Steven Avery
Administrator
In the conspiracy theory of Kevin McGrane, incredible coincidences have to occur.
e.g. - The Lamprou catalog entries that connect Simonides and Kallinikos have to be hand-waved.
Hermas was relatively easy because serendipitously he himself had discovered a Greek text of Hermas on Athos in 1851, which, though somewhat different from the Sinaitic text, was from the same recension. It was doubly fortunate that the text in Sinaiticus was only the first part of the book because then no problems need arise concerning the ending, which was also missing in the manuscript that Simonides transcribed in 1851. Having brought the text to the attention of scholars at Leipzig in 1855—the first time those scholars had seen a copy of most of the book in Greek— supported by three of the leaves that he had stolen from the manuscript, many scholars (including Tischendorf) had given him the benefit of the doubt that such a manuscript had long existed on Athos. Simonides judged that this was sufficient to underpin his story that the text had been available on Athos for him to copy in 1840, but that he only wrote the first part of the book because he ran out of parchment.
Amazingly, McGrane does not even mention that Tischendorf attacked this Hermas as a later medieval text.
e.g. - The Lamprou catalog entries that connect Simonides and Kallinikos have to be hand-waved.
Hermas was relatively easy because serendipitously he himself had discovered a Greek text of Hermas on Athos in 1851, which, though somewhat different from the Sinaitic text, was from the same recension. It was doubly fortunate that the text in Sinaiticus was only the first part of the book because then no problems need arise concerning the ending, which was also missing in the manuscript that Simonides transcribed in 1851. Having brought the text to the attention of scholars at Leipzig in 1855—the first time those scholars had seen a copy of most of the book in Greek— supported by three of the leaves that he had stolen from the manuscript, many scholars (including Tischendorf) had given him the benefit of the doubt that such a manuscript had long existed on Athos. Simonides judged that this was sufficient to underpin his story that the text had been available on Athos for him to copy in 1840, but that he only wrote the first part of the book because he ran out of parchment.
Amazingly, McGrane does not even mention that Tischendorf attacked this Hermas as a later medieval text.
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