facebook discussions - textual forums

[Steven Avery]

This response, (my response to some recent questions) was first placed on the PureBible forum on Facebook.

Pure Bible - April, 2016
From the New Testament Textual Criticism forum on Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/pur...=977403059018250&comment_tracking={"tn":"R0"}

Reading is easier here.

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From the New Testament Textual Criticism forum on Facebook

Solid questions from a poster who is responding to the authenticity concerns.

New Testament Textual Criticism
https://www.facebook.com/groups/11404207692/permalink/10153326007282693/?comment_id=10153327632247693&reply_comment_id=10153327907242693&comment_tracking={%22tn%22%3A%22R3%22}&hc_location=ufi

This is my type of question from SART, and I do not have posting rights on the NTTC. Good questions, so answered here.

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QUESTION - COMMENTS SECTION

> While the "coloring" element of a forgery claim seems to be a recent one due to modern technology, isn't a claim of 19th century forgery a rehash of an issue settled long ago? If such claims are brought up by someone who holds the Greek text behind the KJV to be a verbally perfect representation of the original autographs (such as your family might, and such as many of my friends from a previous life do), I find it helpful to point them to Scrivener's intro to his collation of the manuscript. He discusses at length the "forgery" claim, rebuts it plainly, and marshals basically the same points you have made (in addition to some others). However, since he edited the publication of the Greek text behind the KJV NT in 1881, which is the only "innerant" Greek text (as such folks would claim) his work puts them in a bit of a bind in relation to their conspiracy claims. If Scrivener was part of the conspiracy, then they can't trust their own Greek text. If he was so poor a scholar as to be "duped" then they can't trust their own Greek text. Since he edited and published their venerated text, his voice must be heard, and they have not ever refuted the basic points (some of which you mentioned here) that he raised long ago. Just give them his work.
https://archive.org/details/afullcollationc00scrigoog

> You are quite right. Thanks for the admonition. I shouldn't state it to say, "Scrivener cannot be wrong" but rather, at the least, "Scrivener is a voice who has, from your standpoint, at least earned the right to be heard, and his arguments met."
.
> What does SART stand for? I don't know the group - I just know a lot a KJVO and TRO folks, having counted myself among them for much of my early life.

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SA RESPONSES

> , isn't a claim of 19th century forgery a rehash of an issue settled long ago?

This was "settled" in a superficial, political fashion without careful consideration of the actual manuscript, which was squirreled away. And the history was not approached with a real historical forensics approach.

For some, like the world-class Scotish scholar James Donaldson, the author of Literary Forgeries James Anson Farrer, the Bodleian Librarian Falconer Madan, and the top Russian scientist Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov, the ms. questions were never settled in the 1860s. And Morozov said specifically and clearly that it was not an authentic ms per the Tischendorf claims.

Any supposed "settled" approach would have to be revisited with the extra information that came from the

1) Codex Sinaiticus Project,
2) new ms. information from the internet searching,
3) books now availabie
4) international research cooperation.

And this is precisely what SART has done.

#1 alone changed everything.

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> someone who holds the Greek text behind the KJV to be a verbally perfect representation of the original autographs

This easily falls into a genetic fallacy problem, which you quickly de facto acknowledged on the thread. Note that I very happily defended Sinaiticus as likely authentic until a couple of years ago. Until I really, really studied the evidences.

While a TR or AV defender, or a person who likes Burgon's writing, might have a more natural enthusiasm for the topic, there is no innate positioning.

And for me Sinaiticus has no textual relevance whether authentic or forgery/replica, it is a trash ms. I only got involved by the amazing evidences and what it shows about the problems of textual criticism pseudo-science and pseudo-palaeography. It also is helpful just to show how easily scholars, in Piltdown Man fashion, can be duped, even today.

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> Scrivener's intro to his collation of the manuscript.

Scrivener does a good job with very limited evidence. Remember, he had never seen or handled either of the two parts of the ms. when he wrote this defense of Tischendorf, so at the very best he was giving a very limited appraisal.

We have gone over the arguments from Scrivener (some are significant, many are lightweight). Especially when James E. Snapp, Jr. based his position on the collation. They are innately "soft" evidences of the .. "how could this be .. " variety.

