looking for any Bill Brown review material that can help improve the 2nd edition of David Daniels books

Steven Avery

Steven Avery

Administrator
Almost all his material is garden-variety fallacious

He did find a German typo - Besitz was wrongly Bisitz

Let;s see if there is any more
 
Steven Avery

Steven Avery

Administrator
Milne's 1951 book, "Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus." (Amazingly enough, the two pictures of Alexandrinus in that book show a lighter one and a darker one, so presumably Daniels and Avery think Alexandrinus must have been aged as well).
https://archive.org/details/codexsinaiticusc0000brit/page/n1/mode/2up

Romans
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Maccabees
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Steven Avery

Steven Avery

Administrator
Milne and Skeat touched on one of their supposed "proofs" that these were coffee stains. "There are also a number of brown stains, perhaps due to drops of oil or grease from the lamps and candles of pious readers in the past" (71). They even note the ink has run due to water spots. They further discuss the fact that it was necessary to remove the glossy surface of the animal skins so that the writing would be sustained on vellum. They point out that both medieval AND modern scribes used a variety of substances, including "powdered pumice, powdered cuttle-fish bone, sandarac, chalk, whiting, &c. or combinations of these." They go further in noting that "the harsh scouring of the pages suggests fine sand" (79) and that this treatment, known as pouncing, was actually done by the scribe in the fourth century. The point is that there are many other explanations for the stained pages than a conspiracy.
 
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Steven Avery

Steven Avery

Administrator
The part that Daniels conveniently excised is in bold script:

"Uspensky was no manuscript expert, had received far less academic training than Tischendorf, and did not belong to the exclusive inner circle of European palaeographers, so he was unacquainted with Tischendorf's publication of the Codex Frederico-Augustanus - indeed, just like the monks of the monastery, he failed to detect how old the manuscript was and consequently how valuable. Critical textual research was as rare in Russia's Orthodox Church as it was among the Sinaite monks, as Uspensky would amply demonstrate in a subsequent dispute with Tischendorf.
 
Steven Avery

Steven Avery

Administrator
"only four of them" (Bibles we are told) in 1845. This claim is never footnoted so the interested reader can investigate for himself,

'To my enquiries after manuscripts and a library the priests answered that they had only three Bibles, and I took their word more readily, as Pococke states, they had no rare manuscripts.' So he came away empty-handed." And on the very next page - after listing some of the valuable things taken from the monastery - "In fact, the monks were well aware that they possessed priceless treasures and that their visitors would have liked to take them away."
Quite frankly, Daniels should give more credence to the idea that the monks simply lied to either Turner or Uspensky or perhaps even both. He should also do a better job not twisting parts of the story that contradict his claims.
 
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