Tares Among the Wheat - A Review

            A series of movies available on Amazon Prime Video includes New Testament textual criticism among the subjects it covers – but not in a good way.  Rather than introduce viewers to valid aspects of the field, Christian Pinto and Adullam Films promote the conspiracy theory that Codex Sinaiticus was created in 1840 by Constantine Simonides, particularly in the segment of the movie Tares Among the Wheat that is introduced (about an hour and 50 minutes after the movie starts) by the heading “The Simonides Affair.”

            Those who want proof that Codex Sinaiticus is indeed an ancient document are welcome to consult four earlier posts on the subject:

● Sinaiticus is Not a Forgery:  Setting the Stage – in which I provide some background about Constantine  Simonides and his career as a criminal forger, and explain why no one should believe James White’s account of how Tischendorf first encountered pages from Codex Sinaiticus.

● Ten Reasons Why Sinaiticus Was Not Made by Simonides – in which I summarize 10 observations which weight in against Simonides’ claim to have written the text in Codex Sinaiticus – including the observations that different copyists (with different handwriting and different standards of spelling) produced the manuscript, and that the manuscript includes in its margin an Arabic note that alludes to an Arab invasion.

● Ten More Reasons Why Sinaiticus Was Not Made by Simonides – in which I summarize 10 more reasons why Simonides’ claim should be rejected – including some details of Simonides’ earlier attempt to use a forgery to defraud the Academy of Berlin.  Constantine Tischendorf played a key role in exposing Simonides’ forgery, after which Simonides was arrested. 

● What Darkened Sinaiticus? – in which an explanation is provided, with input from Jacob Peterson, of the differing tints of different sets of photographs of pages of Codex Sinaiticus. 

            Chris Pinto’s movie Tares Among the Wheat (the second in the trilogy) strangely avoids sharing the details about how Constantine Simonides tried to defraud the Academy of Berlin, and does not go into detail about his other attempts to sell forgeries to various individuals and institutions in Europe.  The movie avoids giving a detailed account of Tischendorf’s role in the events in 1856 that led to the arrest of Simonides, and thus viewers are not shown that Simonides had a strong motive to attempt to cause trouble for Tischendorf.     

            Tares Among the Wheat also does viewers a disservice via its minimal description of items in the collection of Joseph Mayer, who was an antiquities-collector in Liverpool, England.  Mayer had obtained a variety of ancient materials from Egypt, including some papyrus scrolls which were so tightly rolled up that he was reluctant to open them himself, and so he had Simonides inspect them.  Along with examining some of Mayer’s genuinely ancient materials (which included a very ancient Egyptian papyrus), and claiming to have discovered a fragment of Hegesippus’ Ecclesiastical History, Simonides spent some time studying the papyrus scrolls, and when he was done preparing them, he declared that they contained ancient New Testament texts, including

Some of the forgeries made by Simonides still exist,
at the World Museum in Liverpool, England.

            (1)  Five fragments with text from the Gospel of Matthew, including one which included, after the end of chapter 28, a note stating that it had been written by the hand of Nicolaus the Deacon, at the dictation of Matthew, the apostle of Jesus Christ, in the fifteenth year after the ascension of our Lord, and distributed to the believing Jews and Greeks in Palestine,” and

            (2) two fragments of the Epistle of James, and

            (3) a fragment of the Epistle of Jude.

            Furthermore, Simonides claimed that the text in all three fragments deviated from the normal text.  For instance, he claimed that in the newly discovered text of Matthew 27:19, Pilate’s wife’s message is much longer; in the newly discovered text of Matthew 27:20, the word αυτων is present (so as to convey “their multitudes”);  in the newly discovered text of Matthew 28:6, the angel describes Jesus as the Lord of death; in James 1:2, the twelve tribes are called the twelve tribes of Israel; in verse 19 of Jude in the newly discovered text, the word “actually” (ολως) is present (so as to convey that the false teachers “do not actually have the Spirit”), and verse 22 is phrased so as to say, “On some have compassion in the fear of the Lord.” 

            If anyone involved in the production of Tares Among the Wheat thinks that Constantine Simonides was not a swindler and a con artist who wrote forged texts on the blank reverse-pages of ancient papyri, then they should be clamoring for the items described by Simonides in Mayer’s personal museum (now part of the World Museum in Liverpool) to be brought to public attention and scrutinized.  But if, instead, they think (as members of the Royal Society of Literature concluded in 1863) that Simonides was an educated huckster who tried to defraud German academics by doctoring ancient manuscripts, so as to make them appear to be palimpsests that contained yet more ancient writing, then they should realize that Simonides had a strong motive to try to impugn Tischendorf’s reputation – for it was Tischendorf who had stepped in and prevented the Academy of Berlin from purchasing such a forgery from Simonides.   
                         