Note, though, the analysis of Scrivener is about totally different issues than what is on the New Testament Textual Criticism forum. Which are largely attempts to handwave the white parchment, the colouring and the superb condition of the mss. Scrivener knew nothing of any of this, he only thought the ms. was "yellow".

"the vellum leaves, now almost yellow in colour"
"vellum sheets, are now yellow in age"

Thus, if he knew the Leipzig leaves are white parchment, he should have started afresh. The discussions of Scrivener are on totally different points that what we have discovered since the CSPO of 2009.

Scrivener was mixed overall, with feet in various camps. His 1881 venture was actually for the Revision, and I do not consider it an important text.

As to why Scrivener was duped on Sinaiticus, he actually expressed a major concern that Tischendorf never showed up with the ms during the controversies. He also felt that SImonides must have mixed up two mss. Overall, Scrivener naively accepted the Tischendorf representations, along with the Tregelles concurrence.

Scrivener was not aware of many elements that we know of today, such as Tischendorf fretting about the Simonides stories en route to the 1859 bogus "loan". Or that the accusation of the colouring by Simonides and Kallinikos actually matches the physical condition of the ms. Or that the ms sections. were in amazingly shape for their supposed history. Overall, he was not able to do the historic forensics that we can do today.

And I would conjecture that if he physically saw and handled Leipzig and St. Petersburg, his analysis would have been very different. If was a Tischen-Trick to squirrel away the mss and have the scholars look at the facsimile.

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Hope that gives a bit of perspective. !

Steven Avery

 

[Steven Avery]

two posts about mansucript issues from Facebook textualcriticism forum

Here are the two posts that will be discussed here:

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A friend of mine has prohibited me from contributing to this (asinine) discussion after a certain set date, but I can still offer some comments for now. I must ask your forgiveness in advance for my state of frustration. I have a thesis to write; I shouldn't be attempting to reason away a conspiracy theory. It is out of my care for others who have similar ideological commitments (i.e. my KJV-only family) that I even bother here. My comments respond not only to this particular issue of colour, but also to other comments made by members of SART elsewhere:

1. Lots of manuscripts have "uncertain provenance" before 1844. That's really not all that unusual. In fact, that Codex Alexandrinus was known and used a lot earlier than Sinaiticus is a great explanation for the relative conditions of Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus. While Richard Bentley was running about in his nightgown carrying Alexandrinus to safety during a fire in 1731, Sinaiticus was (probably) tucked away safely somewhere hidden in St. Catherine's Monastery.

2. The whole discussion of "white" parchment vs. "yellow" parchment--specifically how the yellow parchment must have been artificially aged--reminds me of first-semester physics. All of the homework problems ended with some variation of the phrase "assuming the object is a perfect sphere experiencing zero friction". The insurmountable problem for me was that objects in reality aren't perfect spheres with zero friction, and conditions in which manuscripts are kept are not constants. Conditions affect things. Maybe in a perfect world all the folios of Sinaiticus would be snow-white, or maybe they would all age evenly to the same colour of yellow, but this is not a perfect world, and the manuscript was split up over a century and a half ago. It has been kept in different institutions since, displayed differently since, examined differently since, etc. If the members of SART worked with manuscripts, they would know how this matter of preservation renders their colour argument irrelevant. SUMMARY: Things discolour. Or they don't. Unevenly. Evenly. It all depends on a huge number of variables.

3. If Sinaiticus is a nineteenth-century forgery, how does one explain the multiplicity of hands and the amount of work involved. Did someone just happen upon the flesh of 350 goats? Was it already prepared as parchment? That's a lot of work--that requires explanation. Then, how does one successfully fake the hand(s) of Sinaiticus? One member of SART casually remarks that this sort of calligraphy is easy to fake. Obviously he has never tried to do so. I've attempted reproductions-by-hand and my modern hand lacks the ability to created the very even text of Sinaiticus. A nineteenth-century hand accustomed to cursive writing would probably have even more difficulty with regularity of letters in a text that great. That all assumes a single hand, but there are four discernible hands in the main text of Sinaiticus. Then there are the corrections. Bear in mind that this text was all written before the great papyrological advances in palaeography, where we now have some dated specimens of ancient scripts. How did someone--even a team of people--produce in the nineteenth century a work that is consistent with styles handwriting only discovered and systematically studied decades later? Well some of the leaves are white and some are yellow, so obviously they pulled it off(!).

