Last year, I wrote a
three-part series of posts refuting a conspiracy-claim to the effect that
the famous Codex Sinaiticus is a forgery made in the 1800s. Alas, the conspiracy theorists – particularly
David W. Daniels of
Chick Publications, assisted by Steven Avery –
have continued to promote their theory that a man named Constantine Simonides
produced the manuscript in his youth.
Lately their website has focused on
a particular question about the difference between the photographs of the
portion of Codex Sinaiticus that is housed at the University of Leipzig and the
portions that are housed elsewhere (mainly at the British Library, and at Saint
Catherine’s Monastery): “Why,” they ask, “are the CFA pages in Leipzig University Library white, while the
remainder of the pages, described in 1845 as “white”, are stained and yellowed
with age?” – the insinuation being that Constantine Tischendorf (who took
most of the manuscript from Saint Catherine’s monastery during visits to Saint
Catherine’s monastery in 1844 and 1859) artificially colored the second batch
of pages, in an attempt to make them look ancient. “Sinaiticus is clearly a fake,” Daniels states about Codex
Sinaiticus in his book, Is the World’s
Oldest Bible a Fake?, and “It is not an ancient manuscript at all.”
The real Bible, Daniels affirms, is
the King James Bible. Much of his book
has nothing to do with Codex Sinaiticus and is a presentation of KJV-Onlyist
propaganda, which I shall not address here.
Instead, I shall consider today a question which Daniels raised
repeatedly: why are the pages from the
first collection of pages that Tischendorf obtained in 1844 (the “Codex
Frederico-Augustanus” pages housed at the University of Leipzig, in Germany )
lighter in color than the rest of the pages?
Jacob W. Peterson, with a book-cradle for manuscript photography. |
This issue
about the color of the parchment seems to have been a sort of spark to Daniels’
investigations. In his book, he
describes an experience he had: “I prayed and asked God, ‘What question
should I ask?” And I heard “What color is it?”
And that was the beginning of all that you are about to read. Please, check the facts all you want.”
Okay. Let’s check the facts. To test Daniels’ claim that “someone darkened
Sinaiticus,” I’ve consulted Jacob W. Peterson, a photography-specialist at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts
who has worked with almost 500 New Testament manuscripts and prepared thousands
of photographs of manuscripts for CSNTM.
Here’s the conversation we had about the differences in the photographs
of the different portions of Codex Sinaiticus:
Q: Jacob, the photographs of the pages of Codex
Sinaiticus at Leipzig
clearly have a lighter tone than the photographs of the pages of Codex
Sinaiticus at the British Library. How
do you account for this?
Peterson: There are two explanations for what is going
on here between the parts of the manuscript in the two collections and their
online presentation. As that sentence hints at, these differences are part
actual and part visual effect. As to the actual difference, there are
undoubtedly differences in the storage conditions of these two sections of the
manuscripts that likely led to some of the color difference.
For instance, you can look at other
portions of the Codex Sinaiticus that are currently housed at St. Catherine’s
that share the same color qualities of the London leaves. They are just as dark, if not slightly
darker. It should be obvious that the
manner in which a manuscript is stored can, and does, have an effect on its
color and condition. The visual effect on the images is immediately
recognizable for anyone who has worked in digital reproduction and with
manuscripts in particular.
We’ll get into some of the finer
details in a bit, but as an introduction, the color balance for the images
appears to be off and my suspicion is that the lighting in the room had adverse
effects on the resulting images. What this means is that the photographs of the
Leipzig portion
are not entirely accurate representations of the real leaves. Storage has
definitely played a role. I’m not saying
that the leaves are actually dirty brown, but rather that the leaves are not
greyish-white.
Q: Here you have
supplied, as an example of the effect of subtle environmental factors, two
photographs of the same manuscript page. One image looks darker than the other.
Did you apply lemon juice or tea to the manuscript-page before you took the
second photo, or is there some other explanation?
Peterson: Haha,
no. This is a great example of how digital photography is not as simple as
pointing a camera at an object, pressing a button, and out pops a perfect
reproduction of the object. These images were taken about 15 minutes apart. If
I remember the day correctly, we had just bought new cameras and were trying
them out. We were working in a room with yellowish walls and the color would
not come out correctly no matter how hard we tried. We moved the manuscript
over to another room, where the walls were white, and the image was much
better. So we brought the manuscript back to the main room, turned off the
overhead lights, and only used the lights on our digitization stand. The
correctly colored image on the left was the result. The implication is that the
overhead lights were causing enough reflection off the walls to affect the
color-tones in the photograph. When possible, we now use only the lighting
attached to our equipment, which is designed to emit both warm and cool tones
to provide as neutral lighting as possible.
