the Tischendorf plug-in-the-date guesswork led to the Josef Schmid blunder in reading the apparatus - Myshrall #3

[Steven Avery]

Sister threads (often involving palaeographic puzzles) have the information as to:

​

how Skeat noted that Tischendorf gave no support to his dates, ​

Joseph Veryheyden said this was "fairly disturbing" and ​

Simonides had earlier said that Tischendorf-style palaeography was guesswork.​

​

why is corrector Aleph2 (Ca) 7th century
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.840

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The Earliest Corrections in Codex Sinaiticus
Further Evidence from the Apocalypse (Jan, 2015)
Peter Malik
Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge
http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/v20/TC-2015-Malik.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/public...he_Apocalypseusg=AOvVaw1s1i1-PxbbM2-EEzeorYA4

======================

The Corrections of Codex Sinaiticus and the Textual Transmission of Revelation: Josef Schmid Revisited * (May, 2015)
Peter Malik
University of Cambridge, Faculty of Divinity, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9BS, United Kingdom.
Email: pm486@cam.ac.uk
https://www.academia.edu/11040719/T...smission_of_Revelation_Josef_Schmid_Revisited
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42338536.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/public...smission_of_Revelation_Josef_Schmid_Revisited

There is no real palaeographic analysis, just a bunch of conjectures and guesses of Schmid and Hernandez and a backwards nod to Ca and other studies.

Hernandez is correct in identifying a serious dating error in Schmid's argument, and Sinaiticus' many corrections to the text of Revelation definitely warrant reinvestigation.10 However, his claim of a seventh-century date for Schmid's Sa corrections may appear, in this article at least, overconfident. Indeed, Milne and Skeat were themselves hesitant to ascribe a definitive date to the C-class corrections, allowing for some leeway anywhere between the fifth- and seventh-century dates.11 Later on, Skeat would give a more specific judgement concerning the Ca corrector in particular, dating him to the sixth century.12 More recently still, Amy C. Myshrall's palaeographical analysis led her to similar conclusions.13 And even in his latest article, Hernandez has invoked Milne and Skeat's more cautious stance, calling for fresh palaeographical investigations.14 If indeed Ca worked in (roughly) the sixth century, then his corrections still predate, by almost a century, the composition of Andreas’ commentary, not to mention later minuscules with the Andreas-type text. Since the text of Ca’s exemplar must have predated his correcting activity, it could theoretically still be viewed as a sixth-century - and possibly even earlier - witness to the Andreas text. The dating of
these corrections, however, cannot, as such, settle the matter. Indeed, as will be seen, further complexities are involved in this line of enquiry, complexities which must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

10 The earliest layer of corrections in Revelation is a subject of my forthcoming study. On the earliest corrections of the Marcan portion, see my 'The Eaiiiest Corrections in Codex Sinaiticus: A Test Case from the Gospel of Mark', BASP 50 (2013) 207-54.

11 Milne and Skeat, Scribes and Correctors, 65.

12 T. C. Skeat, ‘The Codex Sinaiticus, The Codex Vaticanus and Constantine ’, Collected Biblical Writings of T. C. Skeat (introduced and edited by J. K. Elliott; NovTSup 113; Leiden: Brill, 2004) 200.

13 Cf. A. C. Myshrall. ‘Codex Sinaiticus, its Correctors, and the Caesarean Text of the Gospels' (Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 2005) 91: ‘The date suggested by Milne and Skeat as between the 5th and 7th centuries can thus be seen as reasonable, although I would tend to place Ca towards the first half of this period. ’

14 See Hernandez Jr, 'The Legacy of Wilhelm Bousset’, 30-1 nn. 50-1. Incidentally, NA28 continues to date these corrections (designated as X2) to the seventh century. Cf. Hernandez Jr, ‘Creation’, 116, 118-19.




