Is the "World's Oldest Bible" a Fake?

Steven Avery said:
Remember, I did start this thread, and have been correcting mistaken arguments.
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You are making mistaken arguments, not correcting them. You are ignoring and dodging evidence. You did not start this thread; unbound68 started it.

David Daniels still clings to the erroneous two streams of Bibles argument, which demonstrates that he clings to incorrect arguments.
 
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logos1560 said:
The poster to which you replied did not refer to the Pinto-Snapp debate in his comment. His comment was concerning the Pinto--James White you-tube debate.
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Right. In fact, there was no Pinto-Snapp debate, only Pinto-White.

Chris Pinto pioneered the recent USA and UK interest in the Simonides authorship. At the time of his debate with James White I had still been recently defending Sinaiticus authenticity as as ancient, maybe 4th century, manuscript, even giving my list of ‘authentic’ reasons. However, I felt that thr internet writers discussing “Tares” and Simonides were not treating Chris Pinto fairly, so the debate was of special interest to me.

Later, James Snapp and I had an interesting Sinaiticus debate, hosted by Joshua Gibbs.

My comment to Bill Brown was meant to refer to Pinto-White.
Thanks for the helpful correction.

Steven Avery said:
You are simply fabricating here, claiming I did not listen to the Pinto-Snapp debate. (Correction Pinto-White.)
Why childishly make up your own false history?
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Steven Avery said:
So what are the partial notes? Even one would help. Or did Tischendorf do some pruning?
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Go Siniaticus.org and look for them in the manuscript.

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Steven Avery said:
What discoveries is Scrivener referring to from 1840 to 1860 that Benedict would have to anticipate?

And why could not the results, using a variety of corrupt sources, be Sinaiticus?
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Try reading some of the Greek papyri that were discovered then.
 
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TwoNoteableCorruptions said:
Try reading some of the Greek papyri that were discovered then.
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Myth.

“It was not until 1862 that Constantine von Tischendorf discovered, for the first time, an authentic New Testament papyrus, today registered as Nestle-Aland ?11 containing parts of 1 Corinthians and held at the Library of St. Petersburg.” -

Simonides’ New Testament Papyri: Their Production and Purported Provenance
Tommy Wasserman
https://themarginaliareview.com/sim...ri-their-production-and-purported-provenance/

Scrivener could not have considered papyri as something particularly relevant to Benedict’s text. Definitely not New Testament and other books highly unlikely.
 
Steven Avery said:
Myth.

“It was not until 1862 that Constantine von Tischendorf discovered, for the first time, an authentic New Testament papyrus, today registered as Nestle-Aland ?11 containing parts of 1 Corinthians and held at the Library of St. Petersburg.” -

Simonides’ New Testament Papyri: Their Production and Purported Provenance
Tommy Wasserman
https://themarginaliareview.com/sim...ri-their-production-and-purported-provenance/

Scrivener could not have considered papyri as something particularly relevant to Benedict’s text. Definitely not New Testament and other books highly unlikely.
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So old Greek writing is not relevant to old Greek writing? Why?

Greek paleographers would not find newly discovered Greek papyri of value? Why?
 
To believe Simonides's story we would have to believe that (a) the St. Catherine's Monastery, collectively, were complicit in helping work up a fraudulent codex and (b) helped to perpetrate this fraud upon their patron and defender of their faith, namely Tsar Nicholas the First, and (c) have continued to perjure themselves in the fraud to this day. Also, (d) that at the age of 15 (sometimes claimed to be 19), Simonides worked up a perfect fake which has deceived all the experts, including microscopic and chemical testing, even though his subsequent fakes were quickly debunked. Further, (e) in working up this fake, and altho it was supposed to please the Tsar, Simonides made what would then have been innovative changes to the accepted Bible text, including rearranging the sequence of NT books - putting Hebrews after 2 Thessalonians and putting Acts after Philemon - as well as many hundreds of readings. And, in furtherance of the fake (f) Simonides added the complete Greek text of the Epistle of Barnabas - a document until then known only in a defective Latin version. Also (g) much of the Greek text of the Shepherd of Hermas. Somehow, in the space of a very few years after being made, (h) fragments of this fake codex were distributed in a number of rooms of the Monastery and even used in book bindings of other Monastery books.

I feel confident that others can append the rest of the alphabet to problems in the claims of Simonides.
 
Shoonra said:
To believe Simonides's story we would have to believe that (a) the St. Catherine's Monastery, collectively, were complicit in helping work up a fraudulent codex and (b) helped to perpetrate this fraud upon their patron and defender of their faith, namely Tsar Nicholas the First, and (c) have continued to perjure themselves in the fraud to this day.
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Nope. Some or all of them may have believed it was an ancient codex, even though it arrived recently and had no provenance before the 1840s. Or they may simply have not known, and did not want to rock the boat of the enthusiastic Europeans.

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Here we can discuss the use of the manuscript in the 1840s and 1850s.

