why would they be overwriting (retracing, reinforcement) on a young manuscript?

[Steven Avery]

CARM
https://forums.carm.org/threads/cod...dentity-fraud-theft.15475/page-5#post-1220257

You haven't made any case for how the Sinaiticus letters faded, together with the corrections, and became aged over such a short period of time (literally 4 or 5 years in the case of Codex Frederico Augustanus).

And I explained this to you earlier.
Now I will make it clearer.

Ink on some pages can be faded for two totally distinct, essentially opposite, reasons.

1) 1500 years of aging, ink-parchment acid reaction deterioration, accompanied by yellowing by age and brittleness of parchment, foxing, etc.

2) The ink was placed on in a faded fashion, by skilled calligraphers working with ink they understand, deliberately or, as the Rolling Stones sang, not fade away (noted below by Bill Brown that the original was by Buddy Holly). 2) is an old trick to try to give an appearance of age.

Since there are page after page of super-ink, in a wide variety of books in the manuscript, it is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that the reason some pages are faded is 2. 1 is shown to be impossible by the many super-ink pages as well as the lack of the basic aging expectations like ink-acid deterioration, even on faded pages.

C'est très simple.

And why the mixture? Sinaiticus was a stumble-bumble operation. You have to be an Athos-Simonides dupe to think it is an ancient manuscript. They probably did not expect any overwriting, but the manuscript was no longer controlled by the original producers and was touched by a variety of hands from Athos to Constantinople to Antigonus to Sinai to Cairo (for the 1859 part) and to the final destinations.

The reason they would not want overwriting is that often it is often suspiciously brand-new, not any theorized 500-1,000 years or so. Plus if the ink was designed to be an ancient formulation (a point that Simonides explains) the overwriting might be chemically right out of the 1800s normal inkwells.

However if you have Sinaiticus dupes, they will never test ink chemically anyway, but that could not be expected on the front end.

 

[Steven Avery]

Ink on some pages can be faded for two totally distinct, essentially opposite, reasons.

1) 1500 years of aging, ink-parchment acid reaction deterioration, accompanied by yellowing by age and brittleness of parchment, foxing, etc.

2) The ink was placed on in a faded fashion, by skilled calligraphers working with ink they understand, deliberately or, as the Rolling Stones sang, not fade away (noted below by Bill Brown that the original was by Buddy Holly). 2) is an old trick to try to give an appearance of age.

One additional point:

The writing on the hair side of the vellum can yield a different result than writing on the soft flesh side. The pages will go in two by twos. The hair side will hold the ink better, while the flesh side can more easily flake and fade.

The staining on the British pages acts as a wash, making the two sides look more similar due to the yellowing (sufflava) look overall.

This does not change the earlier explanation, except that the flesh pairs of pages will often be the pages that were faded. There could be places where the ink never really took right, in addition to the idea of deliberate scribal faint writing to fake age. We would be studying pairs of pages to determine how it occurred.

Here is Skeat on the hair and flesh sides.

The Collected Biblical Writings of T.C. Skeat (2004)
Early Christian Book-Production
Theodore Cressy Skeat
https://books.google.com/books?id=td_OLXo4RvkC&pg=PA41

Parchment has two sides, known as the ‘hair side’ and the ‘flesh side’. The hair side, which was originally towards the outside of the skin, is clearly distinguishable in the coarser types of parchment by its yellow colour, rougher surface, and clearly visible remains of the hair roots. By contrast the flesh side, the original inner side, is whiter and smoother. In the case of documents, therefore, where only one side of the parchment has to be used, it is usual to write on the flesh side because of its better appearance, much as the writer on papyrus used the recto. Despite the superiority of the flesh side, it is usually the hair side, with its rougher and more absorbent surface, which holds the ink better than the smooth and shiny flesh side, from which ink tends to flake off. Often, when the leaves of an ancient manuscript arc turned over, revealing alternate openings of flesh side and hair side, there is a surprising difference of legibility in favour of the hair side.