Luke 23:34a - Answering the Apologists (Part 1)

            This week, as Christians contemplate the words spoken by Christ during His crucifixion, we shall take a close look at the textual variant in Luke 23:34a, where, in almost all Greek manuscripts (and in the Latin Vulgate and the Peshitta), these words of Jesus are recorded:  “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  It may seem overly cerebral to offer a technical analysis of these words which convey such a power message about the love of God – but future Bible-readers won’t see that message if it is taken out of their New Testaments, which is what some evangelical apologists would like to do, claiming that Luke did not write it.

            Before we survey the evidence pertaining to this sentence, let’s investigate how a few modern translations treat this passage, remembering that the editors of the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece put it within double-brackets, meaning, according to the Nestle-Aland Introduction, that the words within the brackets “Are known not to be a part of the original text.”     

            ●  The New American Standard Bible (© 1995 by the Lockman Foundation) has no footnote at all to indicate that a textual variant exists at this point.

            ● The 1984 New International Version (no longer in print), had the sentence in the text, with a footnote stating, “Some early manuscripts do not have this sentence.” 

            ● The English Standard Version has a similar footnote, stating that “Some manuscripts” omit the sentence. 

            ● The New Living Translation (© 2004 Tyndale House Publishers) also has a footnote; it says, “This sentence is not included in many ancient manuscripts.”       

            The New Living Translation’s footnote is inaccurate, and it should have been corrected a long time ago. 

            Now suppose someone asked the footnote-writers, “If a dozen manuscripts can be described as ‘many,’ then how should one describe the over one thousand and five hundred Greek manuscripts that include the sentence?”  Their response would doubtlessly be, “Manuscripts must be weighed, not counted” – the most abused axiom ever spoken in the field of New Testament textual criticism. 

            The idea behind that saying is entirely legitimate, in theory:  if one manuscript is shown to be a direct copy of another manuscript, or if two manuscripts are shown to have been copied from another manuscript, then, in the first case, we have a voice and its echo, and in the second case we have a voice with two echoes.  When we have both a manuscript, and its exemplar (that is, the manuscript from which it was copied), we have one witness repeated, rather than two independent witnesses. 

            This principle may be extended to groups of manuscripts which, although none of them is a direct copies of any of the others, share the same meta-textual features:  if they possess the same exact form of canon-tables for the Gospels, the same book-introductions, the same chapter-titles, the same subscription-notes, and the same lection-divisions, it is generally safe to say that they are all twigs on the same branch, so to speak.  This is especially true of manuscripts which exhibit the same commentary in the margin alongside the text or interspersed between blocks of Scripture-text.

            And what is true of meta-textual features is also true of the text:  if, out of a thousand manuscripts, two dozen share the same array of otherwise unattested readings – not just in a few cases which may be explained as randomly recurring scribal errors, but consistently in chapter after chapter – the group of manuscripts with shared rare traits may be considered to be related to each other, like great-grand-children of an ancestor whose rare genetic trait they have all inherited.

            And there is no reason to limit this to small groups.  Large groups of manuscripts which share the same readings are in some sense specially related; at least they are more closely related to each other than to the families of manuscripts that share rare readings. 

            That is the main application of the axiom that manuscripts must be weighed:  it means that manuscripts must be separated into groups, or branches; the voice of the individual manuscript is not regarded as an independent voice when it sings in unison with fellow-manuscripts in the same choir.  Different groups of manuscripts singing different notes – that is, displaying different textual variants – are organized into different groups, providing insights into the contents of their respective ancestor-manuscripts. 

            Other factors – such as a manuscript’s age, the skill of its scribe, and its physical condition – also come into play when assigning “weight” to a manuscript.  The valid objective of this approach is to amplify the ancestral texts that contain the readings shared by distinct groups of manuscripts – to put the focus not on the twigs, but at the points where the branches diverge, so to speak.

            Unfortunately that is not what most of today’s textual critics do.  For over a century, the “weighing” of manuscripts has been more like the handicapping of horses at a crooked race-track:  after several races in which one horse consistently wins, the race-track owners put weights on the other horses, so that the “best” horse wins more and more races – even if they are run at different distances, at different locations, and under different conditions than the races in which that horse won.   

