sinaiticus!
One can say that Tischendorf did not find Codex Sinaiticus in a trash
can (because it was a basket, not a trash can), but one cannot say that Tischendorf found pages of the Septuagint in a
trash can, and then say that he did
not find pages from Codex Sinaiticus in a trash can, because those pages from
the Septuagint that Tischendorf obtained in 1844 are pages of Codex
Sinaiticus.
This error has been spread by James White and Alpha
& Omega Ministries for over 20 years!
He should openly acknowledge his mistake, and withdraw his error from future circulation, and give a public apology to Douglas Stauffer, who White
mentions in the following statement:
“Sinaiticus was not found in a trash can. It was clearly prized by its
owner, and well cared for. The only
reason Stauffer and those like him continue to repeat the story is for its
impact upon those ignorant of history and unlikely to actually look into it for
themselves. But for anyone serious about
the subject, such dishonesty destroys one’s credibility.”
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