Q: When you
compared the colors of the photographs of different parts of Codex Sinaiticus,
what did you observe, and what does that imply about the environments in which
the photographs were taken?
Peterson: The
portion of the manuscript housed in London
features the typical slight variations one would expect in a manuscript. Some
pages are slightly lighter, and some are darker. This is due to which side of
the parchment you’re looking at (hair or flesh) and several other factors, like
different kinds of animals used as sources of parchment.
The leaves at Leipzig , on the other hand, are a consistent
off-white, which I would describe as having a cool-grey tone. There are a
couple of problems with this: (1) Leaves
should have a little more variation than we see here due to the factors just
mentioned, and (2) Manuscripts typically don’t have a cool-grey tone. Most
manuscripts I’ve seen shade toward warm-yellow tones since this is more or less
the default starting tone for parchment. If I were of the conspiracy mindset
and knew that the images were accurate, I would actually be more inclined to
think the Leipzig
leaves were bleached to make them look newer. The situation would be comparable
to the guys who polish the patina off of old guns to make them appear to be in
better condition, but in doing so ruin their value. But I digress.
Q: When you
compare the color-charts that accompany the pages at Leipzig
to the color-charts that accompany the pages at London , do you notice any difference?
Peterson: There
are immediately recognizable differences. The color chart in the London images is visually
much closer to what I would expect. The color variations between the patches
are clear and sharp. There’s no mistaking the magenta for a slightly different
red. Similarly, the gradient of the greyscale proceeds nicely and evenly with
differences between the sections noticeable at every point.
The Leipzig color charts unfortunately have some
problems. The magenta and the purple patches are clearly not correct. At times
the magenta is barely distinguishable from the red and the purple almost looks
black. The grey and black patches are also barely distinguishable. Similarly,
the greyscale portion of the chart has barely distinguishable sections on the
black end and the middle grey color ends up being in the upper third of the
chart rather than in the middle. To these color differences can also be added
the background color for the images. I do not know for certain that they used
the same board or material, but it looks that way and would be a sensible
protocol. Yet, the background color does not match in the images across
locations.
Q: Does this mean
that someone has been darkening the color-charts, along with the parchment,
using lemon-juice or some special chemical agent?
Peterson: Definitely not.
Q: What, then, does it mean?
Peterson: There are perfectly normal explanations for
everything involved. Again, I think the storage conditions make up a
significant portion of the differences, but the imaging has really altered our
perception of the manuscript’s color. At
the NT Textual Criticism discussion-group on Facebook, I offered the possible
explanation that the Leipzig
portion was photographed under particularly cool lights (in the 6500K range).
This would have given everything a cool-grey appearance so that what the
photographers were seeing in the images was accurate to what they were seeing
with their eyes. It would be like the difference between seeing things by the
light of old yellow-tinted headlights versus new blue-tinted halogen
headlights. The tone of the light you are using drastically influences your
perception of the objects you’re looking at.
In such a scenario, the Leipzig crew did nothing
blameworthy, and unfortunately their photographs were negatively affected by
the lights of the room they were given to work in. Photographing manuscripts is
not an easy task and there are so many variables, often out of your control,
that can really affect the end product. My job is to critique photographs of
manuscripts and you can ask teams working under me how much of a stickler I can
be about getting things right. We have a shooting standard called “practical
perfection” because we know that perfection is unattainable and sometimes
there’s just nothing you can do or the equipment just won’t adjust quite right.
At the end of the day, the Sinaiticus images are perfectly usable and I’d never
advocate for re-imaging them because the minimal returns that would result
would not be worth the risk of damaging the manuscript.
Q: So, which possibility seems more likely to
you: that Constantine Tischendorf deliberately darkened 347 pages of parchment,
or that the photographs taken of the pages at Leipzig were taken under conditions that
caused the parchment to look lighter than it actually is?
Peterson: I definitely think the Leipzig leaves are artificially lighter in
the images than in reality. I made a
technical measurement of the lightness value of the white square in the color
target in one of the images at Leipzig , and it
was 99, which is impossible given the type of target used and in comparison to
the 95 value seen in the images at London . This means that the image from Leipzig is washed
out. At minimum, it has what is
technically called a Δ4 change.
