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Codex Sinaiticus is a Fake?
BY
NEW TESTAMENT,
OLD TESTAMENT,
TEXT ISSUES,
TEXTUAL CRITICISM
Some are claiming that Codex Sinaiticus, an ancient copy of the whole Bible in Greek, is a forgery by Constantine von Tischendorf.
1 The claims go around that he never had a real manuscript, much less a whole codex, and just Joseph Smithed it. They believe that sometime after he visited St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, Egypt, he made the forged copies and sold them to the Russian government. This sits right up there on the shelf next to “The Septuagint doesn’t exist.”
Quick Crash Course
Codex: multiple pages bound into a single volume
Papyrus: plant based early form of paper from Egypt.
Uncial: Greek handwritten font consisting of all capital letters with no spaces. Typically earlier usage.
Manuscript: a handwritten document
Parchment: Dried animal skins for use as a writing surface.
Minuscules: Greek handwriting utilizing capital and lowercase letters, and spaces between words. Typically later usage.
Sinaiticus Stands under Intense Academic Scrutiny
The most striking evidence against the idea that Sinaiticus is a forgery, is the academic work that has gone into analyze the different handwriting, inks, and centuries in which the book was compiled and handled.
2 If this was Tischendorf’s own forgery, why does he suggest that it was copied by four different copyists based on the handwriting? Why does the independent witness of Milne and Skeat at the British Museum conclude at least three copyists were involved (on the basis of idiosyncratic spellings consistent to certain portions)?
3 If the codex was a forgery by Tischendorf, why can Metzger extract that a whole group of correctors later went through the codex and made corrections of spelling and alternate marginal readings in clearly later dated handwriting?
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Coloration Cavils
Some claim that the differences in color between different leaves as they are shown on the Codex Sinaiticus website reflect that this codex was never a cohesive document, but that it was patched together by it’s forgers from various materials. Elijah Hixon explains on his blog, that the coloration varies because of different photography conditions at the different locations where the pages were photographed.
5 Notwithstanding, coloration differences could also be caused by different storage conditions over the last 200 years, different animals used to make the same codex over the last 1500 years, or even different amounts of wear and usage on certain pages. Color itself is a subjective factor for determining manuscript origins, especially when they are merely photographs.
David W. Daniels engages in maximum level deception on the point of colors, as he constantly and deliberately obscures coloration scales when comparing photographs in his video, waving papers around like a mad man (try a still shot to prove your point, guy).
6 Even if coloration were an issue, hiding the color scales from viewers is downright deceptive. As has been pointed out, reputable printers would use color scales to ensure matching printed photograph quality.
7 Daniels really just needs to sell his book, and makes me want to believe in purgatory. I got a still shot of two color scales in his video, just to prove he needs to change his ink cartridge in his printer.
The Problem of “Burning” Vellum
Part of the legendary account of Tischendorf’s discovery, is that the monks of Saint Catherine’s monastery were taking boxes and baskets of old papers and books to burn them to heat the monastery. Among these documents was Codex Sinaiticus, and Tischendorf rescued it from the flames. Some would deny the legitimacy of Tischendorf’s claims regarding the discovery of the manuscript, due to the problem of the flammability of vellum. Vellum is leather, and leather is often used to make fire-resistant clothing. How could a vellum parchment burn, if leather is fire resistant? Modern experiments show that vellum cannot be burned alone, but must be kept in the presence of an open flame in order to burn. One question to be answered is, how parched is the vellum of 1,400 year old quality, stored in the desert, and would it burn more easily? I’m not going to burn any ancient manuscripts to find out.
In order to clarify this for us, Daniel Wallace has told the story of Tischendorf’s account to include that the legendary details were legendary.
8 The same baskets used to carry kindling were also being used to store ancient manuscripts. Wallace notes that this monastery had been preserving manuscripts for over 1,000 years, and they didn’t suddenly start burning them in the 19th century. Tischendorf’s language barrier merely misunderstood that not everything in the baskets was going to be burned. In fact, Wallace records that no Christian or Jewish groups are recorded as ever having burned unused copies of scripture, but rather burying them.
Tischendorf claims to recover the first 43 pages, which would end up at the library in Leipzig, from the basket of materials he believed would be burned, starting at I Chronicles. He concludes that the missing front half of the codex must have been burned. However, this conclusion is proven false by subsequent discoveries of earlier portions of the Old Testament, including some of Genesis.
An additional section of the codex, of about 347 pages, was discovered by Tischendorf at a subsequent visit to the monastery, in which he was able to obtain the pages from a visit to a particular monk’s private room. This set ended up in St. Petersburg, and ultimately in the British Library. However, because this section contained nothing prior to I Chronicles, Tischendorf would have continued to assume that the first half of the document had been destroyed by burning.
