Codex Sinaiticus, EXPERTS, and BAM testing

Unbound68

Well-known member
Maestroh said:
So your excuses can all be reduced to historical agnosticism, which is the refuge of the awful argument.
- we don't know what all might be on Mt Athos
- we need someone with familiarity with Arabic scripts

The latter one is hilarious - you're demanding an EXPERT on a subject and YOU REJECT EXPERTS when they tell you Sinaiticus isn't some 19th century teenager's dream. You reject experts on the moon landing, building 7, atomic bombs, and infectious disease.

But NOW....YOU want an EXPERT!!!


LOL!!!
Click to expand...
He replicates that foolishness at every level of his Sinaiticus "studies." The following is some of what transcription EXPERT Timothy Arthur Brown, from the CSP, had to say to Mr. Conspiracy, in response to some of his oft-repeated and ignorant questions to Amy Myshrall regarding "coloring," "suppleness," etc.:


"I did not notice any difference in color between the Leipzig University and British Library leaves."

"This is more of a conservation question, and we were tasked with the transcription. Our time with the manuscript was given almost entirely to textual issues. But based upon the couple of years I spent poring over the digital images, I never noticed any difference in color variations that might distinguish the Leipzig from the London leaves, nor do I see any telltale differences now as I reexamine the images. (I have copies of the full set of the high-resolution digital images we used for transcription, not just the printed images of the 2010 facsimile or the lower-resolution images available online.)"

"I saw nothing that would suggest that any of the leaves I examined were not as old as their assigned age, i.e. the mid-fourth century."


And this is my favorite part, which came from Brown after he got hit with more ignorance from Avery - via his "researcher on color issues" Mark Mitchie - regarding the color key in the Sinaiticus images, as well as who took the pics:

"You can be assured that I have no intention of ever engaging in a debate with you in a public forum, online or otherwise, but I would offer some advice in private. Ordinarily, people do their research first and afterwards publish their conclusions. It appears that you have chosen to publish your conclusions first, and are doing your research afterwards."


And since Avery has now basically admitted that he is not averse to deferring to an expert on the Arabic note issue in Sinaiticus, would he likewise defer to - and follow - the findings or opinions of an expert in another field surrounding manuscript studies....like, say, the 2015 testing that was to be performed by BAM?

Here is what Avery has said about the issue recently at this forum:


From the Is the World’s Oldest Bible a Fake? thread:


Thread 'Is the "World's Oldest Bible" a Fake?'
https://forums.carm.org/threads/is-the-worlds-oldest-bible-a-fake.11375/

Post# 70
Leipzig cancelled the tests planned in 2015, the day BAM, the testing group, arrive.

Do you think perhaps those "who are in possession" are a bit reluctant to have a real examination?
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Post# 83
BAM from Berlin, under a lady named Dr. Ira Rabin, worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Most of their testing is totally non-destructive.

In 2015, they were invited to test Leipzig Sinaiticus.

The Leipzig library changed their mind the day they arrived.
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Post# 98
If Sinaiticus was to finally have objective parchment & ink analysis, it would make sense to have it done by a world-class testing outfit that had worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Leipzig got cold feet.
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Post# 116
Actually, the type of parchment and ink testing done by BAM can be very helpful.

Think of Prussian blue and Archaic Mark.

The chances of Leipzig or the British Library allowing tests is close to zero, they would likely end up with a lot of egg on face. If somehow the tests were allowed, and actually showed ancient parchment and ink, I would give the tests acknowledgment and careful consideration.

However, it is not likely to happen, both major libraries, I believe, sense the real problem.
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Post# 273
No such tests on Sinaiticus.

They were planned in Leipzig in 2015 but the Leipzig University Library backed out the day of the tests.

Malfeasance, it is.
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Post# 277
That is true. Extensive testing by BAM should differentiate natural parchment yellowing from staining by lemon juice, coffee, tea and/or herbs.

So we should watch for those tests ….

Oh, wait, Leipzig pulled out. Hmmmmm

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Post# 279
However, the British Library has not done any significant tests, not even on the ink. They did have a bit of ultra-violet to see the under-letters, e.g. there was a question at the last verse of John.

