Codex Sinaiticus and Constantine Simonides : Nikolas Sarris Fragment S.2289

TwoNoteableCorruptions

Well-known member
Part of the Codex Sinaiticus (a fragment of Joshua 10:12 LXX), no. S.2289, was pasted into the cover of a volume at St Catherine's monastery, Mt Sinai.

It has been very reasonably proven to have been put into the volume, no later than 1727.

See below:

CLASSIFICATION OF FINISHING TOOLS
IN GREEK BOOKBINDING:
ESTABLISHING LINKS FROM THE LIBRARY OF ST
CATHERINE'S MONASTERY, SINAI, EGYPT.
Nikolas Sarris
VOLUME!:
TEXT
PhD Thesis
Camberwell College of Arts
University of the Arts
London
February 2010


https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/6143/


https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...hidden-in-egyptian-monastery-1780274.html?amp


Backing this up is an eyewitness account of what is undoubtedly the Codex Sinaiticus, by Vitaliano Donati in 1761.

No Simonides story could account for these.
 
A link from a post by John D. Chitty, (👈pictured on the left of Father Justin at link) November 10th, 2011, who helped Nikolas Sarris discover the S.2289 (Sinai Greek 2289) Codex Sinaitiucs fragment.

I encourage you to read the entire article about Mt Sinai manuscripts.

Saint Catherine’s Monastery: An Ark in the Wilderness
By John D. Chitty
November 10, 2011

The following is the lecture delivered on Tuesday night, November 8, 2011 at a symposium on the St. Catherine’s monastery library and the significance of the Sinai manuscripts, hosted by Dr. Daniel B. Wallace and the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts at the Hope Center in Plano, Texas.


"In July of 2009, we were able to make an important announcement about this manuscript. Three years earlier, conservators completed a survey of the Sinai manuscripts, recording the state of each volume, and taking photographs of the bindings. Nikolas Sarris, a Greek from Patmos, used these photographs to study the tooling of the manuscripts. From the decorative stamps used in the bindings, he was able to reconstruct which manuscripts were bound in the same workshop, and determine whether the bindings were executed elsewhere, or made at Sinai itself. 21 He brought to my attention one of the photographs made during the survey. This was Sinai Greek 2289, and he knew from his research that it was one of a group of eighteen bindings made at the monastery in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. 22 On the inside back board, the paper lining had been partially torn away, revealing a parchment with Greek majuscule script. Was it too much to hope that this was yet another fragment of the Codex Sinaiticus? The more we examined it, the more convinced we became that indeed it was. The text is from the first chapter of the book of Joshua, the eleventh verse, in which Joshua commands the children of Israel, ‘Prepare you victuals; for within three days ye shall pass over this Jordan, to go in to possess the land, which the Lord your God giveth you to possess it.’ In every detail, this fragment seemed to match the Codex. But the monastery has other leaves of the Codex Sinaiticus from this same book, which would have been written by the same scribe. 23 When we juxtaposed the letters from these leaves over the image of the newly revealed fragment, the exact correspondence seemed further confirmation of this identification. It was universal practice in earlier centuries to use parchment fragments in repairing or binding other texts. But now we are presented with the daunting task of wanting to reveal the whole of this fragment, without the risk of damaging it in the process. Experienced conservators will need to discuss the safest way to recover this leaf. It may be that advanced scanning techniques could reveal more of the text, without attempting to remove the fragment for the time being. We should not rule out the possibility of simply leaving the fragment as it is, waiting for technology to develop. This would be better than to act in haste, and risk damaging or losing the text."

https://capthk.com/category/reliability-of-the-bible/textual-criticism/st-catherines-monastery/
 
Correction of original post, with the wrong verse numbering. Changed from Joshua 10:12 to Joshua 1:11 LXX.

Part of the Codex Sinaiticus (a fragment of Joshua 1:11 LXX), no. S.2289, was pasted into the cover of a volume at St Catherine's monastery, Mt Sinai.

It has been very reasonably proven to have been put into the volume, no later than 1727.