            With that in mind, we come to the external evidence about Luke 23:34a.  In Papyrus 75, Codex Vaticanus, and the earliest stratum of the Sahidic version, the sentence is not there – which implies that these witnesses do not have it because the ancestral text upon which they were based did not have it.  Similarly, Codex Bezae, the Sinaitic Syriac, and Old Latin Codex Vercellensis (from the late 300’s) appear to echo an earlier Western form of the verse that did not have this sentence. 

            Those witnesses are joined by a few other Greek manuscripts – Codex W (which has an essentially Byzantine text in Luke after 8:12), Codex Θ (which is regarded as having a Caesarean text), 070, 579, and 1241 – but without them, it would be clear that the non-inclusion of the sentence is a very ancient reading, apparently traceable to a point in the transmission-stream when the Alexandrian and Western branches had not yet diverged.   

            The word “apparently” should not be overlooked, for the non-inclusion of the sentence is also attested by a smattering of relatively late manuscripts.  If we apply the canon, A reading attested sporadically in unrelated manuscripts tends to be non-original, then this would suggest the existence of a special factor which affected the text of Luke 23:34 in separate branches. 

            But instead of exploring that possibility today, let’s linger over the external evidence a while longer.  While the just-mentioned witnesses lack Luke 23:34a, an imposing array of manuscripts includes the sentence, including Codex Sinaiticus (in which the sentence, after being written by the main copyist, was marked alongside the text with parentheses around each line, after which someone else erased (without complete success) the parentheses-marks) and Codices A, C, N, L, 700, 1424, family 1, and family 13 – plus the Byzantine minuscules, which constitute a huge mass (over 90%) of the Greek manuscripts here.  Most of the Old Latin manuscripts also have the passage.  So do early versions such as the Vulgate, the Palestinian Aramaic version, the Armenian version, the Old Georgian version, and the Ethiopic version.  That covers quite a lot of territory.

            So when this evidence is considered in terms of weight, three Alexandrian heavyweights and three Western heavyweights do not have Luke 23:34a; nor do Codex W and Codex Θ.  On the other hand, one Alexandrian heavyweight (Codex Sinaiticus), most of the Caesarean heavyweights, and all of the Byzantine heavyweights except Codex W include Luke 23:34a.

            However, there is some important and weighty evidence yet to consider:  the patristic evidence.  Where a patristic writer from the 100’s or 200’s makes a specific quotation, it is like finding a small  papyrus fragment embedded in his writings; where a patristic writer from the 300’s makes a specific quotation, it is like an echo of a manuscript from the same time when Codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were made.   In addition, the patristic writers’ comments sometimes express difficulties that they had when interpreting a passage – and if a passage seemed problematic to a commentator, the probability is high that it seemed problematic to copyists as well.  (See Wieland Willker’s textual commentary for details about the following patristic references.)

            The patristic evidence shows that “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” is an extremely ancient reading:
            ● Tatian (170’s) had the sentence in his Diatessaron, as shown by three citations in Ephrem Syrus’ Commentary on the Diatessaron (c. 360). 

            ● Hegesippus (170’s) recorded, according to Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History Book Two (chapter 23), that when James the Just was killed after being thrown from a tower, he prayed, “I entreat you, Lord God our Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  The same anecdote is recorded by Epiphanius (c. 375) in Panarion 77 (Antidicomanians 14:5).

            ● Irenaeus (c. 180), in Against Heresies, Book Three, twice mentions the passage:  in chapter 16, he alludes to Jesus’ prayer that His Father would forgive those who crucified Him; in chapter 18 he quotes Jesus’ words.

            ● Pseudo-Ignatius, in the late 100’s, stated that Jesus prayed for His enemies, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

            ● Hippolytus (early 200’s) uses the passage in Contra Judaeos 3, in the course of interpreting Psalm 69.  Hippolytus points out that when Jesus said, “Father, forgive them,” those to be forgiven were the Gentiles.  The authorship of Contra Judaeos is disputed; however, Hippolytus also quoted the passage in The Blessings of Jacob and Isaac, in the course of comments about Genesis 27.