Supposedly James Rendel Harris points out the error of Tischendorf’s burn-rescue story, by stating that the same basket was still in the monastery when he visited later. It is important to note that in this paper, he does not criticize the manuscript as being inauthentic, but only the legendary account of Tischendorf’s acquisition of it. Also Harris’s mention of having seen the basket, actually corroborates Tischendorf’s story, that he was actually at the monastery, and that there actually was a “burn basket” of sorts. Harris recognizes the preposterousness of attempting to burn vellum.
9 We do find his writings criticizing the handling of property rights regarding Codex Sinaiticus, but with the laudation of Tischendorf as an eminent scholar.
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The Proof of Progressive Discovery
Tischendorf was not the first person to discover this codex. It was in the monastery for a long time before he got there to bring it to light in the academic sphere. The first recorded mention of Sinaiticus was actually by Vitaliano Donati, an Italian pilgrim to the St. Catherine’s Monastery in 1761. Constantine von Tischendorf is credited with it’s discovery because he first brought the codex forward to the light of European academic analysis and awareness. Tischendorf’s claim is that he directly took 43 sheets of the codex in 1844 to Leipzig University Library, where they still currently reside. In 1859, Tischendorf recovered another 347 pages of the codex from Saint Catherine’s, promising to return it. Somehow he ended up taking the codex to St. Petersburg in Russia, where he copied the contents of the codex. He published his findings in four volumes by 1862. At this point, the Russian government had control of the codex, and would not return it to St. Catherine’s monastery. In 1933, the British Museum purchased all 347 leaves from Russia for £100K.
| British Library | Leipzig University | St. Catherine’s Monastery | National Library of Russia |
| 347 pages | 43 pages | 18 partial leaves | 4 partial leaves |
| 1859 | 1844 | 1975 | 1975 |
The Problem of Progressive Geographic Distribution
So here’s another argument against the Codex being a forgery. How did Tischendorf manage to get so many leaves of a forgery to look like it was written by different, hands, and still have these leaves geographically distributed to all the places in the story of it’s discovery?
As shown in the chart above, manuscript fragments of the codex arrived at different locations at different times, some outside the range of Tischendorf’s work. He dropped off the parts at the University of Leipzig, and St. Petersburg. But how could he have planted pages of the forgery at St. Catherine’s monastery to be discovered over 100 years later? It would take more work to forge this entire codex than to simply discover it.
Keep in mind, that in order to copy this document in such a disheveled fashion, Tischendorf would have to purposely copy damaged matching pages to the other pages. He would have needed to separate the pages into different groups that could end up in different places at different times, only to be later reconstructed. This is what happened in 2005, when these organizations partnered to construct a digital copy of the entire codex available online
here. There are pages of the Codex from this project, that we can’t even prove Tischendorf ever touched. He only recorded handling 390 pages, but the total available is at least 412 pages.
The Problem of Partial Production
We have seen that Tischendorf’s discovery was the start of a process that resulted in subsequent discoveries and future collation into a single cohesive document. However, another problem is interjected to the forgery theory, that Tischendorf would have produced an incomplete forgery with damaged pages. Based on calculations of textual-critical scholars, the original codex probably contained 790 pages. We only have a little over 400 of these pages, meaning that another 390 pages are floating about somewhere, hidden, or possibly destroyed, worn out or damaged.
When making a forgery, why would Tischendorf produce only a partial work and put it forward as a legitimate discovery? Wouldn’t an entire work be more desirable to museums and scholars? If he were to have forged this document, it was with enough miraculous foresight to produce a seemingly authentic partial work.
The problem of Massive Scale Forgery Production
If we were to count out the letters, and lines per page, and estimated pages in Codex Sinaiticus, along with the average handwriting speed, it would have taken Tischendorf 127 hours to produce the entire codex in his basement. However, these assumptions include the assumption that he would be proficient in writing ancient uncial forms, and proficient enough to make consistent spelling errors in certain sections while not in others. He would need to be proficient in using certain scribal markings only in certain scribal sections. He would need access to different kinds of inks. We could add hours of labor to put various handwriting from different time periods in the margins, as well as various corrections in certain places. It is ridiculous to assume that this man would have spent over a month on forging this manuscript, only to end up donating it to universities and libraries in Europe. When we combine this figure with the time it would take for him to copy the text from his own forgery, and to publish that text, we could more than double the time and effort he put into making a lie, over 300 hours?
When we ask whether or not Tischendorf possessed such skills as to reproduce ancient documents like this, we find his journals mentioning lithographic reproduction of the originals. This older form similar to modern photocopying is a far cry from reproducing the hand-strokes of 4th century uncials onto papyrus. He also refers to transcription methods, but this is to copy the ancient writing into a modern form, and not exact reproduction by hand.
The Problem of Motive
We have no record that Tischendorf made any large sum of money on his forgery. He merely made standard profits from the sales of his published Greek New Testament based on Sinaiticus, and quite frankly, these might not offset the time it would take to forge the document, and then copy out the text for book form. He did also have his traveling expenses paid by the libraries and governments to which he brought the manuscripts to rest. The most we could assume is that he wanted his name remembered in history as the motive.