Occam's calling. It's time for a shave.

==============================


I think there is a disconnect here. The colour-issue doesn't need an explanation because it is a non-issue. The folios are all within the range of normal for a manuscript with the age and history of Sinaiticus. That is why nobody is bothered by it. Even if it were an issue, there are far bigger problems posed by the mechanics of forging such a manuscript in the nineteenth century. The amount of skill and resources one would need to be able to pull it off would be unthinkable. Then there are issues of creating a text of the entire Bible that would fool everyone--something close enough to Vaticanus but not too close. Something "block-mixed" in John and clearly aligning with manuscripts like Codex Bezae for parts of John, but not with other parts. Something with corrections/correctors that each bear their own "personalities". Then the scripts themselves--being able to produce such a convincing range of scripts that stand the test of time/palaeographic discovery--each of them subtly different but so consistently executed for long sections of the manuscript. Such a production would be remarkable.

On the other hand, if Codex Sinaiticus is a real 4th-century manuscript, no explanation is needed. Everything fits.

I've read in posts by SART members that text critics have a hard time grasping the simple. I don't have a hard time with the simple. In fact, I prefer it. I don't have much patience for unnecessarily complicated arguments. I understand that the folios appear to be different in colour from the images. That's simple. The problem isn't simple, though, and it seems like SART research doesn't account for how complicated it would have to be to fake a manuscript like Sinaiticus.

So, allow me to turn the tables. If SART can continue to ask members of this group and the yahoo TC list to explain the colouring of folios in Sinaiticus (and several of us have obliged), it should be fair game to ask something of SART. I would like for someone from SART explain to me how Sinaiticus was forged, accounting for 1. the parchment--the expense it would have cost anyone (ancient or modern) to prepare, 2. the text of the manuscript--not just New Testament, but Old Testament, apocrypha, Hermas and Barnabas, and 3. the palaeographical precision of the number of scripts employed in both the main text and in the corrections. Additionally, the explanation should account for how the texts of Barnabas and Hermas and the scripts used in the production of Sinaiticus have stood up to more recent manuscript discoveries that would have been inaccessible or unknown to any nineteenth-century forgers.

 

[Steven Avery]

talking about manuscripts


Before going down this post, I will mention that this is a perfect example of the one-dimensional tunnel view of some groups of scholars and professionals and people who work with manuscripts with only a limited view of history. People handle manuscripts, and of course there are colour and condition variance in manuscripts, so they can falsely assume that such variances are irrelevant. It is a funny dynamic.

In Sinaiticus, the manuscript features are fundamental. These "exceptional" manuscript features demonstrate and confirm the historical elements of the recent production and the tampering.

Similarly with the textual arguments. Independently, they have a bit of pizazz, but they are innately "soft" arguments which we cover in other posts. A true perspective has to look at all the elements, the manuscript conditions (and we were given a special research gift with the divided up manuscript, CFA and CSP, fortuitous for the researcher), the historical elements, the textual elements and more, and how each one relates to the other.

Sinaiticus is shown to be early by a number of elements, and two especially work together:

the condition of the manuscripts (which is not an ancient heavily, used ms. and which shows the colouring) and the
historical and provenance element matching the actual ms. conditions which we can see since 2009

1. Lots of manuscripts have "uncertain provenance" before 1844. That's really not all that unusual.

Hi, I do not think you really understand the special provenance issues of Sinaitiucs. This lack of understanding is a common problem, the way Sinaiticus has been described in the books is a disaster of misinformation, and this is what the scholars go by today.

Now, let's start with the great uncials (you are welcome to offer other examples.) Vaticanus, Bezae and Alexandrinus have clear provenance back to the 1400s and 1500s. This has still led to questions as to their dating, and issues like the overwriting in Vaticanus, but the situation is totally unlike Sinaiticus.