            ● The Syriac Didascalia (c. 250) includes the following imprecise but recognizable statement:  “Our Savior made supplication to His Father for those who had sinned, as it is written in the Gospel, ‘My Father, they know not what they do, nor what they speak; yet if it be possible, forgive them.”

            ● Origen (c. 230-250), as translated by Rufinus (in Latin), appears to cite the passage in part of his Homily on Leviticus; however there is a chance that this is a parenthetical comment inserted by Rufinus.  In De Pascha 2:43, a text recovered among the Tura Papyri and published in 1979, Origen appears to utilize the passage. 
            ● Archelaus (late 200’s), in Disputation with Manes, quotes the passage and compares Jesus’ prayer to Moses’ prayer for Pharaoh and the Egyptians.

            ● Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 330) included the passage in his canon-tables, in Canon Ten.

            ● Acts of Pilate/Gospel of Nicodemus (300’s), in chapter 10, uses Jesus’ words in Luke 23:34a along with some of the surrounding text of Luke.

            ● Apostolic Constitutions (c. 380), which depends at some points upon the Syriac Didascalia, quotes the passage more precisely in II:16, and again in V:14.

            ● Ambrose (late 300’s), in his Commentary on Job, cites this passage twice (in 2:6 and 5:12).

            ● Many others use the passage – all without raising any question about its genuineness:  Gregory of Nyssa (late 300’s), Hilary (c. 350), Acts of Philip (300’s), Clementine Recognitions (300’s), Chrysostom – several times (c. 400), Pseudo-Justin (c. 400), Jerome, in Ad Hedibiam (c. 400), Hesychius (early 400’s), Augustine (early 400’s), and Theodoret (c. 450).  The only writer who challenges the sentence’s right to be in the text is Cyril of Alexandria (c. 425) – hardly surprising considering his location – as reported by the writer Oecumenius, around the year 600, in Asia Minor, in his commentary on Revelation.  In the course of commenting on the first part of Revelation 7, Oecumenius cites Luke 23:34a and mentions that “Although Cyril, in the thirteenth book of Against Julian, says that this prayer of the Lord is not found in the Gospels, we use it nevertheless.”     

            Now that we have some idea of the scope of early evidence in favor of the inclusion of this passage – for in the case of most of these patristic references, it is perfectly clear that Luke 23:34a was in the Gospels-manuscripts used by the writer, and that he expected the passage to be found in his readers’ copies as well – we can proceed, in the following post, to analyze the treatment of the passage in more detail.  First, though, as I conclude today, I wish to address a claim that Alan Kurschner recently made. 

            At James White’s Alpha & Omega website, Kurschner stated:  “If this is an excision,” – that is, if the sentence is original and has been removed in the early Alexandrian text – “it is difficult to explain its omission in toto from an anti-Judaic tendency of a scribe. There are examples in which over-pious scribes in the copying process would omit a single word with theological, pious, or “harshness” effects. . . . Surely then, we should see at least one example of a witness altering Jesus’ prayer for theological reasons. But this is not the case; the witnesses either omit the prayer all together, or it is all intact.”

            However, not only does this line of reasoning seem circular – claiming that copyists could not remove a sentence because copyists did not remove sentences – but according to Nathan Eubank in a detailed 2010 essay about this variant-unit, Epiphanius altered the wording slightly, so as to say, “Father, yield to them,” or, “Father, be patient with them” – a shift from ἄφες to συγχώρησον.  This is how Gregory of Nyssa cited the passage as well.   This little clue provides some guidance about the significance of some other patristic treatments of the passage – as we shall see, God willing, in the next post.

Student's Toolkit: When Your Professor Rejects Mark 16:9-20

          How should preachers handle Mark 16:9-20?  Since I regard this passage as sacred Scripture, I encourage them to preach from it.  I also recommend that they point out to their congregations that most English versions have headings or footnotes which state that some manuscripts (or, the two earliest manuscripts) of Mark do not contain these 12 verses.  Then, point out that footnotes have to be concise, and cannot be expected to always adequately describe the evidence.  Sometimes they even contain mistakes, like the notes about Mark 16:9-20 in the NET, the CSB, the ESV (until 2010), and the hyper-paraphrase known as The Message.