If they had done any tests, they had plenty of time to inform scholars and the public. I think they just took the "discretion is the better part of valor:" approach. Let's not open up a can of worms.

Plus the comparison with really old mss. like Alexandrinus was staring them in the face every day. In fact, until 2009, very few people outside library staff had any access to the ms.

Remember, the few hour return window ended in 1933. Any scientific problems would be egg on the face.
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Post# 308
... so they (now the British Library and the CSP) assume the ancient age, lest they look a little foolish.
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Post# 317
It is more a confirmation that the British Library knows there is a problem, with the exceptional, phenomenally good condition, manuscript, but they do not want any testing done. (That is why they do a little bait-and-switch over to C-14 testing, which they can paint as destructive.)

BAM, under Dr. Ira Rabin, would be happy to do substantial non-destructive testing on the manuscript, she even mentioned that hope on the Brent Nongbri Zoom call in 2021, after she discussed how Leipzig pulled out of the 2015 tests, on the day they arrived to do the testing.
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Post# 421
Here is where once can talk of malfeasance, since the opportunities from modern science are deliberately rejected.

e.g. Leipzig in 2015, when the BAM tests were canceled on the day they arrived.

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Post# 534
The curators are obviously not an objective party.

They know that any efforts to determine its actual age could be very embarrassing.

The Brits put a lot of prestige and $ on the purchase, and the Museum and Library like to play it up.
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Post# 678
Dr. Ira Rabin specifically said they were turned down and away that day at the Leipzig library. She spoke about it at the Zoom conference on Sinaiticus hosted by Brent Nongbri. She did not talk about whether they showed up with heavy equipment, and I would not presume that BAM brought heavy equipment that day. It is also possible that some testing would have been brought back to the BAM labs. Again, not discussed.
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From The False Claims of Constantine Simonides Regarding Sinaiticus thread:

Thread 'The False Claims of Constantine Simonides Regarding Sinaiticus'
https://forums.carm.org/threads/the...tantine-simonides-regarding-sinaiticus.11880/

Post# 275
And nobody ever tested the parchment or ink. Not even today. Leipzig ducked out the day of the tests!

[…]


However, for the textcrits there was a problem, the 4th century date was too deeply entrenched to allow an honest reevaluation. So they watch parchment and ink science change to match Sinaiticus, and put their hands over their eyes.
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Post# 410
So you go with the experts, despite the fact that solid tests have been blocked and they generally ignore and are ignorant of salient information.

It really has nothing to do with the British Library, who clearly will favor the conclusion that gives them a priceless manuscript over that which makes them look a tad foolish for being the Russian marks in 1933 and are still avoiding tests in 2022.
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Post# 418
I've complimented the British Library on their openness. The Leipzig Library is another story, even more so when they cancelled the 2015 BAM tests.
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Post# 419
…the Leipzig Library has run away from the real tests
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Post# 468
Leipzig cancelled superb tests planned by the independent group BAM from Berlin in 2015.

Why?

Simple enough, they have a vested interest in avoiding any analysis that might devalue their manuscript.
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Post# 607
Do you really thing an administrator at the British Library can question Sinaiticus authenticity in a public talk?
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Post# 643
My major point is that C-14 tests are not really the important tests, for many reasons. And since they destroy a tiny piece of parchment, they are used as an out by the British Library as to why they have not done any testing
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So now that Avery has made his conspiracy theory regarding Sinaiticus testing well known here, does his expert Dr. Ira Rabin from BAM - whom he invokes several times above - agree with him on the matter? Would he defer to her expertise? Here's what she had to say during a correspondence with him, which used to appear on his Pure Bible Forum, but has now been hidden:


Unfortunately, the study that was scheduled for April 2015 was cancelled that is the reason why I have never written to you.
I am not sure we will be allowed to conduct it. There is a new director of the conservation department who decided that he isn't interested.

Sorry to dissapoint you.
Click to expand...


I believed that this manuscript is beyond any suspicions because

a) the monks confirm that it was taken by Tischendorf
b) there are some folios found in Sinai that belong to this manuscript
c) the colour and condition of parchment strongly depend on the environment and the initial processing

The Temple scroll had perfectly white sections upon unrolling but now its colour is mostly yellow.
Click to expand...


