the art of misdirection

[Steven Avery]

Mistakes are inevitable, and historical fakes can rarely withstand sustained scrutiny, especially in the physical artifact that embodies the fake. Thus, a forgery's success often depends on misdirection, by inducing the intended audience to forgo somehow a detailed examination of the manuscript and overlook its flaws. A common technique is to control the authenticating process, commonly by offering an overwhelming, but ultimately misleading, mass of supporting documentation detailing how well the fake fits into contemporary expectations of what an important, revolutionary find should look like. This approach not only captures the intended target's interest, but it also prevents close inspection of the fake's flaws.

Stephen C. Carlson. The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark (Kindle Locations 252-256).

One thing that Codex Sinaiticus did not have was close examination, especially by those without a horse in the race. And the authenticating process was .. Tischendorf. (He even belligerently attacked any scholars who did so much as question the 4th century date he assigned, e.g. calling a book Weapons of Darkness Against the Sinai-Bible. It was amazing that anything he wrote about Sinaiticus was taking seriously in scholastic circles.)

Tregelles in 1862 give Sinaiticus some examination, (probably only the coloured part, at the house of Tischendorf in Leipzig) two years after he had proclaimed Sinaiticus a fourth-century manuscript. Tregelles also was going to Tischendorf virtually as a supplicant to see the ms. He also quickly received a surprising yearly stipend, after defending its authenticity and writing some counters to the Simonides assertions. Tregelles also became the key to Scrivener acceptance, since Scrivener in 1864, when he waxes poetic, was a bit skeptical about Tischendorf, and had never seen any part of the The Tale of Two Manuscripts. He had not seen the coloured part, or the white parchment part. Such blind pronouncements are simply not palaeography.

Those proclaiming authenticity today show virtually no interest in the actual manuscript condition. Nor the actual historical problems and impossibilities. Often, they are nothing more than misdirected dupes.

The Christian Rememberancer of 1866 mentions an analyst who looked at Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and thought Sinaiticus was clearly much younger. (Was this also Tregelles, on a clear-headed day?).

Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov (1854-1946) blew the whistle loudly on the condition of the manuscript. (As can anyone who looks at the 2009 CSP today.) However, Morozov was not given over to all the misdirection arguments of Tischendorf. In fact, he knew the whole provenance issue was, at very best, dicey. Morozov was willing to look at the motives of Tischendorf, his need to "find" a really ancient ms. It is unclear if he even know that there was a strongly supported claim that the ms. was recent, he simply knew that it did not have the look and feel of a fourth century ms that had supposedly been heavily used (corrections and notes over many centuries) for many years. "Textual critics" will miss the forest, looking with a microscope at the twigs.

And Tischendorf used his facsimile as a major part of the misdirection. You don't need to look at the manuscript, just use my facsimile, so I can hide the major elements of the colour and condition.