Hey NavPress:  are you ever going to
correct this false footnote?

  

          The impression given by vague footnotes changes drastically when the evidence is described in precise terms:  two Greek manuscripts from the 300’s, and one medieval commentary-manuscript, conclude the text of chapter 16 at the end of verse 8; meanwhile over 99% of the Greek manuscripts (over 1,600, including ancient ones, contrary to the footnote in The Message) support these verses.  In addition, patristic writers used these verses as Scripture in the 100’s, including Justin Martyr, Tatian, and Irenaeus, the last of whom specifically quoted Mark 16:19 in Book Three of his composition Against Heresies (c. 180).  

          In a way, the answer to the question, “Is Mark 16:9-20 part of the canon of Scripture?” – Yes, or No – will also answer the question, “Did the early Christian church hand down the Greek text of the New Testament in a form which accurately conveyed the message of the original text?”.  For clearly the presence or absence of these 12 verses changes the narrative quite a bit.  Most folks will grant that since we trust the early leaders of the church where the canon is concerned, we should trust them where the text is concerned as well – not necessarily in fine details (where their own quotations vary), but at least where readings that heavily impact the meaning are concerned.  

          The patristic writers (and anonymous compositions) who show, in one way or another, that they used manuscripts of Mark that included 16:9-20 include Ambrose and Aphrahat and “Apostolic Constitutions” and Augustine and “Acts of Pilate” and “De rebaptismate” and “Doctrine of Addai” and “Enthronement of Michael” and Epiphanius and “Epistula Apostolorum” and Eusebius and Eznik of Golb and Fortunatianus and Fulgentius and Hierocles (a pagan writer) and Hippolytus and Irenaeus and Jerome and John Cassian and Justin Martyr and Leo and Macarius Magnes and  Marcus Eremita and Marinus and “Martyrium Arethae” and Nestorius and Patrick and Pelagius and Peter Chrysologus and Philosturgius and Prosper of Aquitaine and Pseudo-Didymus and Severus of Antioch and Tatian and Tertullian and Vincent of Antioch and Vincentius of Thibaris and Wulfilas – plus several forms of the Old Latin chapter-summaries of Mark, and Syriac section-divisions.  Most people conclude that all this makes it obvious that the people who recognized the New Testament canon also recognized Mark 16:9-20 as Scripture.   

  

          Some seminary professors, however, are not like most people.  What should a seminary student do when a professor denies that Mark 16:9-20 belongs in the Bible – implicitly tipping his hand on the question of whether or not he believes that the Greek-speaking churches handed down the text of the Gospels with sufficient accuracy to preserve the original message without drastic adulteration or loss?  Here are four suggestions.

1.  In the classroom, ask your professor for details about the evidence pertaining to this passage.  If he says things like, “Clement and Origen do not use it,” or, “Eusebius and Jerome say that it was absent from the best copies,” and if his description of the manuscript-evidence is vague, it is safe to deduce that your professor has only a marginal and shallow grasp of the evidence, and that his statements are mere mirrors of Bruce Metzger’s obsolete Textual Commentary which was designed to defend the readings adopted in the UBS Greek New Testament.      

2.  Meet with your professor privately and inquire about how much attention he has given to this textual variant.  It is quite possible that he has never read a single commentary written by an author who defends the passage.  Introduce him to resources that may be new to him, such as Roger Pearse’s Eusebius of Caesarea – Gospel Problems & Solutions (which shows what Eusebius really wrote, instead of just misleading snippets and summaries), and Carl Cosaert’s The Text of the Gospels in Clement of Alexandria (which shows how exceedingly rarely Clement quoted from Mark), and the 2016 edition of my book, Authentic:  The Case for Mark 16:9-20 (which covers external evidence and internal evidence in minute detail).  Nicholas Lunn and David W. Hester, too, have both recently written in favor of this passage.