I believe the decision not to make analytical study resulted from inner-political disputes of the Library. Initially, our study was welcomed. However, one person (who is neither an expert in parchment nor could personally profit from the study) managed to stop it.

To which Avery replied with:

"Very interesting. One possible motive, and I highlight possible, would be discomfit if the tests showed some surprising things. Even if they showed that the ms. was ancient, but not fourth century. The groups caught on in the last year that the parchment condition was an issue, especially since there was some correspondence with the Brits. On a totally unrelated field, some skeptics asked for C-14 dating on a web
petitions. (About which I am skeptical .) So they might have just decided, let's not take any risks, let's not rock the boat. Science can wait."

Dr. Rabin rejoins:

Dear Steven,
Thanks a lot! Most interesting!
1. But I must assure you that the decision NOT to study was not dictated by fear of unpleasant discoveries. I was present at the main discussion. The fellow who knows nothing of this ms but happens to be simply the head of conservation was mad that the testing was decided without his knowledge but with blessing of the conservator of the ms.
He made a dramatic speech that the name could be damaged by analysis and that HE doesn't need to know anything about the materials to preserve it.
Click to expand...

2. Today some of the Leipzig leaves are completely eaten through! But others are not. This was the main reason for the conservator of the manuscript to request the analysis.
The damage must have occurred in Leipzig but no one knows when.
I did want to test the inks - their composition is more than interesting for my inks studies!
Click to expand...


So what do any of you honestly think Avery would say, were he to find an expert on Arabic to write and tell him what he doesn't want to hear about the Arabic notes in Sinaiticus?

Despite what Timothy Arthur Brown told him about the images and coloring, Avery persists with the same uninformed lies.
Despite what Dr. Rabin told him about the testing and her own view on Sinaiticus authenticity, Avery persists with the same uninformed lies.
Ditto for McGrane, Hixson, and others.

Expertise is ignored.
No matter what expert is consulted on any issue surrounding Sinaiticus, Avery defers to no one but himself. EVER.
 
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Steven Avery said:
The most important information from Dr. Ira Rabin came in the 2021 Zoom meeting with Brent Nongbri.
Well, why not provide us with something more than just your say so? Like a transcript? Those of us who know you learned long ago that we can't take you at your word. What "important information" was provided?


Steven Avery said:
That is when she explained that Leipzig pulled out of the testing on the day that BAM arrived at Leipzig.
And I’m sure her explanation wasn’t anything close to the conspiratorial misinformation you’ve been spouting. You're constantly making the mistake of thinking that the mere fact that testing was stopped is proof in and of itself of a cloak and dagger conspiracy to keep the world from knowing the truth about a single manuscript. What happened to your "Logic 101?" Again, give us a transcript of her explanation, instead of just your say so.


Steven Avery said:
There was quite a bit of emotion,
So?


Steven Avery said:
and some hope that tests will take place, somewhere, perhaps at the British Library.
Again, so? That's all worthless verbiage in light of the fact that your "witness" isn't really a witness for your conclusion.


Steven Avery said:
And I never said that Rabin has a position on Sinaiticus,
Nice try. I never said you said anything about Dr. Rabin having a position on Sinaiticus. By invoking her name here on the topic of Sinaiticus authenticity, you're purposely trying to fool the uninformed into thinking she's a like-minded witness to your conspiracy theories and an ally to your position of a 19th century Sinaiticus.

Was she ever to drop in and see all the ridiculous postings you've made here on this forum, you'd probably never hear from her again.

As I've shown with her own words, she is far from your conclusions.

So is Timothy Arthur Brown, by his own words.
So are others, by their own words.

You are a master at misrepresenting and misappropriating the words of experts. Why? Because your position is so weak, ridiculous and untenable that you desperately need some sort of validation from someone, somewhere.

The words of some other experts will be placed in the spotlight here soon enough. Though we all know it doesn't matter one whit what any expert tells you. I wish Dr. Rabin would drop in here and "correspond" with you regularly for 2 weeks. I can predict exactly what would happen: you'd scare her away forever by inevitably calling her a Tischen-dupe for the crime of demolishing your insane theories and making you look like an uninformed troll.
 