 

Christian J. Pinto

           Not only did the producers of Tares Among the Wheat promote and encourage the conspiracy theory about Sinaiticus and Simonides, but they even tried to draw the genuineness of Codex Vaticanus into doubt.  Following an interview in which Scot McKendrick stated that the decorative book-titles in Codex Vaticanus were added by “a fifteenth-century scribe,” the narrator asks, “Is it possible that the reason Codex Vaticanus has a strange and even newer appearance is that it may not be a truly ancient manuscript?”

            It should be noted that McKendrick’s statement is contestable; the exact point at which those book-titles were spruced up is not known; it makes sense to reckon that the letter-reinforcement throughout the manuscript, and the title-enhancements, were undertaken to make the codex look more presentable just prior to being placed in the Vatican Library, but that theory is, well, theoretical.

            McKendrick may also be subject to mild criticism because of his claim that Codex Sinaiticus is “The ancestor of all the Bibles that everybody else has in the world.”  For those who use the King James Version or some other version based on the Textus Receptus, or based on the Byzantine Text, such a claim is entirely false.

            Tares Among the Wheat is three hours of anti-Jesuit propaganda, blended with KJV-Onlyist versions of selective details in the history of New Testament textual criticism.  Even if the producers of this movie possessed the purest theology on earth, the fact remains that no theology is well-served by obscuring evidence and making stuff up.  We should not serve it that way; we should not want to serve it that way.  This movie’s conspiracy theory about Codex Sinaiticus should not be taken seriously.

            Those who want to see the kind of texts that Simonides produced, and which he vigorously defended as ancient documents, should consult the following links.  (Needless to say, the handwriting of Simonides is very different from the handwriting in Codex Sinaiticus):
            Simonides’ forgery of Matthew 28:6ff. (Fragment M111690.5 at the World Museum, in Liverpool).

            Simonides’ forgery of other parts of the Gospel of Matthew (Fragment 11169T at the World Museum, in Liverpool).

            Simonides’ forgery of the “Voyage of Hanno” (Fragment M11169G at the World Museum, in Liverpool).



Readers are invited to double-check the data in this post.

   

What Darkened Sinaiticus?

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.

 

Same page.  Different lighting.

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.   

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.  

          In the previous post, we saw that there is some question about the manner in which Codex Sinaiticus, or at least the main portion of it, was obtained by Constantine Tischendorf at Saint Catherine’s Monastery – 43 parchment sheets in 1844, and a much larger portion in 1859, which included every book of the New Testament.  Although the exact manner in which it was brought to the attention of European scholars is disputed, there is no question among paleographers – researchers who specialize in the study of ancient handwriting and writing-materials – that the manuscript is genuinely ancient. 

          In 1862, however, after the text of Codex Sinaiticus was published by Tischendorf, a scholar named Constantine Simonides claimed that this manuscript was not ancient at all.  In a letter that appeared in the newspaper called The Guardian on September 3, Simonides claimed that the manuscript that Tischendorf heralded as the pearl of all his researches was actually something that Simonides himself had made.  “About the end of 1839,” Simonides wrote, his uncle Benedict, who oversaw a monastery on Mount Athos, wished to present a gift to the Russian Czar, Nicholas I.  After Benedict consulted with some colleagues, it was decided that a complete Greek manuscript of the Bible, combined with works of the sub-apostolic age (Barnabas, Hermas, Clement of Rome, etc.), written in ancient lettering on parchment, would be a suitable gift – along with a gold cover.  The chief calligrapher of the monastery was very reluctant to begin such an intimidating task, and so Simonides, then 19 years old, began the project, after studying the handwriting in manuscripts at Mount Athos.  His uncle Benedict, he claimed, made a sort of exemplar by using a printed Greek Bible (printed by Zosima with the support of the Moscow Bible Society), comparing it with ancient copies at Mount Athos. 

          And from where did he get the parchment?  Simonides stated that at Mount Athos, he conveniently found a bulky codex consisting almost entirely of blank pages, “prepared apparently many centuries ago.”  Simonides filled these pages, he claimed, with the Old Testament and the New Testament, and proceeded to write compositions from the sub-apostolic age (Barnabas and Hermas) until he ran out of parchment.  By the time he had gotten that far, his uncle had died, and so instead of presenting it to the czar, he went to Constantinople and consulted two patriarchs, Anthimus and Constantius, who recommended that he donate it to Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, where Constantius had previously served as bishop.  Simonides agreed to this course of action.

          Shortly thereafter – according to Simonides – he took the codex to the island of Antigonus, intending to deliver it to Constantius, whose residence was there.  Constantius was, however, away from home, and so Simonides left it there in a packet, with a letter.  Later, Simonides claimed, he received a letter from Constantius, written in August of 1841, assuring him that the codex would be donated to Saint Catherine’s Monastery as he had intended.