The provenance of Sinaiticus is totally unusual, with many strange factors.

1) no catalogue in the monastery (even though one was claimed)

2) no report of any kind before the 1840s (e.g. Vaticanus had correspondence with Erasmus, Bezae had the donation form Theodore Beza to Cambridge)

3) numerous explorers and manuscript seekers before 1844 at St. Catherine's knew nothing of the manuscript

3) "too good to be true" .. exactly what Tischendorf was looking for

4) tissues of lies about the discovery

5) an alternate production scenario that is historically far more sensible and that is has coincidences and improbabilites galore when the dismissal attempt is given (the called shot of the colouring, the Hermas of Simonide and much more)

NOTHING gets even close to this (other than the minuscule 2427) in terms of late dating perplexity. If you deny that Sinaiticus has a perplexing provenance problem, then you simply do not know the manuscript's history. You have been tischenduped .

Now, when it comes to the white parchment colour of the Leipzig manuscript, we have checked dozens of manuscripts, none of them are even close to the white parchment of Leipzig, they all are yellowed. Some of them you can see here.

Comparison with other manuscripts
http://www.sinaiticus.net/other%20mss.html

This is why on issues like various "exceptional" elements:

a) the white parchment of Leipzig
b) the amazing and large distinction of Leipzig's whiteness to the British Library coloured section
c) the variableness within the British Library (Leipzig is consistent, and mss in general are consistent except in special spots like water stains and cover pages)
d) the flexibility and suppleness of both mss, unique and "exceptional" from such a heavily used antiquity ms (This is one of the hardest points for a replica or forgery to emulate.)

We continually ask for examples to compare. None are given that are even remotely analagous, but we get all sorts of arcane comments instead.

In fact, that Codex Alexandrinus was known and used a lot earlier than Sinaiticus is a great explanation for the relative conditions of Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus. .

Here you simply do not know the purported history of Sinaiticus. Which is heavy use from 350 AD to c. 1500, with corrections, bindings, and notes added basically in every century. (One thread here shows century-by-century, using Skeat & Milne and various commentary.) This lack of knowledge is a common problem among the textual criticism opposition to actually considering the Sinaiticus evidences.

While Richard Bentley was running about in his nightgown carrying Alexandrinus to safety during a fire in 1731, Sinaiticus was (probably) tucked away safely somewhere hidden in St. Catherine's Monastery.

Which is totally irrelevant to the heavy use theorized from 350 AD to 1550. And we can add the strange situation in 1844 when it was supposedly chopped up, strewn about the monastery. (Except that this was one of the lies of Tischendorf.) If Sinaiticus was stashed away invisibly at Sinai from 1550 to 1840, even in a jar, that would not undue any of the wear of the first 1200 years. Nobody has claimed that storing a manuscript for hundreds of years will turn it from yellowed to pristine white. Do you?

2. The whole discussion of "white" parchment vs. "yellow" parchment--specifically how the yellow parchment must have been artificially aged--reminds me of first-semester physics. All of the homework problems ended with some variation of the phrase "assuming the object is a perfect sphere experiencing zero friction". The insurmountable problem for me was that objects in reality aren't perfect spheres with zero friction, and conditions in which manuscripts are kept are not constants. Conditions affect things. Maybe in a perfect world all the folios of Sinaiticus would be snow-white, or maybe they would all age evenly to the same colour of yellow, but this is not a perfect world, and the manuscript was split up over a century and a half ago.

Some of these comments are simply diversionary, a type of misdirection, here are two:

> Maybe in a perfect world all the folios of Sinaiticus would be snow-white

Why would any parchment heavily used for a millenium be snow-white? Parchment yellows with age and use. Remember, Scrivener and others, duped by Tischendorf, emphasized that Sinaiticus was yellow with age as part of their apologetic as to accepting Sinaiticus as 4th century.