See below:

CLASSIFICATION OF FINISHING TOOLS
IN GREEK BOOKBINDING:
ESTABLISHING LINKS FROM THE LIBRARY OF ST
CATHERINE'S MONASTERY, SINAI, EGYPT.
Nikolas Sarris
VOLUME!:
TEXT
PhD Thesis
Camberwell College of Arts
University of the Arts
London
February 2010


https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/6143/


https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...hidden-in-egyptian-monastery-1780274.html?amp


Backing this up is an eyewitness account of what is undoubtedly the Codex Sinaiticus, by Vitaliano Donati in 1761.

No Simonides story could account for these.
 
See also:

"The Discovery of a New Fragment from the Codex Sinaiticus"
Sinaiticus Journal, London
Pages 12-13
By Nikolas Sarris, 2010


"In April 2009, during work for my PhD research on the bindings from the Saint Catherine’s manuscript collection,1 I came across a photograph taken six years earlier by a member of the Camberwell - Saint Catherine’s (now Ligatus) Library Conservation Project team. The photograph was of the inner face of the right board of Sinai Greek 2289 (see page 1), a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century book in an eighteenth-century binding. Showing through the pastedown of the binding was a fragment of the oldest and most famous manuscript at Saint Catherine’s and one of the most important Christian books, the Codex Sinaiticus. My research involved the careful examination of several bindings and, for this binding in particular, a detailed study of its structure, date and style. According to my investigations—using the records collected during the condition survey of the monastery’s manuscripts—Sinai Greek 2289 belongs to a group of 18 manuscripts and three printed books that appear to have been bound at the monastery at the beginning of the eighteenth century, by the same workshop. The paper pastedown on the right board of Sinai Greek 2289 is partly torn, detached, no doubt, by a previous reader or examiner who failed to notice the importance of what he had exposed. The lacuna created by the tear revealed a layer of parchment with manuscript writing that was not very well preserved. The act of detaching the pastedown had not only created the tear but had also removed some of the ink. The manuscript waste was adhered to the binding board as board lining, and it seems that the turn-ins of the leather cover are pasted over the manuscript. This would suggest that the manuscript waste was used as an integral part of the binding. The writing on the fragment is in Greek uncial, and the exposed area is sufficiently large to show that the script is arranged in a narrow column with 13 to 15 letters per line. Uncial Greek writing was replaced by minuscule script from the ninth century onwards, so the manuscript underneath is clearly very early, while the narrow column itself is very rare. The majority of early Greek manuscripts known to us are written in one, or occasionally two, columns that, according to the size of the parchment folio, contain 20 to30 characters per line. The Codex Vaticanus, written in three narrow columns with 17 to 18 letters per line, is a notable exception. Few manuscripts have narrower columns. The manuscript that best matches the fragment is the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete copy of the New Testament to survive. Was the fragment I had discovered indisputably from the Codex Sinaiticus? The number of letters per line, and the height and width of the letters, match perfectly. The style of the writing is identical, too, pending confirmation by specialist palaeographers. The fragment displays yet another characteristic of the Codex Sinaiticus, the use of horizontal and vertical rules to align the letters. Most chapters of the codex have double-spaced rules for every other line of writing, as does the fragment. What is more, the distance between the two lines is the same, as is the distance between the two vertical rules. The Saint Catherine’s librarian, Father Justin, inspected Sinai Greek 2289 soon after the photograph of the binding caught my attention. He not only confirmed my initial speculations—the fragment is indeed from the Codex Sinaiticus—but he was able to identify the passage to which it belongs, Joshua, chapter one, verse ten: Prepare you victuals; for within three days ye shall pass over this Jordan, to go in to possess the land, which the Lord your God giveth you to possess it. How, one wonders, did a fragment of such an important manuscript become part of a bookbinding? Manuscript fragments were often used in bindings. Parchment, in particular, a rare and expensive material, served perfectly as a strong and flexible component of bookbinding. It is not uncommon to see fragmented parchment folia re-used in covers, end leaves, and spine or board linings. In a remote location like the Sinai desert, it is not surprising that discarded parchment was recycled, even a fragment from the Codex Sinaiticus. It is likely that a folio became detached from the manuscript and was kept together with other individual waste leaves of parchment for use by binders at the monastery. It is interesting to note that some of the fragments of the Codex discovered at the monastery in 1975 belong to Joshua, chapters twelve and
thirteen, only a few folia after the new fragment. Perhaps this fragment, too, would have been found with the others, had it not been used as bookbinding material. A challenging task awaits conservators, who will need to find a way to expose more of the fragment without damaging its very friable ink or the historic binding of which it is part. This task poses serious ethical and practical dilemmas that require careful consideration. What is the best way to reveal the fragment and examine the binding and the manuscript in which it is found? Whatever the course of action, an appropriate conservation studio and conservation equipment will be needed, with the support of imaging technology. The prospect of finding more hidden fragments of the Codex Sinaiticus in the left board of Greek 2289, as well as in the 20 other bindings made by the same workshop, suggests that further research is required."

