The stately quarto of Constantine Simonides, published in 1861, and full of
fac-similes, at first sight imposing, but rapidly crumbling away under examination, is a much more remarkable achievement; it imposed for a time upon men who had pretensions to be called learned.
[10] What was attempted in it was not the floating of long spurious histories, but the production of early fragments of the Gospels and Epistles containing remarkable readings, and of inscriptions and colophons serving to confirm the Apostolic origin of the New Testament books. There are quotations from Hegesippus, part of a record of Christian chronology from an inscribed stone at Thyatira, fragments of a copy of St. Matthew's Gospel written in A.D. 48, and, in a footnote, a set of directions in Greek for taking photographs by a writer of the fifth century. There is no lack of enterprise about Simonides.
....
It is a curious trade this of writing apocryphal books; one that can only thrive in a
milieu where the critical faculty is not developed. This age, unluckily for the trade, is nothing if not critical. People will be asking - "Where is the manuscript? What was it like?" Simonides was ready enough with his answer to the inquirers of this class.
Fac-similes and originals were always forthcoming.
[10] Constantine Simonides (
c.1820-1867):
Fac-similes of Certain Portions of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and of the Epistles of Ss. James & Jude, Written on Papyrus in the First Century, and Preserved in the Egyptian Museum of Joseph Mayer, Esq, Liverpool, with a Portrait of St. Matthew, from a Fresco Painting at Mount Athos, edited and illustrated with notes and historical and literary prolegomena..., by Constantine Simonides. London: Trübner & Co., 1861.
Simonides was a controversial figure in scholarly circles in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Although an undoubted forger (for which crime he was charged but not convicted), he also dabbled in the sale and study of genuine manuscripts, some of which he altered to increase their rarity, thus muddying the waters as far as this book of "Fac-similes" is concerned. Authentic material from the "Egyptian Museum" of the Liverpool antiquary Joseph Mayer was tampered with and given faked additions, such as the impossibly early portions of the Gospel of St Matthew (and presumably
the fifth-century "set of directions... for taking photographs"!). Later in the 1860s, Joseph Mayer's important collection was donated to the Liverpool Museum (founded in the previous decade), and today the Egyptian Collection is the Museum's largest single group of antiquities, of which Mayer's acquisitions form the core.
Among other Simonides fakes was the correspondence which he produced to 'prove' his 1862 claim that he had forged the
Codex Sinaiticus (the fourth-century Greek Bible manuscript eventually acquired by the British Museum in 1933 at a cost of £100,000, coincidentally during MRJ's trusteeship of that institution).
(back)