The next expert to have been unfortunate enough to have to endure the nonsensical ramblings of our resident pseudo-scholar is Professor Joseph Verheyden of Belgium. He has written several works, including an article contained within the book Lire demain - Reading Tomorrow, entitled Read; Write and Correct: the Scribe and the Perfect Text. In that article, and speaking of the Codex Sinaiticus now being online for all to view, he writes:


“However, there is also a certain danger that this easy access might take away a bit of the myth that has surrounded this particular Codex. Or should one rather say that it is just the opposite, and that this new opportunity adds to the myth?”


Enter Steven Avery Spencer, who asks the professor:


Avery:
a) Are you familiar with the material from the Scotish scholar James Donaldson? Where he asserts that the Tischendorf dating of Codex Sinaiticus is way off, based on the linguistics of Hermas and Barnabas (he uses the original Tischendorf argument against the Hermas of Simonides). He also expresses a healthy skepticism about the whole account.


b) You reference the Simonides paper of James Keith Elliott as a "brilliant monograph". However, he omitted some of the most salient data, and today we know a lot more. We can even see, looking at the Codex Sinaiticus Project, where the bulk of the manuscript from 1859 is artificially coloured yellow, while the 1844 section in Leipzig is white parchment, as was described by Uspensky for the whole ms. This is quite an amazing confirmation of an essential part of the Simonides-Kallinikos history.




Professor Verheyden replies:


a. I am indeed familiar with the comments of Donaldson. As far as I know he twice spoke out on Barnabas Sin. In 1864 he concludes the text is not genuine (p 254). Ten years later he is less outspoken and concludes that the Sin Barnabas is "either a very corrupt MS. of Barnabas, or a translation based on the Latin" (316-7). I do not see much evidence for the latter option, but the first one is of course always a possibility, which says something on the quality of the text (tradition), but nothing on its genuineness.


b. Elliott's book remains in my opinion a good presentation. What evidence are you referring to when saying that he left out (on purpose?) salient data? He can of course not be blamed for what he could not yet know. By the way, such is also the case for Donaldson: three of the four words he says in 1874 (p316) are not found elsewhere or only in Suida and a later author, are now attested in pre-Christian and early Christian literature (see Montanari's dictionary). The fourth (anthropopoiètos) is a verbal form, the verb is attested as well.



{Avery still persists with the nonsense about Elliott and Donaldson to this day, when he’s been told exactly what Verheyden told him above for many years!}

c. I am not a chemist but "decoloration" can happen. Are you sure this is really "artificially coloured"? If so, how does it disprove the genuineness of the ms and the text it contains? Maybe one tried to make the ms look older, but it does not prove the text it contains is a fake.



Avery:
Thanks for your fine response in February on James Donaldson, the James Keith Elliott book and the question of the apparent colouring of the 1859 section of Codex Sinaiticus.



Remember that thank you from Avery. In a minute you’ll see that what I said in another post about Avery deferring to no one but himself was right on the money.


Avery goes on and on with a typical reply to Verheyden’s point “c” above, because - of course - the coloring issue is the hill he wants to die on. At one point he mentions Helen Shenton’s comment, but doesn’t inform Verheyden that she dates Sinaiticus to the 4th century.


He says all the usual stuff we’ve seen him post here a hundred times, and even provides Verheyden with a link to a now defunct Russian blog regarding a letter from Tischendorf to Uspensky….leading the professor to believe he can actually read it!


He then says:


Avery:
The ms. is 1840s. And it is a fairly new parchment, clumsily coloured to make it look yellow.



And:


However, the bottom line is simple .. the Sinaiticus ms was made c. 1840.
Thanks for listening!



As if he didn't read ANYTHING the professor had written! Expert? What expert? Avery defers to no one!