Q: Could you explain in a little more detail
what is wrong with the approach being used by David Daniels?
Peterson: The individuals who are claiming that Sinaiticus
is a forgery are focusing on the HCL color values that were assigned to the
images. There is, no doubt, some
objectivity and subjectivity to the process of assigning HCL color values when
this is done without a spectrometer and averaging software. Nevertheless, they provide a much better
picture of the real color since they were done with the actual manuscript at
hand. The conspiracy theorists have said the following about the color of the
pages at Leipzig :
“The colour of the CFA pages housed
in Leipzig are
consistently characterized by the CSP as S 1005-Y20R, while the leaves housed
at the British Library are more variable.
They tend toward a NCS number of S 1010-Y or S1010-Y10R but vary all the
way from S 1005-Y20R to S 1515-Y10R.”
They then offer this image [shown to right] as a
sample of these NCS values.
You would have to be imbibing severe amounts of alcohol to think three
of those colors even remotely describe Codex Sinaiticus. The GitHub generator
they’ve used to convert the NCS code into RGB has serious deficiencies. If I
had to guess, the code has inverted the yellow-red values. The S 1515-Y10R
looks rather like actual NCS color S 1515-Y90R (As an aside, not recognizing
such an issue casts strong doubt on SART’s
description of Mark Michie as a “colour engineer expert”). Rather than
using a second-hand generator, you are free to use the
generator provided by the organization that came up with the NCS.
Regarding
the claims about supposedly radical differences in page color, let’s just say I
am less than impressed. I don’t have an
explanation for why in Leipzig
they seemed to have gone with a single descriptor code. Perhaps they wanted to be a bit more specific
with the larger sample size of leaves in London .
Perhaps the Leipzig
leaves are more uniform. Again, storage conditions perfectly explain the latter
option if that’s the case. Regardless of
which of these is true, it is demonstrably untrue that the leaves in Leipzig are the cool-grey
color that is shown in the digital images.
It is demonstrably untrue that those leaves are drastically different
from those in London .
The Leipzig leaves in actuality have a slight
yellow tint that is exactly the same as, or very near to, the tint of some
leaves in London .
Q: So, how – with
a minimum of jargon – would you answer David Daniels’ question, “Who darkened Sinaiticus?”
Peterson: The
natural passage of time, with possibly a little help from the British
climate. The options are to trust either
(1) color science as demonstrated by L*A*B* and NCS color schemes, the physical
assessment of the manuscript by a team of scholars, and my experience
digitizing manuscripts or (2) A theologically motivated group who have never,
to my knowledge, photographed, handled, worked with, or seen a manuscript
except for perhaps in a museum display.
TTotG: Thanks, Jacob. I remind our readers that in addition to this
explanation of the color-differences as basically a phantom-difference caused
by different cameras’ environments, 20 more reasons why Codex Sinaiticus is not
a forgery are listed in my earlier posts Ten
Reasons Why Sinaiticus Was Not Made by Simonides and Ten
More Reasons Why Sinaiticus Was Not Made by Simonides. I would also like to draw reader’s attention
to a 21st reason: a
newspaper report (mentioned by Dr. Tommy Wasserman in a comment in 2017)
announcing that a fragment from Codex Sinaiticus (with text from Joshua 1) was
discovered by researcher Nicholas Sarris in a book-binding from the 1700s.
Thank you, James and Jacob.
ReplyDeleteAll of this has been responded to, point by point, and giving much more context, at:
What Darkened Sinaiticus? - the strange hand-wave theories of Jacob W. Peterson and James Snapp
http://www.purebibleforum.com/showthread.php?715-What-Darkened-Sinaiticus-the-strange-hand-wave-theories-of-Jacob-W-Peterson-and-James-Snapp
Thanks for sharing this. Of course , none of this would be necessary if authorities would just carbon date the pages and ink of Siniaticus. The unwillingness to do so is a big red flag .......
ReplyDeleteMy forum with the answers changed to Xenforo and the new url is:
ReplyDeleteWhat Darkened Sinaiticus? - the strange hand-wave theories of Jacob W. Peterson and James Snapp
https://purebibleforum.com/index.ph...ries-of-jacob-w-peterson-and-james-snapp.715/
Thanks!
Steven
https://linktr.ee/stevenavery