3.  Treat your professor like he has a brain and is not obligated to conform to groupthink or “conventional wisdom.”  Scholars and teachers should be especially happy when they learn that a position to which they once subscribed is not really sustained by the available evidence – even when abandoning that position means admitting not only that they were wrong, but that the “scholarly consensus” is also wrong.  Your professor probably already has some opinions that are shared by only a small minority of his peers; encourage him to investigate the ending of Mark with the same curiosity that led him to those minority opinions.   

4.  Keep the lines of communication open.  It may seem natural to want to ignore a teacher who advocates the view that practically the entire Christian church outside the borders of Egypt failed to hand down a form of the Greek text of the Gospels that conveyed the meaning of the original text.  However, your professor might gradually realize, if he is encouraged to continue to investigate the subject, that a lack of meaningful peer review has allowed research on the ending of Mark to stagnate (as one can see by observing the many commentaries that simply rephrase Metzger’s words). 

           Your professor may then perceive that the scholarly consensus on this subject has grown unjustifiably entrenched, even though more evidence than ever before has come to light supporting the genuineness of these 12 verses.  With prayerful and gentle but persistent interaction, attempt to guide your professor to a new appreciation for the longstanding ecclesiastical acceptance of a form of the text that includes Mark 16:9-20.  This might even provoke similar journeys regarding other textual variants.        

[This post is intended as a response to a recent post by Danny Akin at the Gospel Coalition blog, and echoes it in some respects for rhetorical effect.]

Manuscripts Within Manuscripts: They Are Real!

Dr. Erik Kwakkel

            Regarding the previous post and the discovery of a manuscript-page containing John 7:50-8:12 within the binding of a printed book from the 1600’s – Happy April Fools Day!  There were some clues:  there is no research library in Christiania (Christiania is a small commune in Copenhagen); the subtitle to Hevelius’ Selenographia has the word Luna, not Lura (a Swedish word for “fool”); the initials of the Photomagnetic Hyperspectral Ultraviolet Light Scans (PHULS) can be pronounced “fools,” and there is no German periodical called the Zeitschrift des Lachens (“Journal of Laughter"). 

            Although this discovery was fictitious (including the digitally created picture), other discoveries – in which manuscripts are found within the bindings of other manuscripts, or within the bindings of printed books – are real, and the likelihood is very high that we are going to see more of them.  

            Rearrange the letters in the name of the fictitious Kirk Walkeek, and you can make the name of the real Dr. Erik Kwakkel of Leiden University, who, along with Dr. Joris Dik (whose name shares the same letters as the fictitious Jodi Kris) of Delft University of Technology, is developing technology and techniques which can read text on materials within book-bindings, using macro x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (MA-XRF) without dismantling the binding itself. 

Dr. Joris Dik

            Binding-materials have already been the source of several Greek uncial fragments, such as
            ● 0311 (which has text from Romans 8:1-13, and the earliest witness to the non-inclusion of εκ νεκρων in 8:11a),
            ● 0312 (which has text from Luke 5, from the late 400’s),
            ● 0313 (which has text from Mark 4:9 and 4:15 – from the late 400’s, with a distinct Byzantine reading),
            ● 0314 (which has text from John 5:43, from the late 400’s), and
            ● 0315 (which has text from Mark 2:9, 2:21, 2:25, and 3:1-2 – from the 300’s or 400’s!) – all fragments obtained by Christopher de Hamel.  (For some more information about 0313 see my report about it from 2015,)

This isn't real
either.  But
something like
 it is  –
wait and see.

            Kwakkel, who blogs about his work at https://medievalbooks.nl/ , also shares many images that he encounters in the course of his research at http://erikkwakkel.tumblr.com/ (often with brief analytical notes), as well as images and notes contributed by other researchers.  

            Entries from an earlier blog, now a sort of archive, can be found at the Turning Over a New Leaf project, found at https://medievalfragments.wordpress.com/ and assorted images related to the project – hundreds of them – can be found at Flickr. Several of his lectures are also available online, such as this one about  professional medieval book-production. 