Right along with the problem of motive remains the question of why he would put forward an academic defense of his work in the prefaces to the New Testaments he published, if it was all just for a forgery. He puts forward arguments in defense of returning to older manuscripts that were long neglected in the study of the original New Testament text.
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The motive of Tischendorf to discover ancient New Testament manuscripts was actually fueled by his passion to disprove German scholars who were claiming that the New Testament text could not be verified as legitimately ancient. He set out to find ancient manuscripts that could help to prove the historicity and ancient character of the New Testament text. So clear is his passion for this subject matter, that this search and study would characterize the rest of his life work. If we were to throw out ancient discoveries like Tischendorf’s, we would be denying evidence of the historical character of the New Testament text.
“to show that our inspired gospels most certainly take their rise from apostolic times, and so to enable the reader to take a short but clear view of one of the most instructive and important epochs of the Christian church.”
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“having no other desire than to build up my readers in their most holy faith.”
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Not so Simple Solution: Dating the Codex
Why don’t we just subject the codex to forensic analysis to determine the age of the document? The codex is a parchment, meaning it does contain carbon 14, and could be successfully carbon-dated. However, this would involve the destruction of certain portions of the manuscript, so it is generally not admitted as an option. This is a disappointment to the empiricist, because we are now left with more subjective means of analysis.
Paleographical analysis brings us between the 4th and 5th centuries, by analyzing the shapes of letters, the writing styles, and the materials used to write. While this method is not mathematically calculable, we can use this method to parallel other similar documents that we do have dating information for. The field of archaeology utilizes a number of methods to determine approximate dates for objects found, sometimes based on other objects around them.
14 This means if Tischendorf were to forge this document, he would need to be a master paleographer who knew intricately how to get the date of his work misidentified by other scholars
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Advances in carbon-dating technology have actually opened up the possibility for individual organizations in possession of portions of the codex to subject them to carbon dating, involving the destruction of a single cm2. Along with reevaluating assumptions about paleographic dating, scholars are actually beginning to call for the carbon-dating of the manuscript, which would provide a margin of error basis, not for the copying date of the manuscript, but for the production of the writing materials themselves.
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The Witness of Tischendorf’s Parallel Works
Codex Sinaiticus, while it is perhaps the most Indiana-Jones-esque story of New Testament scholarship, is not the only work that Tischendorf was involved in. He was a publisher of New Testament editions reflecting his findings in manuscripts. He would go searching for manuscripts, discover them, and publish his findings, like a true researcher. Not only did he work on publishing the contents of Sinaiticus, but he also worked on 10 other uncials, including the Vaticanus text and Papyrus 11.
If Tischendorf produced Codex Sinaiticus as a forgery, how do we explain all his other legitimate New Testament scholarly work?
17 Do we claim that he was a factory of forgeries, and that he forged all these documents, and all of them passed scrutiny and inspection by other New Testament scholars?
Common Unrelated Misunderstanding
Lot’s of people assume that because Sinaiticus was discovered in Egypt, it must be an Egyptian manuscript, and thus align with the Alexandrian text type. It should be noted that within biblical scholarship, there is at least a portion that attribute Cesarean origin to this manuscript.
18 Again, the issues at hand are not as cut and dry as we wish they were, to just put this codex in a neat little box and throw it into the fire like the legendary account of Saint Catherine’s monks.
The Hypothesis of Conflated Stories
Perhaps this myth is perpetuated by conflating the story of Constantine von Tischendorf with another Constantine around the same time period, Constantine Simonides. Perhaps it is the confusion of the two characters, or perhaps it is the witness of Simonides that is believed when convenient. Simonides was guilty of at least dealing, if not producing forgeries that were quickly identified by the academic sphere, and specifically as a result of Tischendorf’s scrutiny. Simonides was claiming to have found manuscripts within a few decades of the ministry of Jesus, that were in fact forgeries. These forgeries were exposed by Tischendorf’s study, as well as others. In retaliation, Simonides claimed Tischendorf had forged Sinaiticus, the origin of this myth. However, when the scholars of the time looked at either work, it was clear that Tischendorf’s codex was legitimate, while some of the manuscripts of Simonides were fakes. It is important to note as well, that some manuscripts sold by Simonides were in fact authentic, but not most.
Historicity and the Need for Evidence
Now here is where the conspiratorial and theoretical action gets serious. It is one thing to propose a theory or hypothesis, that Tischendorf
could have made a forgery. It is another thing entirely to
prove with
evidence that Tischendorf made a forgery. We have evidence that when evaluated seems to indicate a single volume of ancient origin, handled by at least four different copyists and editors in different centuries, which became geographically separated, and reassembled incomplete hundreds of years later. This is the story of the codex. Theories and hypotheses are not proof. At the mouth of two or three witnesses, every word shall be established.
So I am calling to the stand, any eyewitness records of the codex that can be determined to prove that Tischendorf produced a forgery. Until then, this is a lie at worst, and a baseless hypothesis at best.
