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”) in 19:10.
● 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.”
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.
(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.