Books like Forensic Chemistry by Alfred Lucas point out that yellowing artificially is a known method to make manuscripts look old, we share a number of salient quotes here:

discoloration of documents, stains, liquids used - forensic testing
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/b.109

With Sinaiticus, we have evidences everywhere that this is what happened to the 1859 St. Petersburg leaves. Why close our eyes to the evidence? We even have amazing physical corroboration since 2009 to what was specifically noted to have occurred c. 1860. This type of independent corroboration evidence is amazingly strong. Even more so when the authenticity scenario posits that the people who pointed out the colouring knew nothing of the manuscript.

> and the manuscript was split up over a century and a half ago.

The great bulk of the manuscript wear was way before 1840, according to the common errant theory. The massive wear would be 350 AD to 1844. If you want to have a theory where Leipzig used Comet or Ivory Soap to undue the wear, state the theory and look for evidences. If not, you have to deal with the major evidences as we have them clearly shown through the Codex Sinaiticus Project.

Do you actually have a scenario that you are claiming that explain the various current "exceptional" anomalies?

It has been kept in different institutions since, displayed differently since, examined differently since, etc. If the members of SART worked with manuscripts, they would know how this matter of preservation renders their colour argument irrelevant. SUMMARY: Things discolour. Or they don't. Unevenly. Evenly. It all depends on a huge number of variables.

If they don't necessarily discolour after 1500 years of heavy use, why not point to other ancient, heavy used manuscripts that are pristine white parchment, flexible and supple, like Leipzig?

Its a simple request. Instead of all the dancing with words, why not try to show your analogy manuscripts? We are continually making this request.

3. If Sinaiticus is a nineteenth-century forgery, how does one explain the multiplicity of hands and the amount of work involved. Did someone just happen upon the flesh of 350 goats? Was it already prepared as parchment? That's a lot of work--that requires explanation.

In a general way, it is explained in the discussion of Benedict and Simonides and Kallinikos working at Mount Athos, and with some others who worked on the ms up into the 1840s. I do not think you are aware of the historical elements here, so let me suggest that you read up on this first.

Then, how does one successfully fake the hand(s) of Sinaiticus? One member of SART casually remarks that this sort of calligraphy is easy to fake. Obviously he has never tried to do so.

We are talking about trained calligrarphy skills. And not only that, individuals who are native to Greek scripts and work daily with a trove of ancient manuscripts on Mt. Athos and who likely were familiar with various uncials for this project. (Thus, I do not think your anecdotal experiences are particularly relevant.) The letters are simply formed, they do not have real fancy flourishes and such, which is why there has been so much changing back and forth in the analysis as to the number of scribes and correctors! (Tischendorf, Skeat, Traube and others all disagree, and new theories have recently come forth.)

Now, I'll keep my eyes open for the reference which discusses the ease of such writing, however it is rather obvious when simply looking at the letters. A really skilled calligraphist can emulate far more complex writing (e.g. the printing of the AV-1611 has a beautiful hand emulation) but the simple box type of script of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus and Claromontanus and other uncials is much easier that complicated flourishes.

I've attempted reproductions-by-hand and my modern hand lacks the ability to created the very even text of Sinaiticus. A nineteenth-century hand accustomed to cursive writing would probably have even more difficulty with regularity of letters in a text that great.

There is no reason that Greek orthodox monks familiar with many texts and skilled in calligraphy would have great difficulty here.

That all assumes a single hand, but there are four discernible hands in the main text of Sinaiticus. Then there are the corrections. Bear in mind that this text was all written before the great papyrological advances in palaeography, where we now have some dated specimens of ancient scripts. How did someone--even a team of people--produce in the nineteenth century a work that is consistent with styles handwriting only discovered and systematically studied decades later?

Isn't e.g. Vaticanus much closer in script to Sinaiticus than most of the papyri? By bringing up the rather wild papyri issues, I do think you are missing the basics.

Now there is one valid point you are making about a team. It does seem that there would have to be some organizational pizazz and cooperation to create the manuscript. And this I believe is in fact the history. It is very likely that Simonides down-played this element in his famous historical description .. in order to make his calligraphy the central focus. Possibly the motives were not quite as pristine pure as he alleged. |

On the other hand, it seems like there was a change of perspective about the manuscript along the way. It became more and more a first draft, a hack job, a rush job, full of problems. We discuss this on various pages on the forum. I find that textual criticism people are clueless about this because they have bought nto the Tischendorf group of fabrications.

