Steven Avery
Well-known member
Uspensky, quote, said he was "bored" with the manuscript.
What do you say to that?
You have the whole quote, in context?
Which year?
After how many hours?
Uspensky, quote, said he was "bored" with the manuscript.
What do you say to that?
Wrong.
Uspensky wrote extensive notes, copying out sections, describing the manuscript.
Why not tell the reader?
You have the whole quote, in context?
Which year?
After how many hours?
Moreover if Tischendorf had stolen the leaves, he would have been arrested as a thief in 1853.
What notes?
One might ask, why do YOU not quote them for the reader?
You have it. You know it.
The monks had long felt the arrogance of western scholars; why should they nourish such prejudices unnecessarily? Most of all: joking this way the librarian would have deprived himself of any argument for not surrendering all the 129 sheets to Tischendorf.
[22] Fyssas, “Recent History” (see n. 21), 190, mentions a letter of Callinicos of Sinai quoted by F.H.A. Scrivener, A Full Collation of the Codex Sinaiticus with the Revised Text of the New Testament (Cambridge, 1864), vii n. 1, saying “that the manuscript was always kept in the library and was inserted in the old catalogues of the Monastery.” Alas, there is again no proof of this. Bénéchevitch, Les manuscrits Grecs (see n. 8), 25–31, mentions a first but incomplete catalog prepared by Cosmas, later patriarch of Constantinople, of 1704; this catalog does not include the codex. The same is true for the new catalog by the librarian Cyrillos in the 1840s; further work in cataloging the manuscripts (after Tischendorf’s first visit) was done by Porfirij Uspenskij (1845 and 1850), Archimandrite Antonin Capustin (1850), Victor Gardthausen (1886), and Vladimir NikolaevicˇBénéchevitch (1911); the most comprehensive now is M. Kamil, Catalogue of All Manuscripts in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai (Wiesbaden, 1970; Arab. original, 1951).
How these precious fragments came into such a place is not easily understood, the rather since we have been recently assured that the manuscript of which they formed a part had long been in the library of the monastery, and inserted in the old catalogues 1.
1 See Callinicos of Sinai’s letter to Mr. J. S. Davies, in the Guardian of May 27, 1863.
.... the MS. in question (as the librarian of our holy monastery, having been so from the year 1811 to 1858, assured me) belonged to the library of the monastery, and was marked in its ancient catalogues.
... old manuscripts like the Codex Sinaiticus were worthless. Its majuscule script belonged to a by-gone age and was no longer readable.
If you were presented with a English book, where all the letters were written in a continuous string without spaces, and which you didn't believe had any monetary value, would you be inclined to read it, when you had other books with the same content which were properly formatted?A claim without evidence.
If it were true, Tischendorf would likely have crafted a story as to how he told them what was in the manuscript. In his fake story, the red cloth monk knew he had the New Testament.
How many leaves of the Codex Sinaiticus, and other ancient condexes, had been consigned to the flames or to other purposes by 1844? Answer: a vast quantity. Probably the remnants of Sinaiticus were the only survivor of a prior wealth of ancient codices.Why would a monk have a responsibility to give even one leaf to Tischendorf?
A charge that doesn't stand up, as the rest of Sinaiticus was kept in a monk's cell, to which Tischendorf had no access and no sight of. And you won't answer what happened to the other half of the codex. Thus your contentions here would be "laughed out of court" for lack of evidence.Unless he was a corrupt accomplice.
The real facts are simple.
TIschendorf took five intact quires and part of a sixth out of the existing codex, which Uspensky saw the next year.
the rest of Sinaiticus was kept in a monk's cell, to which Tischendorf had no access and no sight of. And you won't answer what happened to the other half of the codex.
Who would have accused him, in what court?
Isn't your position that some underling unknown gave him "permission"?
Secretly, without a paper trail, and with Tischendorf keeping it all secret.
Dirk Jongkind gave us thanks for making Uspensky available in English.
You have the whole quote, in context?
Which year?
After how many hours?
I'll consider your "quote" irrelevant.
Why was it all together when Uspensky saw it in 1845 and 1850?
If you were presented with a English book, where all the letters were written in a continuous string without spaces, and which you didn't believe had any monetary value, would you be inclined to read it, when you had other books with the same content which were properly formatted?
I think it is eminently reasonable to suppose that the parchment "wasn't readable" in the ordinary sense.
A claim without evidence.
I'll consider your "quote" irrelevant.
Actually a weak argument from silence...
Uspensky didn't specifically say the "complete" or "entire" or "whole" book of Hermas (like he said of the New Testament) when describing the contents of the Codex Sinaiticus.
Where does Uspensky actually say that he saw the "complete" or "entire" or "whole" book of Hermas in the Codex Sinaiticus in his extensive notes?