          Simonides then said that in 1852, he had visited Saint Catherine’s Monastery and had seen the manuscript there, and examined it, “and found it much altered, having an older appearance than it ought to have.”  Simonides also noted that the preface, in which the manuscript was dedicated to Czar Nicholas I, had been removed.   Later, Simonides continued, he had been shown a sample-page of the manuscript that Tischendorf was publishing, and “at once recognized” his own work.

          Now that we have an idea of what Simonides’ claims were, let’s look at the reasons why they do not survive close scrutiny.

(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.

To be continued . . . 

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. 

          In the past few years, a conspiracy theory has developed about Codex Sinaiticus, consisting of the claim that the manuscript is not from the 300’s but is instead from the 1800’s – specifically, that it was made by Constantine Simonides, who was both a scholar and a notorious forger.  Before introducing his claims and the evidence against them, let’s review today the basic history of how Codex Sinaiticus was brought to the attention of European researchers.

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 Saxony, who financed his travels.  The pages themselves were entrusted to the library at the University of Leipzig, where they remain to this day.

          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. 

          A note to this effect, with Tischendorf’s signature, is still extant at the monastery; in it, Tischendorf states that there has been delivered to him “as a loan an ancient manuscript of both Testaments, being the property of the aforesaid monastery,” and “This manuscript I promise to return, undamaged and in a good state of preservation, to the Holy Confraternity of Mount Sinai at its earliest request.”  Eventually, instead of the manuscript, the monks of the monastery received a donation and a collection of medallion-awards. 

          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.”

          Considering that it is James White who is mixed up, such a confidently worded statement destroys his credibility and makes him a laughingstock.  But he should not bear the blame alone, for his colleagues and co-workers have allowed his error to circulate for over 20 years, either because they, too, are ignorant about the history of how Tischendorf first encountered pages from Codex Sinaiticus, or because they find such a combination of bravado and ignorance highly entertaining. 

           With all that in the background, we shall focus on the claims of Constantine Simonides, and the evidence against them, in the next post.

The "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" Is a Forgery

Photos of FHF can be viewed online.

            On February 27, 2015, Salon magazine published a remarkably inaccurate article about Jesus.  The author, Valerie Tarico, (a non-theist), stated at the outset that Jesus was probably married.  The first thing she mentioned as the basis for this claim was “an ancient papyrus scrap” that referred to the wife of Jesus.  She was referring to the fragment which Harvard professor Karen King – the publisher of that papyrus scrap – has labeled “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” 
            Tarico’s Salon article is a collection of falsehoods glued together with inaccuracies and wrapped in half-truths, but her claim about this papyrus is particularly misleading.  The so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” has been demonstrated to be a forgery.  Yet even after the proof of the forgery has been placed online where any journalist can access it, Salon published Tarico’s claim anyway.  If Salon were a doctor, it would be guilty of malpractice.

            The proof of the counterfeit nature of the Forged Harvard Fragment – abbreviated, for the sake of convenience, as FHF – does not consist in the date of the materials out of which it was fabricated.  Forgers have plenty of access to ancient papyrus.  Forgers can not only use ancient papyri – say, relatively cheap receipts – to write upon, but they can also burn ancient materials to create soot as a component of carbon-based ink to write with. 

            FHF was subjected to two Carbon-14 tests, and the results, part of the detailed analysis published in Harvard Theological Review, were wildly divergent:  one test indicated that the materials were from A.D. 650-870, and the other one indicated that the materials were from 410-200 B.C.  Neither one is consistent with a production-date in the 300’s or 400’s, which is what the Harvard professor had been proposing.     

            FHF’s carbon-14 date in 650-870 is consistent with the date of another fragment which was in the same collection of old fragments in which the FHF was brought to Karen King’s attention:  a fragment of the Sahidic (Egyptian) text of the Gospel of John.  The production-date of the papyrus used for the fragment of Sahidic John was carbon-dated consistently to somewhere between 640 and 880.  This supports the idea that the fragment of the Sahidic text of John, and the FHF, both come from the same batch of papyrus, and that the papyrus-material was produced in 640-880.  Strengthening the likeliness of this is Dr. Christian Askeland’s observation that when one looks at the fragment of the Sahidic text of John, and also at the writing in FHF, “the writing tool, ink and hand” are “exactly the same.” 

            This presents a rather large obstacle to the notion that the FHF was written in the 300’s or 400’s:  a writer in the 300’s or 400’s obviously would not have access to papyrus writing-material produced in the 600’s-800’s.  So is the solution to move the production-date of the texts into the 600’s-800’s?  That isn’t feasible either, because by that time, the dialect in which this particular fragment is written was no longer being used.  The dialect – Lycopolitan Coptic – is attested rather sparsely; it is known from a manuscript called the Qau Codex (a manuscript of the Gospel of John produced in 350-400) which was published in 1924 by Herbert Thompson. 