======================

 

[Steven Avery]

papers that use the 7th century date for Aleph2

The Earliest Corrections in Codex Sinaiticus
Further Evidence from the Apocalypse1 (Jan, 2015)
Peter Malik
Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge
http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/v20/TC-2015-Malik.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/public...he_Apocalypseusg=AOvVaw1s1i1-PxbbM2-EEzeorYA4


And yet, it is not always easy to establish the use of a second exemplar behind corrections, and the reliance on a critical apparatus may lead to misleading results. As Juan Hernández Jr. has recently shown,2 such a confusion surprisingly made its way even into Josef Schmid’s seminal study of the textual history of Revelation.3 Perhaps based on his misreading of the secondary literature4 —but perhaps also because of his reliance on collations—Schmid mistook the later C-group to be the earliest corrections made in the scriptorium, thus wrongly using them to date the Andreas text-type into the fourth century.5 Naturally, Hernández’s discovery calls for reappraisal of Sinaiticus’s later corrections and their place in Revelation’s textual history.6 At the same time, however, it also poses important questions concerning the bona fide scriptorium corrections in this portion of the codex: At what stages of production were they made and by whom? Are they textually significant? What is their extent and nature?

1 I would like to thank Peter M. Head, James R. Royse, Juan Hernändez Jr., Elijah Hixson, and the anonymous reviewer for reading through the initial draft of this article and providing many helpful comments and corrections.

2 Juan Hernandez Jr., “The Creation of a Fourth-Century Witness to the Andreas Text Type: A Misreading in the Apocalypses Textual History,” NTS (2014): 106-20.

3 Josef Schmid, Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Apokalypse-Textes (Münchener theologische Studien 4; München: Karl Zink, 1955-1956).

4 So Hernandez, “Creation of a Fourth-Century Witness,” 110-113.

5 Ibid., 113-14

The Corrections of Codex Sinaiticus and the Textual Transmission of Revelation: Josef Schmid Revisited * (May, 2015)
Peter Malik
University of Cambridge, Faculty of Divinity, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9BS, United Kingdom.
Email: pm486@cam.ac.uk
https://www.academia.edu/11040719/T...smission_of_Revelation_Josef_Schmid_Revisited
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42338536.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/public...smission_of_Revelation_Josef_Schmid_Revisited

* I would like to thank Juan Hernandez Jr. and the anonymous reviewer for their careful reading of an earlier draft of this article, as well as their helpful comments and corrections. All the remaining shortcomings are my own.

Hernandez is correct in identifying a serious dating error in Schmid’s argument, and Sinaiticus’ many corrections to the text of Revelation definitely warrant reinvestigation.9 However, his claim of a seventh-century date for Schmid’s Sa corrections may appear, in this article at least, overconfident. Indeed, Milne and Skeat were themselves hesitant to ascribe a definitive date to the C-class corrections, allowing for some leeway anywhere between the fifth- and seventh-century dates.10 , Later on, Skeat would give a more specific judgement concerning the Ca corrector in particular, dating him to the sixth century.11 More recently still, Amy C. Myshrall’s palaeographical analysis led her to similar conclusions.12 And even in his latest article, Hernandez has invoked Milne and Skeat’s more cautious stance, calling for fresh palaeographical investigations.13 If indeed Ca worked in (roughly) sixth century, then his corrections still predate, by almost a century, the composition of Andreas’ commentary, not to mention later minuscules with the Andreas-type text. Since the text of C"s exemplar must have predated his correcting activity, it could theoretically still be viewed as a sixth-century - and possibly even earlier - witness to the Andreas text. The dating of these corrections, however, cannot, as such, settle the matter. Indeed, as will be seen, further complexities are involved in this line of enquiry, complexities which must he dealt with on a case-by-case basis. p. 4-5​

9 The earliest layer of corrections in Revelation is a subject of my forthcoming study. On the earliest corrections of the Marcan portion, see my “The Earliest Corrections in Codex Sinaiticus: A Test Case from the Gospel of Mark,” BASP 50 (2013): 207-254.

10 Milne and Skeat, Scribes and Correctors, 65.

11 T.C. Skeat, “The Codex Sinaiticus, The Codex Vaticanus and Constantine,” in Collected Biblical Writings of T.C. Skeat (Introduced and edited by J. K. Elliott; NovTSup 113; Leiden: Brill, 2004), 200.

