Simonides' Writing Style

[James A PhD]

As a nerd that pays attention to little details, I noticed something interesting about the style of Simonides writing, and compared it to other manuscripts.
Every writer has a particular "style" of how they write. Some people use large fonts when they write, others smaller. Some use a lot of space for a margin, others use margins that are a half inch to an inch from the edges of the page. When you use a particular font size, depending on where you set your margins, it will limit the amount of "lines" you use, and those lines are revealing about the author of hand-written manuscripts.

I decided to count the lines of various mss.

Codex Vaticanus: 36 lines per page
Codex Alexandrinus: 51 lines per page
Codex Leningrad (Heb, First Firkovich Collection. (Evr. I В 2, 230v.–231): 31 lines per page

Codex Sinaiticus: 48 lines per page
Shepherd of Hermas: 48 lines per page
Epistle of Barnabas: 48 lines per page

We KNOW that Constantine Simonides authored Barnabas and Hermas, Tischendorf later praised Simonides for his scholarship for them (after initially claiming it was a fraud). What a coincidence that Codex Sinaiticus happens to have the same amount of lines per page as Hermas and Barnabas, which imo, shows the same copyist/author who used that style on Hermas and Barnabas is likely the same author who executed that same style on Sinaiticus.

 

[James A PhD]

Would love to see if someone with better eyesight and better graphics editors could blow up and compare the ro, lambda, gamma, and upsilon and chis of select pages of Hermas and any book of Sinaiticus. I'm currently comparting Hermas 1 and Revelation of Sinaiticus, and all of those letters seem to have the same characteristics in each codex. If we KNOW that Simonides authored Hermas, then that should be a worthy exemplar without have to obtain any of Simonides handwritten letters (which David Daniels informs me mysteriously disappeared from a library in New York). It wouldn't be the most efficient scientific analysis, but better than any non-tests we're getting from the UK.

 

[Steven Avery]

Good thinking, James.

I will try to put some energy to this in the next day or two.

I saw handwritten letters from Simonides at the Grolier library about five years back. When I went there some months back, some of the best I did not see, especially writing to Kallinikos, however we do have some Simonides handwriting in the batch.

 

[Steven Avery]

You would have to be more specific, especially on the edition of Hermas you are referencing. We can not be surprised that Hermas and Barnabas within Sinaiticus have the same number of lines as the rest of the Sinaiticus text.