In the end, seemingly having the good sense to wash his hands of the conspiracy nut’s nonsense, the professor replies for the last time:


Professor Verheyden:

In general: coincidence is a strange phenomenon, too strange indeed to build much on it, certainly not enough to counter a majority opinion, for the simple reason that even if what is said is true it has the ring of "coincidence" around it. That said, I am afraid you are jumping to conclusions with regard to the relation between Athos ms and Sin. The similarity between both has nothing remarkable and is what one would expect of mss transmitting the same text. It does not prove and one cannot argue on this basis that there must be a direct literary connection between the two. All one needs to assume is that Athos was copied from a model that was close to Sin. In order for you to argue for the other direction, you should show passages (mistakes) in Sin that can only be explained, or made very plausible, if Sin depends on Athos; but is there anything like that?


Finally, re the analogy with Barnabas (and earlier edition by Simonides): I have never heard of Simonides' 1843 Barnabas edition. Can you provide the bibliographical details?


I also had a look at the texts you posted on Tischendorf-Plug-in-the -Date. Personally I am not such a big fan of blogs etc because it tends to fragmentize the evidence too much, which I am afraid is also what is happening here. There are bits and pieces of arguments and "evidence", but it is left to the user to bring these together in an orderly manner. In my opinion, the best way to state an argument is to write a formal essay, well structured and focusing on one or more problems, thereby clearly stating the problem and then offering a plausible (alternative) solution. Maybe with the knowledge you have gathered it is about time to do just that and submit it to an academic journal for broader circulation among the guild.
 
And Avery received the following from Dr. Paolo Cecconi (thanks to Maestroh):



Dear Mr. Avery,

I have received your first email from Prof. Tornau.

Given that I am having a very "busy time" at work, I am able to reply you only today.

Concerning your questions in your Email to me of Nov. 16:

1) the coincidence is a simple a mere coincindence maybe given to the interest of both english govenmenent and Russian Czar with Russian church in discovering new sources (and thus into establishing contatcs) with the provinces and territories of the former osman empire. 19th Century was an era of discoveries of several manuscripts and moreover there were "troubles" in the osman Empire (e.g. Greek indipendence war). So, this is a mere coincidence like similar ones during e.g. the Renaissance in Italy.

2) we have several other manuscripts of 4th century in good condition (and we have also older Papyri in good condition). This is also not surprising for historical records which profited of good climatic conditions.

3) it is not true
if we consider the need to produce a "good" edition of the Bible on behalf of the Roman Imperial government and with its financial support (please consider also the editorial initiative mentioned by Eusebius ordered by Constantine). The Sinaiticus could have been either one of those manuscripts or a good copy of one of them. Anyway, the history of the Sinaiticus reveals a competent editorial team behind it. I described this situation thanks to textual evidences in my paper of 2018 for Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum.

4) the history of the writings and some information about the context (see for Instance concerning the Codex Athous the studies of Brigitte Mondrain) confirm the datation of Sinaiticus on 4th and of Athous on 14th century.

5) As proven by subsequent studies, Simonides was wrong and moreover he falsified his sources (see below).
So there is no proof of a later date of the Sinaiticus.


LOL!!!!
 
His claims get debunked or shot down by an expert, and he moves onto the next one.

When his claims get debunked or shot down by expert #2, he moves onto the next one.

He keeps up this merry-go-round in the hopes of finding one that agrees with him.

Honest researchers don’t keep on repeating claims that everyone they correspond with shoots down, debunks and disproves. (See the Timothy Arthur Brown quote, where he slams Avery for pushing his conclusions and doing the research afterword).
 
Kevin McGrane, in correspondence with Steven Avery:
I would suggest that before wasting more of your time and everyone else's on following Simonides' lies that Benedict = Basilaeus = Bessarion => Vissarion all the way into another identity theft (as Simonides did by making out Benedict was the hegumen of St Panteleimon) you spend a few years learning some languages, starting with Greek and Russian, and then you will be able to read all the biographical material and see how deceived you have been.

BTW, yours and Daniels' description that Uspensky wrote his papers in Old Slavonic is utterly hilarious. Your Ukrainian translators must have been having a laugh.




Steven Avery:
Does David or I say that Uspensky wrote in Old Slavonic? Or simply that the script is Slavonic and perhaps some words as well (which is what was shared by the translators, the less professional ones in Ukraine did the work in two steps.) There is also a distinction made between Church Slavonic and Old Slavic. If we made a mistake in the description then most definitely we would want to make a correction. Afaik, I have never written that Uspensky wrote his papers in Old Slavonic.



