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

[Steven Avery]

BTW.
Steven Avery has posted a low resolution (unfortunately) digital image of Simonides Comma-inclusive forgery of 1st John 5:7-8.
https://purebibleforum.com/index.ph...s-meyer-papyrus-in-liverpool.3738/#post-15536
I would love to have a higher resolution image zoomed in on the Comma-inclusive forgery.

It leads back to Hugh Houghton on twitter

https://twitter.com/x/status/1198423863706570752

And he might be pointing back to Tommy Wasserman.

So one of them may have higher quality.

 

[Steven Avery]

Can Avery - or anybody - explain why, IF Simonides forged the Sinaiticus, he omitted such familar passages as the longer ending of Mark and the story of the adulteress? These were so ingrained by the mid-19th century that only some special motivation would cause Simonides to omit them.

Reasonable questions.

Benedict and anybody involved in textual scholarship was well aware of the textual positions.
And the movement against those sections was already moving and grooving.

Richard Simon in the late 1600s goes into the Pericope in some depth.
The Birch collations were good for Vaticanus readings, and clearly showed that they were not in the Vaticanus text.
Griesbach and Lachmann had Greek New Testament editions out, and there were many commentaries questioning the section.

There is a lot more, but at the moment I have other topics.

 

[TwoNoteableCorruptions]

It leads back to Hugh Houghton on twitter

https://twitter.com/x/status/1198423863706570752

And he might be pointing back to Tommy Wasserman.

So one of them may have higher quality.

Are you implying a coverup? A deliberate withholding? A conspiracy?

Yawn. Anyway.

It appears to be a similar (as far as I can zoom in) script to the Codex Mayerianius.

It also looks similar to (in terms of format, script, papyrus texture and coloration etc) his other fake Papyrus' of James 1, Matthew 28, etc at the Liverpool museum of fakes...

I'll hazard my guess now, that it ultimately (when it becomes readily available in a higher resolution) simply turns out to be Simonides usual uncial handwriting clearly evident in his other forgeries.

 

[Shoonra]

I cannot fathom Avery's response. He's been a defender of the Simonides fable but now references textual critics for evidences that those familiar passages came after the fourth century. It seems contradictory to me.

 

[TwoNoteableCorruptions]

It seems contradictory to me.

It is.

 

[Steven Avery]

I cannot fathom Avery's response. He's been a defender of the Simonides fable but now references textual critics for evidences that those familiar passages came after the fourth century. It seems contradictory to me.

I have always said that Sinaiticus is a textual disaster.
Whenever and whoever.

Benedict mostly focused on the “LXX” but used modernist errors in the NT.

Simonides was simply a scribe.

 

[Shoonra]

It's tough to suggest that Simonides was copying "modernist errors", circa 1830, when the first printed edition to omit the longer ending of Mark was (acc. to Reuss) published in 1849.

Appropos of nothing: Former President Donald Trump is now peddling a "patriotic" edition of the KJV, which kinda chips away at the traditional wall between church and state, but back in 2017, when he was inaugurated he used a "family bible" that was an RSV.
I can say a great deal more that would rub many people the wrong way.

 

[Steven Avery]

It's tough to suggest that Simonides was copying "modernist errors", circa 1830, when the first printed edition to omit the longer ending of Mark was (acc. to Reuss) published in 1849.

Here is where the focus was for scholars like Benedict in the early 1800s.

The Turning Point for Mark 16:9-20 (2013)
Jan Krans
http://vuntblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-turning-point-for-mark-169-20.html

Out of curiosity, however, I moved back into history, from Birch to Wettstein (1751) … Bengel (1734) … Mill (1707) … Simon (1689) … Erasmus (1516)…
....
Andreas Birch, the Danish theologian-philologian, who, from 1781 to 1783, collated dozens of Greek New Testament manuscripts in continental European libraries, mainly those in Italy. Tregelles says about Birch that he “probably did more than any other scholar in the collation of MSS. of the Greek Testament” (Account of the Printed Text, 1854, p. 88). One of the manuscripts Birch examined in the Vatican library was already famous for its presumed age (some held it to belong to the 4th century; this dating is commonly accepted today). Some of its peculiar readings had already been circulating among scholars from Erasmus onwards; Wettstein can refer frequently to the manuscript he labelled ‘B’ because of its age. The most remarkable variant of ‘Codex Vaticanus’, however, had remained hidden from the scholarly community. Birch must have had his finest hour when discovering that in this manuscript, today generally considered to be our best one, Mark ends with ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ—“for they were afraid” (16:8).

See the comments, too.

 

[Steven Avery]

Are you implying a coverup? A deliberate withholding? A conspiracy?

You never can accept simple scholarship comments.

Overall, the paper from Wasserman on The Cable Guy is rather good. I think it was written before the Forging Antiquity Project was hiding the scholarship of the Simonides-Hodgkin and Simonides-Kallinikos correspondence.

 

[TwoNoteableCorruptions]

Here is where the focus was for scholars like Benedict in the early 1800s.

The Turning Point for Mark 16:9-20 (2013)
Jan Krans
http://vuntblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-turning-point-for-mark-169-20.html



See the comments, too.