            It is just a matter of time, I suspect, before the remains of a Greek manuscript will be found embedded within a book-binding.  (If one could aim a MA-XRF machine at book-bindings in the Vatican Library, the discovery would probably be made within a week.)   If the book is not very important, the Greek manuscript will probably be physically extracted.  But if the case is otherwise, or if there is a significant risk of damage involved in the extraction-process – for example, the risk of tearing apart a page secured by glue – then perhaps textual critics should create a new category of evidence:  besides papyri, uncials, minuscules, lectionaries, versions, and patristic quotations, I recommend that the symbol “r” (“remnant” or “recycled” or, in Dutch, “rest” or “remainder”) should be affixed to whatever uncial-number or minuscule-number is assigned to a fragment that remains embedded within another book – so as to convey that there is a lack of direct accessibility to such manuscripts that is not a factor with the others.

            Who knows how many libraries within libraries there are, hidden within the bindings of books?  There’s only one way to find out.
            

News: Early Text of the Pericope Adulterae Found in Book-binding

The cover of a fragmentary
copy of Selenographia (1647)

          Although manuscripts of the New Testament continue to be discovered in remote monasteries, the axiom,“The best place to discover a New Testament manuscript is a European library” has been proven to be correct once again:  an early fragment containing the pericope adulterae has been found in Denmark, after being recycled centuries ago to be used as material in the binding of a printed book.

          About a year ago, at the Forsknings Bibliotek Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark, assistant librarian Kirk Walkeek noticed an old book as he was conducting a routine inventory-check.  Upon examination, it was found to be “beskadiget,” a fragment of a damaged book; almost all of its pages were missing.  When whole, it had been a 1647 copy of astronomer Johann Hevelius’ Selenographia (subtitled sive, Lura [sic] descriptio), but now it contains only a few pages, which feature Hevelius’ description of a device to view obscured objects through the use of mirrors and lenses.

          At the same time Walkeek was undertaking the library’s inventory-check, professor Dr. Kris Jodi was at the library, and had just completed multi-spectral imaging of dozens of old book-bindings, searching for signs of recycled manuscripts.  Multi-spectral imaging technology, similar to x-rays, has already yielded the discovery of numerous manuscripts (see, for example, here and here and here).  Dr. Jodi’s experimental work is taking the technology a step further:  using Photomagnetic Hyperspectral Ultraviolet Light Scans, several images of a binding are made; each one is “tuned” to detect specific ingredients in ancient ink.  From these images, an aggregate image is formed, thus allowing the ink on hidden pages to be revealed without the pages themselves being visible. 

A mutilated Latin fragment embedded in the binding:
John 7:50-8:5a on recto; John 8:5b-12 on verso.
(Superimposed over the book-cover.)

         Walkeek, noticing that the binding of the Selenographia fragment was somewhat  bulky, presented it to Jodi, who scanned it using the PHULS scanning-tools.  The result:  the discovery of a page from an ancient Latin copy of the Gospel of John, containing text from 7:50-8:12.  This includes the pericope adulterae, which many commentators regard as a later addition to the text because it is absent from a number of early manuscripts.  This page, trimmed to 23.5 x 15.5 centimeters, was probably one of many discarded pages from a damaged copy of the Gospels that were reused as binding-material.  The center of the page has been cut away, but the rest of the text, on both sides of the page, has survived.

          Paleographical analysis of the script indicates that the codex from which the fragment was taken was produced in the 700’s, possibly in Northumbria.  It resembles the Vulgate but has some affinities with a form of the earlier Old Latin text, which is notable for its inclusion of the pericope adulterae.  A full analysis is scheduled for publication later this year in a special Danish edition of the German journal Zeitschrift des Lachens.

Defending Inerrancy and Mark 16:9-20 -- Aren't You Glad They're Not Lying?

Today, let’s look briefly at claims made by Dr. Norman Geisler about Mark 16:9-20.  This shows the contents of part of the Defending Inerrancy website, accompanied by my comments.  (And although the inaccuracies that are being spread by Dr. Geisler and the Defending Inerrancy website are pretty bad, the ones spread by John MacArthur are even worse.  And don’t even get me started about the Credo Courses from Dallas Theological Seminary professors.)