12 Cf. A.C. Myshrall, “Codex Sinaiticus, its Correctors, and the Caesarean Text of the Gospels” (Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 2005), 91: “The date suggested by Milne and Skeat as between the 5th and 7th centuries can thus be seen as reasonable, although I would tend to place Ca towards the first half of this period.”

13 See Hernandez Jr., “The Legacy of Wilhelm Bousset,” 30-31 nn. 50-51. Incidentally, NA28 continues to date these corrections (designated as K2) to the seventh century. Cf. Hernandez, “Creation,” 116, 118 119.

Codex Sinaiticus: An Early Christian Commentary on the Apocalypse?
Juan Hernández Jr.
https://www.academia.edu/13710418/Codex_Sinaiticus_An_Early_Christian_Commentary_on_the_Apocalypse
Codex Sinaiticus: New Perspectives on the Ancient Biblical Manuscript (2015)
Chapter 8

The Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus is a striking example of a fourth-century text that differs substantially from modern critical editions. It exhibits dozens of differences at key locations, reflecting the concerns, interests, and idiosyncrasies of its earliest copyists and readers. Taken as a whole, Codex Sinaiticus’s text of the Apocalypse reads like an early Christian commentary on the book, disclosing its fourth-century milieu and anticipating the later concerns of Oecumenius and Andrew of Caesarea. This is no commentary in the contemporary sense, however. Codex Sinaiticus’s readings range from the spectacular to the mundane and include the theological, the liturgical, the commonplace, and even the infelicitous. It is a text ever in tension with itself, effective both in its capacity to obscure as well as in its regulation of meaning. Clarity and confusion reign together and compete for our attention. Nonetheless, we can discern a concerted effort to elucidate the Apocalypse’s message by scores of changes throughout. Some of these are inherited, others created. All affect the reading of the text.'

To what extent is this paper negated by the discovery that Schmid had his correctors wrong?

And then look at how silly it is to think of those correctors as 7th century. We will go back to Skeat and Myshrall to try to discover how this arbitrary dating occurred.

Studies in the History of the Greek Text of the Apocalypse: The Ancient Stems
By Josef Schmid
https://books.google.com/books?id=o-tmDwAAQBAJ&pg=PR4

The Creation of a Fourth-Century Witness to the Andreas Text Type: A Misreading in the Apocalypse's Textual History (2014)
Juan Hernandez, Jr.
Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive, St. Paul, MN 53112-6999, USA. email: j-hernarulez@bethel.edu
https://www.academia.edu/6073329/Th...calypses_Textual_History_Link_to_this_article

The publication of Josef Schmid’s landmark work on the textual history of the Apocalypse seemingly established the Andreas Text Type as a fourth-century product. The primary evidence for Schmid’s claim came from the fourth-century corrections of the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus, corrections which bore a close resemblance to the Andreas text of the Apocalypse. Schmid’s reconstruction, however, is flawed. The fourth-century corrections he identified are actually from the seventh century. The data supporting a fourth-century Andreas text type does not exist. Schmid’s widely influential error appears to have been based on a misreading of Milne and Skeat's Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus.

Nestle-Aland 28 and the Revision of the Apocalypse’s Textual History
https://books.google.com/books?id=eJMDCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA71
Chapter 3
Studies on the Text of the New Testament and Early Christianity: Essays in Honour of Michael W. Holmes (2015)

 

[Steven Avery]

Skeat and Myshrall are supposed to support the 7th century date

Tischendorf offered no support, as was pointed out by Skeat & Milne, and commented upon by Joseph Verheyden "fairly disturbing" and see also the earlier Simonides comment.

Palaeographic Puzzles and the Tischendorf Plug-in-the-Date Game
British Library and Hendrickson book has 86 pages of Leipzig photo-shopped yellow to look like British Library pages
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.591/post-1222

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Let's look for the Myshrall references to the 7th century date, we will also extract from Kirsopp Lake and Skeat & Milne.