No indisputable connection to Benedict has been made.

These cherry picked quotes don't mention Benedict at all. (Whistling ??? echoing as he walks away)

Your contextomized snippets (if the readers haven't noticed) almost always happen to be generic in content and never specific to the person i.e. Benedict's Sinaiticus 1 John 5:7-8 Comma omission, Benedict omitting the Long Ending of Mark, and Benedict (and specifically stating him as being the author of the Codex Sinaiticus) and him omitting the Woman caught in Adultery.

 

[logos1560]

You never can accept simple scholarship comments.

Thanks for asserting that your simple, non-scholarly comments should not be accepted.

 

[Steven Avery]

Your contextomized snippets (if the readers haven't noticed) almost always happen to be generic in content and never specific to the person

The question was generic, and I gave a generic response.
I explained that there was lots of scholarship at the time that would omit the sections.
Totally proper.

It is true that we do not have a lot of precise information about Benedict, beyond his strong history and some writings.

 

[Steven Avery]

Your response fails logic 101. I acknowledged the truth that you are not a scholar so your comments are non-scholarly.

You totally misunderstood what I wrote, so your turn-around attempt was worthless.

 

[Steven Avery]

Stop spamming then.
Readers. My point stands.

Many of your posts are repetitive and posturing, and often spam.

In this case you tried to criticize my accurate explanation of why an 1800s scholar might omit the Mark ending.
So you changed the topic to the exact background of Benedict.

 

[logos1560]

Many of your posts are repetitive and posturing, and often spam.

Perhaps you describe many of your own posts.

 

[Maestroh]

You flunk Logic 101 again.

Says the guy who thinks not one, not two, but THREE excellent calligraphers used expensive parchment and made 23,000 mistakes corrected by a virtually blind man who allegedly had done “pre-rough draft on expensive parchment collation” and then corrected those mistakes despite no longer being able to read manuscripts, at least, according to the guy claiming to be his nephew.

And did it all in less than 12 months.

 

[Steven Avery]

Says the guy who thinks not one, not two, but THREE excellent calligraphers used expensive parchment and made 23,000 mistakes corrected by a virtually blind man who allegedly had done “pre-rough draft on expensive parchment collation” and then corrected those mistakes despite no longer being able to read manuscripts, at least, according to the guy claiming to be his nephew. And did it all in less than 12 months.

You do not even know the basic history.

The corrections were largely Constantinople, Antigonus and Sinai.
Pay attention. Read.

The story makes less sense for a supposed 4th century scriptorium or monastery, it makes more sense at Athos, where they really were bumbling with the Biblical Greek.

 

[Maestroh]

You do not even know the basic history.

Says the person who doesn't know what happened himself and renames his speculations as facts.

The corrections were largely Constantinople, Antigonus and Sinai.

And you have proof of this?

Pay attention. Read.

I'm sorry, but I'm not inside your head, where you keep making up new "facts" to support your conspiracy theory.
I can read just fine, better than you no doubt, but I don't have nor do I need access to your active imagination, either.

The story makes less sense for a supposed 4th century scriptorium or monastery, it makes more sense at Athos, where they really were bumbling with the Biblical Greek.

Steven Avery is telling us it makes more sense that three people worked on a ROUGH DRAFT on an EXPENSIVE parchment and made 23,000 mistakes because they were going to re-copy it later.

As opposed to the reality, which is, "Simonides had zip to do with it."

 

[Maestroh]

I reiterate: if Steven Avery wants to clarify it for us in one post instead of his usual "I've already answered that" fashion on a blizzard of posts, he's welcome to do so. I can understand, given how amusing the story is when it's in one post, why he doesn't wish to do that. Narcissists fear nothing more than ridicule and being laughed at, but rest assured Stevie, we're already laughing at you.

He did not deny even one point of my comments above:

[He] thinks not one, not two, but THREE excellent calligraphers used expensive parchment and made 23,000 mistakes corrected by a virtually blind man who allegedly had done “pre-rough draft on expensive parchment collation” and then corrected those mistakes despite no longer being able to read manuscripts, at least, according to the guy claiming to be his nephew.

And did it all in less than 12 months.

We will note he has NOW added the claim that it was corrected several geographical places and named others that he has ZERO evidence did this.

 

[Maestroh]

What will never cease to be hilarious about the arguments postulated in this post by members of the SART team is this: NOT ONE of these guys would dare go up to an airline pilot and quote from an old book and tell a pilot with thousands of hours of flying experience that he has been deluded all this time. Not one would go tell a NASCAR driver how to drive a race car. Not one of these people would go tell a vascular surgeon - again, by quoting from an old book - that he's been saving lives wrongly all these years.

But they somehow cannot help themselves expressing opinions on a subject in which they don't possess even entry level qualifications like the date of Sinaiticus. Or vaccines (these are people who cannot even explain the basics of viral replication OR the difference between cellular or humoral immunity.

Yet they go online and give long-winded expose's and sell books on something whose basic outline they couldn't present to a Sunday School class.


Remember, folks: cartoons don't have to be consistent.