Ten More Reasons Sinaiticus Was Not Made by Simonides

Continuing from where I left off:

(11)  Sinaiticus Has Rare Alexandrian Readings.  As Scrivener observed in his 1864 Full Collation of Codex Sinaiticus, in Matthew 14:30, after the word ανεμον, the word ισχυρὸν is missing.  The printed edition of Codex Vaticanus’ text that was available when Simonides claimed to have made the codex reported that Codex Vaticanus included this word.  It was not until 1855 that the collation of the text of Codex Vaticanus was revised, and it was found that the main text of Vaticanus did not have this word; it was added by a later corrector. 

            This agreement between Vaticanus and Sinaiticus is one of many examples of the special affinity of their contents – agreements which would not exist between Codex Vaticanus and any artificially created composite-text based on the sources described by Simonides.  Simonides claimed to have used a Greek Bible prepared at Moscow, and printed by the Zosima brothers; this was understood to refer to a Greek Bible published by the Holy Russian Synod in 1821, in which the Old Testament portion is based on Grabe’s edition of the text of Codex Alexandrinus (an edition finished in the early 1700’s by other scholars after Grabe’s death).  According to T. C. Skeat, the New Testament portion of this edition consists of the Textus Receptus.  It may thus be expected to represent a fifth-century form of the Greek text of the Old Testament books, but the extraction of many Alexandrian readings from its New Testament text would be impossible.   

            Even if Simonides had somehow acquired a collation of Codex L (a manuscript known from the time of Stephanus (mid-1500’s) to have a text of Mark, Luke, and John which often deviates from the normal Byzantine standard (because, as later researchers discerned, its text in those three Gospels, and in the closing chapters of Matthew, is Alexandrian)), this would not have helped him find Alexandrian readings in the first 20 chapters of Matthew, where L’s text is primarily Byzantine.

            Yet we see many agreements between Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in Matthew 1-20 – of which the following are samples – which are inexplicable if the text of Sinaiticus were put together by the process which Simonides claimed to have used:

            ● The omission of Και (“And”) at the beginning of 3:2.

            ● The omission of (“his”) αυτου in 3:7.

            ● The omission of Ἰωάννης (“John”) in 3:14.

            ● The omission of ρημα (“word”) in 5:11.

            ● The harmonization τασσόμενοος (“placed”) in 8:9.

            ● The omission of και (“and”) in 8:13a.

            ● The omission of αυτου (“his”) in 8:13b.

            ● The omission of αυτου (“his”) in 8:21.

            ● The omission of πολλα (“often”) in 9:14.

            ● The omission of ανθρωπον (“a man”) in 9:32.

            ● The addition of και before Ἰάκωβος (“and” before “James”) in 10:2.

            ● The omission of εισίν (“are”) at the end of 11:8.

            ● The omission of οχλοι (“crowds”) in 12:15.

            ● The inclusion of αυτω (“him”) in 12:38.

            ● The omission of ἀκούειν (“to hear”) in 13:9.

            ● The variant φησιν (“says”) in 13:29.

            ● The omission of ανθρώπω (“a man”) in 13:45.

            ● The omission of αυτον (“him”) in 14:3.

            ● The omission of τὸν in 14:10.

            ● The omission of ισχυρὸν (“strong”) in 14:30.

            ● The omission of αυτων (“their”) in 15:2.

            ● The omission of αυτου (“his”) in 15:12.

            ● The omission of με (“I”) in 16:13.

            ● The addition of Χριστος (“Christ”) after Ἰησους (“Jesus”) in 16:21.

            ●  The variant εχει (“is ill”) instead of πάσχει (“suffers”) in 17:15.

            ● The omission of 17:21.

            ● The omission of εις με (“against you”) in 18:15.

            ● The omission of ανθρώπω (“a man”) in 19:3.
            ● The omission of αυτου (“his”) 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. 

John 21:24-25 in Codex Sinaiticus,
viewed under ultraviolet light.