Kevin McGrane:

Steven Avery, CARM forum, April 22, 2016: "Another unusual question was asked about reading the language of Uspensky...What is strange about this is that the SART team is the only one that have translated into English and published the salient Porfiry Uspensky Old Slavonic sections...We use a Slavonic translator, one with the skills that go beyond today's Russian translators"
Steven Avery, Biblical Criticism & History forum, February 6, 2016: "up until today you simply can't read Uspensky in English. (The Old Slavonic of a couple of sentences was placed on a web-site or two and then on Wikipedia, without translation, by the Ukrainian scholar Leszek Janczuk...)
Steven Avery, Fighting Fundamental forum, May 6, 2016 "The sources that have been used for the Codex Sinaiticus research are wide-ranging. As one simple example, this includes our having original finds and translations of the Uspensky and Morozov material, from Old Slavonic and Russian."
David Daniels "I and my fellow researchers, Steven Avery and Mark Michie, wanted to know what Uspensky wrote. But none of us knows Old Slavonic. Thankfully, a missionary to Ukraine, John Spillman, got it translated for us, from Old Slavonic, into Russian, then into English."


I would have to take issue with this laudatory language about 'original finds'. What this 'SART team' really means is that they were ignorant of it. It was inaccessible to THEM because they couldn't read Russian, didn't realize that Russian orthography was different in the nineteenth century, and were conned into believing it was Old Slavonic, and made fools of themselves by repeating such twaddle. Someone must really be having a laugh at their expense since Old Slavonic has been extinct for 900 years. And, if we are to believe Daniels, one of this SART team, their translation was a translation of a translation via a third language, Russian!).
 
Russian orthography was different in the nineteenth century,
Modern OCR tools, such as Abbyy FineReader, have had the ability to capture the old Russian alphabet for quite a while now, and google translate also recognizes the old russian alphabet, and translates it very well, as other European languages. So no problems in translating 19th century Russian.

"Old Church Slavonic/Old Slavonic (9th-12th century) as it appeared after the 12th century in its various local forms is known as Church Slavonic; this language has continued as a liturgical language into modern times. It continued to be written by the Serbs and Bulgarians until the 19th century and had significant influence on the modern Slavic languages, especially on the Russian literary language [well established by 19th century] that grew out of a compromise style incorporating many Church Slavonic elements into the native Russian vernacular."​
[source]
Slavonic lay in the province of palaeography in 19th century Russia:
"Bishop Porfiry Uspensky, Bishop of Chigirin, assembled a collection of mainly Greek and Slavonic manuscripts (435 items, including fragments). The importance of the comparative study of Greek and Old Slavonic and Old Russian manuscripts was for Porfiry the principle which guided his collecting activities...The description of the collection of Porfiry Uspensky published in the Or&t [Report] of the Public Library for 1883 may he said to mark the end of the second period in the history of Greek palaeography in Russia - the period during which mediaeval Greek manuscripts were studied in connexion with the development of Slavonic and Russian literature."​
[source]

"Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian.[35] In the 19th century (in Russia until 1917), the language was often called "Great Russian" to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called "White Russian" and Ukrainian, then called "Little Russian"​
.​
.​
.​
The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language (современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose in the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter the Great and developed from the Moscow (Middle or Central Russian) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language.[43] This occurred in spite of the fact that Saint Petersburg, the Western-oriented capital created by the "Westernizing" Tsar Peter the Great, being the capital of the Russian Empire for over 200 years.[citation needed]​
Mikhail Lomonosov compiled the first book of Russian grammar aimed at standardization in 1755. The Russian Academy's first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared in 1783. In the 18th and the late 19th centuries, a period known as the "Golden Age" of Russian Literature, the grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation of the Russian language in a standardized literary form emerged."​

However in the 19th century, there remained a problem with local Russian peasant dialects:
"After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930:​
The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism.... On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to the factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar and vocabulary... the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingua, in the context of developing heavy industry, a qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society.[46]
By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the compulsory education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features (such as fricative [ɣ] in Southern Russian dialects) are still observed in colloquial speech"​
[source]
 