“Codex Sinaiticus, its Correctors, and the Caesarean Text of the Gospels”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 2005), 91:
Amy Catherine Myshrall
https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do...62D420B767C12390AF0B14?uin=uk.bl.ethos.433713

“The hands of the C correctors are harder to date, as can be seen from the wide date ascribed by Milne and Skeat of the 5th to the 7th centuries. The order of the C correctors has already been established by Milne and Skeat in a logical manner, placing Ca as the first. Ca’s hand though appears to be more archaic than the hands of the other C correctors as it has retained its squareness as in Biblical Majuscule. It is possible though that Ca was archaising his hand to match the manuscript he was correcting. However, there are other signs that Ca was possibly a later corrector within the 5th to 7th centuries:

his καί compendium is wavy
his alpha has a curved bow at the bottom left
the base line of his delta has been extended
the mid-stroke of the epsilon bends downwards as with the scribes, but the top bow is often nearly closed as well
his kappa has a late form (with the diagonals being separated from the vertical) his xi is less regulated
the omega is a lot looser and more open in shape. p. 90

His hand demonstrates further development, with there being slightly more embellishment with finials on some of the letters, especially the epsilon, tau and upsilon. The rho, upsilon, phi, and psi have also become longer and stretch below the text line. The pi of Ca can be compared to 5th century Codex Bezae because the horizontal line extends beyond the two verticals.130 However, the hand has not yet developed as far as the eighth century 047, where the serifs have now become the dominant part of the letters.131 The date suggested by Milne and Skeat as between the 5th and 7th centuries can thus be seen to be reasonable, although I would tend to place Ca towards the first half of this period.- p. 91

130 METZGER, B. M. Manuscripts of the Greek Bible, p. 90, Plate 19 A. ,
131 Ibid., p. 99, Plate 23.

It there anything there that is impossible or even unlikely for the 4th century?
And is there anything there difficult for a 10th century corrector writing in majuscule?
Or an 1840 corrector of an 1839-1840 text writing in the historic old majuscule style? (As Uspensky noted.)

It is interesting that they ignore the ink question. When the correction matches the original ink, as in the Revelation 17:8 example:

why is corrector Aleph2 (Ca) 7th century
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.840/post-1760

then the whole theory falls apart. Why would the ink colour and intensity and style be the same three hundred years later?

And where are the pics?

The reassessment of hands shows doubt in the accepted view of Scribes A and D working in the Gospel of Matthew, and also assigns the hand of the Ezra and Esther colophons to Ca with Tischendorf, instead of the widely accepted CPamph.

Which basically undercuts the colophon.

Abbreviations
Ca - The first C corrector of the 5th-7th centuries.

Skeat & Milne
The C correctors have been assigned by some to the fifth, by others to the seventh century, and lack of comparative material enforces caution upon whoever would decide between the two dates

Here is the related Kirsopp Lake guess, noted by Finney:

Dissertation
http://www.tfinney.net/PhD/PDF/part2.pdf

I assign a sixth century date to corrector C on the strength of the following statement by Lake (1911, xvii-xviii):

On the whole the C hands so closely resemble each other, and can with such little confidence be much separated in date, that there is considerable force in the suggestion that they all come from the scriptorium at Caesarea, and represent a thoroughgoing attempt to accommodate the Codex Sinaiticus to a model which in the fifth and sixth century was more fashionable than the original text.​

The assignment is not based on the writing, this is not epigraphy or palaeography, it is based on historical and textual hyper-speculations.

Burgon and Miller have written in regard to John 6.55, “The transcriber of X by a very easy mistake let his eye pass from one (Greek) to another, and characteristically enough the various correctors allowed the error to remain till it was removed in the seventh century, though the error issued in nothing less than ‘My flesh is drink indeed’. Could that MS. have undergone the test of frequent use?”72 - p. 23

72 BURGON, J. W. AND MILLER, E. The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels, London: George Bdl and Sons, 1896, p. 38.

 

[Steven Avery]

the circular cottage industry

Here is more from the circular cottage industry:

Journal Article
The Earliest Corrections in Codex Sinaiticus: A Test Case from the Gospel of Mark
Peter Malik
The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists
Vol. 50 (2013), pp. 207-254
https://www.academia.edu/5675974/Th...inaiticus_A_Test_Case_from_the_Gospel_of_Mark

Larry Hurtado and comments
https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/earliest-corrections-in-codex-sinaiticus/

Ken Penner on Isaiah