In 1995,
James White wrote
The King James Only
Controversy, and in 2009, a second edition appeared.
In both editions, White badly misrepresents
the means by which Constantine von Tischendorf acquired Codex Sinaiticus at
Saint
Catherine’s monastery.
This is
something that should be sorted out, lest readers of White’s book continue to
be misinformed about this.
Tischendorf’s
own report of his encounters with the manuscript is accessible; he has left us
his account in a section of his little book
When
Were Our Gospels Written? – With a Narrative of the Discovery of the Sinaitic
Manuscript.
On page 28 of that
book, Tischendorf affirms that in May of 1844, at St. Catherine’s Monastery at
Mount Sinai, “I discovered the pearl of all my
researches.”
It may be easier to simply
present Tischendorf’s statements rather than summarize them:
“I
perceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket full of old
parchments; and the librarian, who was a man of information, told me that two
heaps of paper like this, mouldered by time, had been already committed to the
flames. What was my surprise to find
amid this heap of papers a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old
Testament in Greek, which seemed to me to be one of the most ancient that I had
ever seen. The authorities of the
convent allowed me to possess myself of a third of these parchments, or about
forty-five sheets, all the more readily as they were destined for the
fire. But I could not get them to yield
up possession of the remainder.”
Tischendorf
related that after returning to Europe, he named the pages he had gotten at
St.
Catherine’s monastery Codex Frederico-Augustus, and they were deposited at
Leipzig University, where they remain to this
day.
He also says that years later, in 1853,
he visited Saint Catherine’s monastery again, but found only “a little
fragment” of the manuscript which he had previously seen, in dismantled form,
in the basket.
On page 32,
Tischendorf described his third visit to Saint Catherine’s monastery, in
January and February of 1859. He writes
that on February 4, he encountered substantially more pages of the manuscript
that he had encountered in 1844: in the
course of a conversation with the steward of the monastery,
“As we
returned toward sunset, he begged me to take some refreshment with him in his
cell. Scarcely had he entered the room
when, resuming our former subject of conversation, he said, “And I too have
read a Septuagint, i.e., a copy of
the Greek translation made by the Seventy;” and so saying, he took down from
the corner of the room a bulky kind of volume wrapped up in a red cloth, and
laid it before me. 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.”
That is
enough from Tischendorf for our present purpose. It should be noticed that we only have
Tischendorf’s word for the details involved.
Now let us turn to James White’s version of events, from the second
edition of The King James Only
Controversy, pages 56-58:
“Tischendorf
embarked on a journey to the Middle East in
1844, searching for Biblical manuscripts.
While visiting St. Catherine’s monastery on Mount
Sinai, he noticed some parchment scraps in a basket that was to be
used to stoke the fires in the monastery’s oven.”
Here White has placed a
footnote: “If you’re wondering why these
scraps would be in a trash can, the answer is that ancient books, be they made
of papyrus or vellum, decay over time.
Bits of pages, the final or initial pages of a codex, were very subject
to loss; they would, over time, find their way to the floor and need to be
picked up to avoid a real fire hazard.”
White
continues: “Upon examining them he
discovered they contained part of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the
Old Testament. This was exactly what he
was looking for, so he asked if he could take the scraps to his room for
further examination, warning the monks not to be burning such items.”
White then
briefly describes Tischendorf’s third visit to Saint Catherine’s monastery (in
1859), when he encountered the steward’s manuscript: “From the closet in his cell he produced a
manuscript, wrapped in a red cloth. The
monk had no idea of the treasure in his hands, for this was none other than
Codex Sinaiticus, which at that time was at least fifteen hundred years old!”
Up to this
point, one might think that White’s version of events is not much different
from Tischendorf’s account. But then we
reach White’s footnote on page 58, where – after reporting that D. A. Waite claimed
that some individuals “just about worship” Codex Sinaiticus – White states,
“This, after alleging, inaccurately, that before being found À was
about to be burned (one will note that that the steward at St. Catherine’s kept
the manuscript in his cell, wrapped in a red cloth, hardly the way one treats
trash.”
Did White
fail to perceive that the “parchment scraps in a basket” that Tischendorf
encountered in 1844 were pages of Codex Sinaiticus?
That is exactly what happened.
White’s imaginative footnote demonstrates
that when he wrote, he pictured those “scraps” as if they were “bits of pages” or
pages from the beginning and end of codices, rather than the
full
pages from Old Testament books which constitute what used to be called Codex Frederico-Augustus, that is, those pages are the portion of Codex Sinaiticus (
quires
35.1 – 37.3 and
47-49,
to be precise) which bear the library-stamp of Leipzig University.
You can see them (and the
Leipzig University
library-stamp upon them) at
the Codex Sinaiticus
website.
In 2006,
White
demonstrated a complete unawareness that the pages in the basket in 1844 were
part of Codex Sinaiticus, stating, “Sinaiticus was
not found in a trash can.
It
was clearly prized by its owner, and well cared for.”
White still did not realize that what was
presented to Tischendorf on 1859 was affirmed by Tischendorf himself to include
“those very fragments which, fifteen years before, I had taken out of the
basket.”
The monks (as T. C. Skeat pointed
out in his essay
The
Last Chapter in the History of the Codex Sinaiticus) had rebound the pages
sometime after 1844 and before 1859.
(It is
possible that the monks were simply rebinding the pages when Tischendorf saw
the unbound pages in a basket in 1844.
This
may be a good place to mention that David Parker, like
J. Rendel
Harris before him, has expressed strong suspicions about the veracity of
Tischendorf’s description of the monks’ activities during his first visit to
Saint Catherine’s.
Harris (who himself
was a visitor to St. Catherine’s) pointed out that the monks there use baskets
simply as baskets, to carry things, and have never been in the habit of burning
books.
Parker
(p. 131) suggests that Tischendorf misapprehended both why the pages were in
the basket, and what he was told about what the monks were doing with the pages.
He
concludes, “Although there are no grounds for believing it to be
deliberately misleading, one cannot take Tischendorf’s account at face
value.”
The correctness of this verdict
is augmented by the discovery of pages from Codex Sinaiticus among
the 1975 “new finds” which indicate
that the monks at Saint Catherine’s respectfully consigned damaged codex-pages
to a
genizah, rather than to an oven.
The entire notion that the monks at Saint
Catherine’s monastery in the 1800s were burning manuscripts in a stove appears
to be completely fictitious.)
White clearly
says in an online lecture (
listen
to the audio here) that Tischendorf found scraps of parchment “in a
trash can” and,
in the same lecture,
denies that Codex Sinaiticus was found in a trash can.
He was so confident in his misunderstanding
of events that when addressing claims that Codex Sinaiticus had been found in a
trash can – which is essentially where Tischendorf, rightly or wrongly, claimed
to have first seen its pages, and which is where White affirms that Tischendorf
found “scraps of parchment” in 1844 –
he
wrote, “I’m sorry, but any “scholar” who can’t even get this story straight
is not really worth reading, to be honest.”
No doubt if there is a third
edition of
The King James Only
Controversy in the future, this shortcoming will be rectified.
In the meantime, owners of the second edition
are encouraged to add notes in the margin of page 57 to explain that the
“parchment scraps” which White says that Tischendorf found in 1844 in a basket
were actually pages of Codex Sinaiticus, and that the claim about the monks
burning manuscripts in an oven is a dubious claim by Tischendorf.
(Readers are invited to check the data in this post, and to explore the embedded links to additional resources, and this
short video from 2011.)