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"Old Church Slavonic/Old Slavonic (9th-12th century) as it appeared after the 12th century in its various local forms is known as Church Slavonic; this language has continued as a liturgical language into modern times. It continued to be written by the Serbs and Bulgarians until the 19th century and had significant influence on the modern Slavic languages, especially on the Russian literary language [well established by 19th century] that grew out of a compromise style incorporating many Church Slavonic elements into the native Russian vernacular."​
[source]
Slavonic lay in the province of palaeography in 19th century Russia:
"Bishop Porfiry Uspensky, Bishop of Chigirin, assembled a collection of mainly Greek and Slavonic manuscripts (435 items, including fragments). The importance of the comparative study of Greek and Old Slavonic and Old Russian manuscripts was for Porfiry the principle which guided his collecting activities...The description of the collection of Porfiry Uspensky published in the Or&t [Report] of the Public Library for 1883 may he said to mark the end of the second period in the history of Greek palaeography in Russia - the period during which mediaeval Greek manuscripts were studied in connexion with the development of Slavonic and Russian literature."​
[source]

This post from cjab is helpful in confirming the Uspensky's references to Old Church Slavonic as distinct from Russian, and that distinction applies to the writing of Uspensky as well as Uspensky's usage in discussing Sinaiticus. We have had this confirmed, so Kevin McGrane would have to explain his concerns if we want to go into this further.

It is an interesting question, but McGrane did not really offer any scholarship. If I am wrong, then I will be most happy to be corrected, but McGrane does not override the words of Uspensky and analysis like above and what we learned from folks native in the Russian language.

You can see one of Kevin McGrane's problems in this discussion, he is more interested in possibly scoring points than sound scholarship. This came up a few times, such as the direct, strong connection of Simonides and Kallinikos in the Spyridon Lambrou Athos catalogue. Now, I do like his writing overall, he makes some sound points, and at times helps me to reconsider my position. However, there are numerous areas where he goes astray. Another example, he tries to protest Benedict at Athos, yet he also shows Benedict (Bissarion) as having a high position at the Panteleimon monastery, so his objection reduces to quibble. Another was when he tried to handwave the Simonides Hermas, before the Sinaiticus Hermas, as just a serendipitous (for Simonides) coincidence :).
 
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This post from cjab is helpful in confirming the Uspensky's references to Old Church Slavonic as distinct from Russian, and that distinction applies to the writing of Uspensky as well as Uspensky's usage in discussing Sinaiticus. We have had this confirmed, so Kevin McGrane would have to explain his concerns if we want to go into this further.

It is an interesting question, but McGrane did not really offer any scholarship. If I am wrong, then I will be most happy to be corrected, but McGrane does not override the words of Uspensky and analysis like above and what we learned from folks native in the Russian language.

You can see one of Kevin McGrane's problems in this discussion, he is more interested in possibly scoring points than sound scholarship. This came up a few times, such as the direct, strong connection of Simonides and Kallinikos in the Spyridon Lambrou Athos catalogue. Now, I do like his writing overall, he makes some sound points, and at times helps me to reconsider my position. However, there are numerous areas where he goes astray. Another example, he tries to protest Benedict at Athos, yet he also shows Benedict (Bissarion) as having a high position at the Panteleimon monastery, so his objection reduces to quibble. Another was when he tried to handwave the Simonides Hermas, before the Sinaiticus Hermas, as just a serendipitous (for Simonides) coincidence :).

I hear sweeping ????
 
Steven Avery wrote at BVDB in 2020:

And I am very confident that the Sinaticus obvious and clear inauthenticity will be commonly understood and accepted.

Dr. Ira Rabin, on the Brent Nongbri Zoom study, explained the panicked reaction at Leipzig when they came to do the scientific studies in 2015. They know.


Compare that with what Dr. Rabin actually said in the email to him:

But I must assure you that the decision NOT to study was not dictated by fear of unpleasant discoveries. I was present at the main discussion. The fellow who knows nothing of this ms but happens to be simply the head of conservation was mad that the testing was decided without his knowledge but with blessing of the conservator of the ms.
He made a dramatic speech that the name could be damaged by analysis and that HE doesn't need to know anything about the materials to preserve it.
 
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