(18)  The Last Verse of John Was Initially Omitted in Codex Sinaiticus.  Although Tischendorf insisted that there was something weird about the final verse of John in Codex Sinaiticus, this was doubted by subsequent researchers, since even in photographs nothing seemed amiss.  When the scholars Milne and Skeat, studying the manuscript in the early 1930’s for the British Museum,  applied ultraviolet light to the passage, however, Tischendorf was vindicated:  the copyist at this point finished the text at the end of 21:24, and drew his coronis, and wrote the closing-title of the book – and then he erased the closing-title (gently scraping away the ink) and the coronis, and the closing title.  Then he added verse 25 immediately following verse 24, and remade a new coronis and closing-title.  All this is as plain as day, as long as one has an ultraviolet light handy to examine the manuscript.

            A thoughtful copyist could decide to reject the final verse, regarding it as a note by someone other than John.  And his supervisor could overrule his overly meticulous decision.  But Simonides would have had no reason to stop writing at the end of verse 24, add the coronis and closing-title, and then undo his work and remake the text with verse 25 included.

(19)  The Lettering on Some Pages of Sinaiticus Has Been Reinforced.  On page after page, the lettering that was first written on the page has been reinforced; that is, someone else has written the same letters over them, so as to ensure the legibility of what was once faded.  The first page of Isaiah is a good example.  This reinforcement was not undertaken mechanically, but thoughtfully; the reinforcer did not reinforce letters and words that he considered mistakes; he introduced corrections, such as in 1:6, where the reading καιφαλης is replaced by κεφαλης.  Inasmuch as it is highly unlikely that the writing of a manuscript made in 1841 would be so faded that it would need to be reinforced within a few years, this weighs heavily against Simonides’ story. 

                       

(20)  Pages from Near the End of the Shepherd of Hermas in Codex Sinaiticus Are Extant.  When Simonides wrote his letter for The Guardian in 1862, he very clearly stated he concluded it with “the first part of the pastoral writings of Hermas,” but his work then ended “because the supply of parchment ran short.”  Such a description plausibly interlocked with what one could discern at the time about the contents of Codex Sinaiticus by reading Tischendorf’s description of it.  At the time, only the first 31 chapters of the text of Hermas were known to be extant in Codex Sinaiticus; that is all that Tischendorf had recovered from Saint Catherine’s Monastery.  However, in 1975, when the “New Finds” were discovered, they included damaged pages from Hermas – to be specific, from chapters 65-68 and chapters 91-95.  The Shepherd of Hermas has a total of 114 chapters.  In no sensible way can Simonides’ statement that he wrote “the first part” of Hermas and stopped there be interlocked with the existence of pages containing the 95th of its 114 short chapters.

            The clear and incriminating implication of this evidence is that Simonides’ report about how he produced the codex, including the prominent detail that he wrote the first part of Hermas but stopped there because he ran out of parchment, was shaped by his awareness of Tischendorf’s description of the codex, which stated that there was no text of Hermas extant after that point.  If Simonides had actually written the codex, he would have said something to the effect that a large part of his work was missing.  

            More evidence against the plausibility of Simonides’ story could be accumulated:  indications that the copyists of Sinaiticus at least occasionally wrote from dictation, and the existence of textual variants (in Matthew 13:54, Acts 8:5, and First Maccabees 14:5) which suggest that a copyist was working at or near Caesarea, and the remarkable similarity between the design of the coronis applied by Scribe D at the end of Tobit and after Mark 16:8 in Sinaiticus, and the design of the coronis at the end of Deuteronomy in Codex Vaticanus, and the drastic shift in the text’s quality in Revelation, and more.  But enough is enough.

            Simonides’ motives for spreading the false claim that he made Codex Sinaiticus may be a mystery till Judgment Day, but his guilt is not hidden at all.  He was a well-educated charlatan, and his claims about Codex Sinaiticus were false, as Tischendorf, Tregelles, Bradshaw, Scrivener, Wright, and others, equipped with the skill to evaluate the evidence, and the wisdom to evaluate the accuser, have already made clear.    

            

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 . . .