The Arabic notes were called "very recent" by the orientalist:

Richard Gosche (1824-1889)
https://www-catalogus--professorum-...tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc
https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translat...tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc

"Here and there a later hand has written Arabic notes in the margin, and these Tischendorf imagines are from the same hand that has made some corrections (apparently) in the eighth century: if so this would be an uncommonly ancient piece of Arabic writing: I showed the lithographed facsimile of the page to Dr. Goesche of the Royal Library, Berlin; and he tells me, (what I strongly suspected before) that the Arabic is very recent, also that it is by the hand of some Syrian, being (as I before knew) a liturgical note."
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Some Unpublished Letters of S. P. Tregelles Relating to the Codex Sinaiticus,
Evangelical Quarterly, 1976 Timothy C. F. Stunt, p. 20

"Very recent" sounds like it fits the 15+ year period of tampering, 1844-1859, when the manuscript was definitely at the monastery. Uspensky did did not mention seeing any Arabic notes in his visits of 1845-46.

For more information on the Arabic notes, see my page on PBF "the Arabic notes".
 
Shoonra said:
Also, (d) that at the age of 15 (sometimes claimed to be 19), Simonides worked up a perfect fake which has deceived all the experts, including microscopic and chemical testing, even though his subsequent fakes were quickly debunked.
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There have been no microscopic or chemical testing of parchment or ink designed to determine date and authenticity. They were planned for Leipzig in 2015 by BAM and Leipzig pulled out on the day of the testing. There was, I believe, a bit of ultra-violet to check for underwriting, especially the last verse in the Gospel of John.

Plus, the manuscript was handled and studied by very few people over the years. Generally, it was the Tischenforf facsimile books that were used for study. The 2009 CSP was the big moment of change, and led to the discovery that the 1844 manuscript in Leipzig is very different that 1859 at the British Library, and that the differences match what was said by Simonides and Kallinikos in the early 1860s.

The writings of Simonides that were considered forgeries had incredible aspects of trying to change or add to an established history. This made them very vulnerable to errors in chronology. While the Bible text of Athos, Codex Simoneides, does have linguistic issues, it has no historical issues. Also the script itself was easy-peasy for calligraphists.
 
Shoonra said:
Further, (e) in working up this fake, and altho it was supposed to please the Tsar, Simonides made what would then have been innovative changes to the accepted Bible text, including rearranging the sequence of NT books - putting Hebrews after 2 Thessalonians and putting Acts after Philemon
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Sinaiticus
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, Hebrews, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Acts, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, Revelation, Epistle of Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas.

The manuscript was designed to represent a time when there was no one accepted order. Vaticanus and Alexandrinus vary much more widely from our current order.

So pretty much any decisions on the order of Codex Simoneides could be considered "innovative".

You can compare the order of Sinaiticus with a couple of early manuscripts here:

The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development of the Bible (2004)
Paul Wegner
https://books.google.com/books?id=kkVFOTsBOAEC&pg=PA60
 
Shoonra said:
Simonides made what would then have been innovative changes to the accepted Bible text, .... as well as many hundreds of readings.
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The prep work was likely over some years by Benedict, David Daniels goes over his background in his books.

Often "singular" readings are simply scribal corruptions, and especially omissions. So your argument here is far too vague to be on point. James White made a truly absurd claim in this regard, covered in an earlier post.
 
Shoonra said:
Also (g) much of the Greek text of the Shepherd of Hermas.
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Which is extremely strong evidence that the manuscript was developed in Athos. As I have mentioned a few times the Simonides Hermas is very similar to that of Sinaiticus, and was published in 1856, years before Sinaiticus. Tischendorf by 1857 had attacked the text linguistically as having medieval elements, but withdrew the attack (quietly, in Latin in one of his works) when he was publishing the Sinaiticus Hermas.

Literary Forgeries (1907)
James Anson Farrer
http://books.google.com/books?id=4lgLAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA59
https://archive.org/stream/literaryforgerie00farruoft#page/58/mode/2up

That Simonides was a good enough calligrapher, even at an early age, to have written the Codex, is hardly open to doubt, and it is in his favour that the world was first indebted to him in 1856 for the opening chapters in Greek of the Shepherd of Hermas, with a portion of which the Codex Sinaiticus actually terminates. The coincidence seems almost more singular than can be accounted for by chance.
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Shoonra said:
Somehow, in the space of a very few years after being made, (h) fragments of this fake codex were distributed in a number of rooms of the Monastery
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There is one other room of the monastery for the manuscript, which has a latter part of Hermas, the New Finds of 1975.

In Sinaiticus-Tischendorf mythology, this makes no sense. Tearing apart the most valuable manuscript in the monastery? Absurd.

Plus, in writing of his 1845 visit Uspensky mentions Hermas, without any indication that the Codex only had a small section of Hermas. Hmmmm.

However, once you study the problem that Tischendorf had with the Simonides Hermas, published years before the Sinaiticus Hermas, it all makes far more sense. The less Hermas the better, as Tischendorf had attacked the very similar Simonides text as being not ancient, but a medieval retranslation. So part of Hermas was separated and ended up in a dump room, out of sight. (Many details on the Pure Bible Forum.)
 
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