[Emphasis added by me]
1. Nikolas Sarris, ‘Classification of Finishing Tools in Byzantine/Greek Book binding: Establishing Links for Manuscripts from the Library of St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, Egypt’, doctoral thesis funded by the AHRC and submitted to Camberwell College of Art-University of the Arts London in February 2010. NIKOLAS SARRIS is supervisor of the book conservation workshop at the Monastery of St John in Patmos, Greece and a member of the Saint Catherine’s Library Project team. He is completing his PhD thesis on the decorated book bindings at Saint Catherine’s.
 
  • Constantine Simonides 1859, Codex Sinaiticus stance "M. Tissendorf also lately discovered in a certain monastery in Egypt the Old Testament and part of the New, as well as the 1st Book of Hermas, all of which were written in the 2nd Century, or 1750 years ago."
  • Constantine Simonides 1862, Codex Sinaiticus stance "First I copied out the Old and New Testaments, then the Epistle of Barnabas, the first part of pastoral writings of Hermas ... because the parchment ran short..."
 
This is interesting.

You might want to read this folks!

Important bit highlighted in red.

The Principal Uncial Manuscripts of the New Testament
By Hatch, William Henry Paine
1875-1972


https://archive.org/details/principaluncialm0000hatc/page/98/mode/2up?q=Athos

Codex Coislinianus - Hp Hpaul 015
Page 98


https://archive.org/details/principaluncialm0000hatc/page/98/mode/1up

"According to a subscription found in the codex the manuscript was compared with a copy which was written by Pamphilus and was preserved in his library at Caesarea.{3} The existing leaves were afterward used in binding codices at Mount Athos; and, being in bindings, they made their way to various modern libraries. The Moscow leaves are said to have been bound up in the year 975 and to have been in the Laura of St. Athanasius until 1655. The Turin leaves were found in the binding of a twelfth-century ‘manuscript, and the Paris leaves were bound up in the Laura of St. Athanasius in 1218."
This is straight from Avery's blog.

Found in binding...

Sound familiar????
 
This is interesting.

You might want to read this folks!

Important bit highlighted in red.

The Principal Uncial Manuscripts of the New Testament
By Hatch, William Henry Paine
1875-1972


https://archive.org/details/principaluncialm0000hatc/page/98/mode/2up?q=Athos

Codex Coislinianus - Hp Hpaul 015
Page 98


https://archive.org/details/principaluncialm0000hatc/page/98/mode/1up

"According to a subscription found in the codex the manuscript was compared with a copy which was written by Pamphilus and was preserved in his library at Caesarea.{3} The existing leaves were afterward used in binding codices at Mount Athos; and, being in bindings, they made their way to various modern libraries. The Moscow leaves are said to have been bound up in the year 975 and to have been in the Laura of St. Athanasius until 1655. The Turin leaves were found in the binding of a twelfth-century ‘manuscript, and the Paris leaves were bound up in the Laura of St. Athanasius in 1218."
This is straight from Avery's blog.

Found in binding...

Sound familiar????
To this provenance of antiquity, Avery has never produced a satisfactory reply. His technique is to ignore it.
 
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