 

Photos of the Sahidic fragment of John are included in the report in 
Harvard Theological Review and can be viewed at several news-blogs. 
(Photo credit unknown -- Timothy Swager (?))

When we look at the Qau Codex and compare its text of the Gospel of John to the contents of the fragment of John that was made by the same person who made the FHF, we find something highly incriminating:  the line-endings in the fragment of John correspond to the line-endings in the Qau Codex.

            Even without knowledge of Coptic dialects, this can be seen via a simple comparison, as shown here.  Thus we can practically reconstruct what the forger who made FHF did as he produced FHF’s sister-forgery:  he wrote the text of the Qau Codex, and simply combined every two lines as a single line.

            On May 24, 2014, Bart Ehrman wrote about this at his blog:  “On the reverse side of the Gospel of John fragment there is writing (not from John but from another text).”  He also wrote:  “The words and letters on the left hand margin for all of 17 lines in a row of the “new discovery” match exactly those in the text that was discovered in the 20th century,” i.e., in the Qau Codex.  Both of Ehrman’s statements are problematic.  First, the fragment in question has text from the Gospel of John on both sides.  Second, the left margin of the fragment is only extant on one side.  Third, the correspondence to the Qau Codex occurs on alternating lines in the fragment, not on every line.  (One wonders if he ever even saw pictures of the fragment he was describing to his readers.)  Hopefully Dr. Ehrman will post again on this subject in a less confused state.  In the meantine, the fragment can be viewed in the online report submitted to Harvard Theological Review.

           Francis Watson has shown that the FHF’s text is similarly derivative:  the forger basically pieced together snippets from the Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas (a Gnostic text composed in the 100’s), altering their contents to make the contents more sensational, but leaving clear traces of his source.      

            Stephen Emmel has pointed out a different path to the same conclusion:  when one reconstructs the format of the text of the Gospel of John that would be necessary in a codex in which a page has the particular passages on the front and back that this fragment contains, the codex’s pages would need to be either exceptionally tall (if the text were written in a single column) or exceptionally wide (if the text were written in two columns).  This augments the point that the person who made the Sahidic fragment of John – the same person who made FHF – did not carefully think through everything that would be required to make a convincing forgery.

           Mark Goodacre and other perceptive readers noticed that in one phrase, the FHF reads the same as the text of the Gospel of Thomas usually does, except for one unusual reading which happens to be identical to a typographical error that appeared in an online edition of the Gospel of Thomas – specifically, an edition by Mike Grondin which was first available in November of 2002.  This may indicate when and where the forger obtained his text of the Gospel of Thomas before using its component-parts in the process of putting together the text of the forgery.  Not long thereafter, Dan Brown’s deceptively marketed and fictitious work The Da Vinci Code was published – which, as Dr. Francis Watson has noted, may have given the forger the idea of using snippets of the Gospel of Thomas to create a forgery which conveyed that Jesus had a wife.

What's next, National Geographic?

                The history of the Forged Harvard Fragment was interesting and illuminating.  It showed the value – I mean, the worthlessness – of some “expert opinions,” and the worthlessness of the sort of “peer review” that can occur when the ultra-liberal “peers” thirstily want something to be true.  (James McGrath at Butler, Candida Moss at Notre Dame, James Tabor at UNC-Charlotte, and April DeConick, I’m thinking of you.  Candida Moss has finally acknowledged the obvious about FHF, in a CNN report on February 20, 2015.  Why does it seem so hard for the others?  Roger Bagnall, any comment?  And AnneMarie Luijendijk: “impossible to forge”?  Please explain.)  

            It also showed how a group of scholars (Leo Depuydt (whose has consistently maintained his early assessment that FHF is a poorly executed forgery), Francis Watson, Andrew Bernhard, Mark Goodacre, Michael Grondlin, Alin Suciu, and Christian Askeland, among others), connected by the internet, can undo the damage which the recklessness and negligence of other scholars would probably have otherwise done.  

            And, inasmuch as Salon magazine is still spreading essays that treat the Forged Harvard Fragment as something other than a proven forgery, months after the proof was provided, it also shows that there is a real need, on the part of people who engineer a sensationalistic mess, to clean up after themselves with the same level of energy that was expended in the promotion of a falsehood.  Why has there been so little, if any, acknowledgement of the proof the FHF is a forgery from the Smithsonian Channel and other media-outlets responsible for spreading false claims about this forgery?  When will the headline appear in National Geographic informing its readers that the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” is fake?)  This responsibility seems to be very much lacking in some circles of New Testament academia – which is rather ironic considering what the New Testament says about honesty.