Well some of the leaves are white and some are yellow, so obviously they pulled it off(!).

While you meant this dismissively, there is an element of truth.

We are weighing clear impossibilities in the historic scenario of Sinaticus. The history does not work, and the manuscript does not work, and the two together seal the simple fact that the manuscript is not from 350 AD and is not heavily used and it is coloured in the larger section.

We are also weighing perceived improbabilities in the development of the manuscript in 1840. This has been a major part of the SART enterprise. Let me give you the short answer .. impossibilities trump perceived improbabilities every day of the week, especially when the improbabilities are really not very difficult.

==================================================

Now from the second post above:

> The folios are all within the range of normal for a manuscript with the age and history of Sinaiticus.

Then where are the examples of white parchment (pristine and flexible too) manuscripts with 1000+ years of heavy use. We continually ask this question, and only get handwaves and platitudes in response. If you have no examples, your statement above is simply 100% false. The British Library indicates it is false by the continual use of "exceptional" in describing the manuscripts condition.

> That is why nobody is bothered by it.

Nobody knew about these anomalies, verifying the Simonides-Kallinikos late production history from the 1850s-1860s, until very recently. It was hidden. It is still hidden in ALL the public Sinaiticus literature. People who are ignorant clearly will not be bothered! In textual criticism circles, we have a George Orwell maxim, ignorance is bliss.

And anybody with some sense about history and manuscripts clearly should be "bothered by it". Unless they are so ingrained by circularity into thinking that Sinaiticus must be fourth century so there must be an explanation, so why be concerned?

> Even if it were an issue, there are far bigger problems posed by the mechanics of forging such a manuscript in the nineteenth century. The amount of skill and resources one would need to be able to pull it off would be unthinkable.

One manuscript? Unthinkable? On Mt. Athos? Hogwash.

> I understand that the folios appear to be different in colour from the images.

If you believe that the Leipzig images are a failure, and the manuscript is not white parchment, simply make the claim and give the basis.

In fact, NOBODY has made this claim who has worked with the manuscript. If the Leipzig manuscript is white parchment, then what appears to be different in the Codex Sinaiticus Project .. is different. As you should know, NOBODY claims that the British Library pages are anything other than an "yellow with age" with "exceptional" wide variance.

> Then there are issues of creating a text of the entire Bible that would fool everyone--something close enough to Vaticanus but not too close. Something "block-mixed" in John and clearly aligning with manuscripts like Codex Bezae for parts of John, but not with other parts. Something with corrections/correctors that each bear their own "personalities".

Here you fall into a basic fallacy, a fallacy of assumed total design. It is clear that there is a hodge-podge of sorts in the development of Sinaiticus. Manuscripts like Vaticanus, Bezae and Claromontanus may have been used directly or indirectly.

Now, post-facto all sorts of relationships are found, some strong, some weak. Anything "found" can be considered as designed. Yet anything short of direct homoeoteleuton spots or precise copying of words tells you very little. Whatever the final result, various scholarly papers can take the hodge-podge of results and pretend that it is all a designed result. We only can see through a glass darkly as to the exact dynamic from c. 1830 (when Benedict would have started work) till 1840.

> Then the scripts themselves--being able to produce such a convincing range of scripts that stand the test of time/palaeographic discovery--each of them subtly different but so consistently executed for long sections of the manuscript. Such a production would be remarkable.

Here you have another fallacy. Clearly if three or four people using a similar antiquity script (e.g. trained together on Athos) worked on the manuscript, it would have exactly what you are noting. So there is nothing there that should be perplexing.

Also remember that Tischendorf had plenty of opportunity to eliminate any obvious script and notation and cover perplexities (look, e.g. at the page with what looks like a late India ink obliteration.). We know from his own declarations that Tischendorf actually trimmed off edge notes (and also that margin notes were specifically referenced by Simonides.)

So there easily could have been many markers even more perplexing than the huge anomalies we have today .. that were eliminated.

