David p. 128
If the manuscript had been stained in
Cairo, it would have had to have been
away from the sight of anyone who would
have noticed the difference. Then only
curious Kallinikos might have seen what
Tischendorf was doing. But there were a lot
of eyes on the Codex once it got to Cairo.
And Tischendorf, as you will see, was only
given a quire of it at a time.
p. 300
Success for the Saxon
As he awoke in Cairo, on Valentine's Day,
Tischendorf realized he had just received
his heart's desire. A messenger had been
dispatched from the Cairo monastery the
night before, to bring the Codex from St.
Catherine’s by the following Wednesday!
He quickly wrote letters to inform the Tsar
and his brother Grand Duke Constantine,
and to the Saxon Minister of Culture Von
Falkenstein, "to give the news to the Saxon
newspapers.” Yet he wrote to his wife “not
to say anything about it to anyone except
best friends."
p. 301
I’ll let Tischendorf narrate how
happened:
"... they [Agathangelos and his
colleagues] ... agreed to send one of
their Bedouin sheiks to Sinai that
evening [February 13th] to get the
manuscript. I promised the latter, if
he hurried as quickly as possible, a
special reward. But his haste was
almost beyond belief; for on the
evening of February 23 he rode
back into Cairo. On the morning
of the 24th, Agathangelos and his
vicar brought me the precious piece
of cargo by the dromedary mail. We
now agreed at the Russian Consulate
General that I should take individual
booklets (quaternions) [quires] of 8
sheets [folia] each for copying, with
which I immediately started."
From the 13th through the 23rd is just
10 days! And this is going down to St.
Catherine’s and coming back! I almost
wonder if the Codex wasn’t already in the
process of being brought to Cairo, say, by
Kyrillos.
If all the possibilities I've raised
are correct, could Kyrillos have finished
coloring, say, the New Testament (which is
lighter than the Old Testament), before he
began to ride to Cairo with the text, fully
expecting it to be delivered to Tischendorf?
If so, then perhaps Agathangelos simply
intercepted the text as it was already being
brought. Otherwise, we have a marvelous
transportation system, that has gone from
12 days one way, to 8 days one way, to 10
days both ways!
On the other hand, maybe dromedary
mail was the Dromedary Express, the FedEx
of the 1800s. Either way, it’s something to
think about.
-----
p. 303
Copying the Codex
Once he was settled in a place where
he could do the work, one quire (4 sheets,
8 folia, 16 pages) at a time was given
to Tischendorf to copy. He wouldn’t need
Barnabas or Hermas. He had already copied
them at St. Catherine’s. He calculated he
would need six weeks in Cairo to copy the
entire Codex.
But Tischendorf didn’t copy the Codex
alone. In the summary of his letters by
Featherstone, two people popped out that
were "to help with the copying of the MS”:
• "a doctor med. L’Orange from
Konigsberg" and
• "a pharmacist from Leipzig” named
Voss, "who calls the bookseller in
Leipzig his uncle”
though Tischendorf must check their
work and revise as necessary. He saw that
they could write about fifty folia [6 quires
and two folia] per week. ^22 As you can
see, there is no way Tischendorf could have
kept up that kind of a load on his own.
By March 30, he had been given the last
125 folia in a single load. And while he was
overseeing copying the Codex, and revising
it himself, he also made three photographic
facsimiles of individual pages. ^21
Whew. The copying process had gone
off without a hitch. The doctor’s