On the other hand, if Codex Sinaiticus is a real 4th-century manuscript, no explanation is needed. Everything fits.

. Totally false. The Codex Sinaiticus Project site itself is full of anomalies that don't "fit" on the binding, on the ink, on the parchment, on the history. This is an example of ignorance is bliss, to the modern textual critics.

I've read in posts by SART members that text critics have a hard time grasping the simple.

Yep, and I believe it is demonstrated 100% by your inability to even address even the first simple questions like the following:

1) are the Leipzig pages white parchment? (did Leipzig fail in the CSP?)
2) where are the similar "normal" exemplars?

Instead we get a lot of theorizing, mostly sans substance.
Like the following flying jump.

> I don't have a hard time with the simple. In fact, I prefer it. I don't have much patience for unnecessarily complicated arguments. I understand that the folios appear to be different in colour from the images.

So now you are claiming that the Leipzig pages are not white parchment?

Really? On what basis?
Where is your actual evidence that the Leipzig Codex Sinaiticus Project failed on the most basic element of their page representations?

If you can demonstrate that the Leipzig pages are not white parchment, that the Leipzig Codex Sinaiticus Project online is a failure, I will be quite grateful for your efforts.

That is your challenge.

If the Leipzig pages are in fact properly represented online, or you have no evidence that they are false, you really should retract a bogus claim.

So, allow me to turn the tables. If SART can continue to ask members of this group and the yahoo TC list to explain the colouring of folios in Sinaiticus (and several of us have obliged),

Yet you manage to avoid the fundamental questions. You will not even answer on what basis you claim the Leipzig pictures to be a failure and the manuscript to actually not be white parchment.

it should be fair game to ask something of SART. I would like for someone from SART explain to me how Sinaiticus was forged, accounting for 1. the parchment--the expense it would have cost anyone (ancient or modern) to prepare, 2. the text of the manuscript--not just New Testament, but Old Testament, apocrypha, Hermas and Barnabas, and 3. the palaeographical precision of the number of scripts employed in both the main text and in the corrections. Additionally, the explanation should account for how the texts of Barnabas and Hermas and the scripts used in the production of Sinaiticus have stood up to more recent manuscript discoveries that would have been inaccessible or unknown to any nineteenth-century forgers.

The main point here is that there likely would have to be some organization cooperation, on Athos or externally, a little bit of financial and time effort and investment. Yet, whether the purpose was a gift for the Tsar, or to help along with the perfect sidekick manuscript to buttress Vaticanus to fight the Received Text, or a combo of both, there would be the necessary organizational pizazz. And we are talking about Mount Athos, where manuscripts and parchment are abundant.

We and others have conjectures on this, but there is not a lot of log material available. We do know that Benedict, Simonides and Kallinikos were working together on manuscripts at exactly the right time and place. (One of the many reasons why the Simonides story is far too coincidentally true to be dismissed.) This information came out of the Mt. Athos catalogue of Lambros, published in 1895 and 1900 and emphasized by James Anson Farrer as a critical evidence in Literary Forgeries, yet ignored by modern one-dimensional textcrit analysis.

Was there organized Jesuit influence to fight the Received Text behind the production of the "too good to be true" manuscript and the papal fawning over Tischendorf ? Possibly, there are a lot of puzzles there, but it is not my emphasis. None of this type of conjecture is necessary to show that Sinaiticus is a recent manuscript, and is, physically, nothing like the 4th century manuscript claimed by Tischendorf. Tischendorf pushed pseudo-scholarship, based on hiding the actual manuscripts, and pointing to his deceptive writing in his facsimile.

Now, you do not seem to be aware that Simonides "coincidentally" produced Hermas and Barnabas editions, (Hermas was emphasized by Farrer) that clearly are totally compatible with his hand on Sinaiticus as well. Please, read James Donaldson on this and come up to speed, there is more than I can place here. And read about the Tischendorf retraction on the Simonides Hermas.

Before going more into the final parts, I have to have you answer:

What does "palaeographic precision" precisely mean in this context?
What scripts are "precise" in what way?

Specifically, to what inaccessible manuscript discoveries are you referring?

Thanks!

Steven Avery