Info on Kallinikos from McGrane's Review of Cooper's The Forging of Codex Sinaiticus:
Dr Cooper’s evidence demonstrates only that there was a lay monk called Kallinikos in the Panteleimon monastery sometime in the later nineteenth century. We do not doubt it, as the name is very common: Simonides himself states (The Guardian, June 17, 1863), ‘The name is not an unusual one...and there are several of that name in Mt. Athos’. But the evidence does not establish that a Kallinkos at the Panteleimon monastery was Kallinikos the correspondent to The Guardian, nor that he was there at the same time as Simonides (both of which Dr Cooper claims).
Dr Cooper’s source for the existence of a Kallinikos at the Panteleimon monastery is the Lambros Catalogue, which has entries for works written by Καλλινικος μοναχος. But this proves too much. Dr Cooper states (p.40), ‘The term Καλλινικου μοναχου [of Kallinikos the monk] is of much interest, because it is the same term by which Kallinikos himself signs his letters to Simonides and those he wrote in support of Simonides to the newspapers – Καλλινικος μοναχος, Kallinikos the monk.’ Dr Cooper could hardly be more wrong: the letters are signed + Καλλινικος Ἱερομοναχος, which connotes a clergyman, a monk ordained as a priest whereas Καλλινικος μοναχος connotes an unordained layman, as most monks were (the apparent exception is in a letter appearing in The Guardian of November 11, 1863, which has a different translator, who has unusually transliterated the name as Callinikus and incorrectly translated Ἱερομοναχος as ‘the Monk’. This translator also translates second person singular as ‘thou’, ‘thee’ and ‘thy’).
Dr Cooper appears to have overlooked that all the signatures on letters to Simonides are preceded by a cross symbol, which at that time customarily denoted high ecclesiastical office (bishop or archbishop). Spyridon Lambros, himself a Greek, a professor of history, and sometime Prime Minister of Greece, was not so ignorant as to refer to a ἱερομοναχος, a clergyman, as a μοναχος, a layman. We note that, for example, Benedict correctly appears in his catalogue as ἱεροδιακονος: a monk ordained a deacon (Dr Cooper translates this as ‘archdeacon’, which is most incorrect), and even a cursory inspection of his catalogue shows that authors and copyists who are a ἱερομοναχος and distinguished from those who are a μοναχος. Two of the works in the Lambros catalogue by Kallinikos (6406 and 6407) are mere copies of a work copied by Simonides of 1841 (6405), and we are not given the date of the copying. However, another of the works by the lay monk Kallinikos, who describes himself as ‘the least of the monks of the Russikon coenobium’, was done in March 1867, which is 26 years after Simonides left the monastery, so hardly establishes contemporaneity, and he is not said to be a ἱερομοναχος. A fourth work is an undated book ‘written by the hand of the monk [μοναχος] Kallinikos and [the hand] of the monk Simeon of Samos’, which has no evident association with Simonides or to the Panteleimon monastery (it being merely on their bookshelves). Accordingly, the Lambros catalogue gives no support for Simonides’ correspondent Καλλινικος Ἱερομοναχος being at the Panteleimon monastery, nor even of a lay monk named Καλλινικος being there at the same time as Simonides.
But we can go further. One unintended consequence of Simonides’ having invented a whole back story for his correspondent is that it closes off the possibility that Kallinikos was an unordained monk, a μοναχος, at Mt Athos when Simonides knew him, and was ordained a Ἱερομοναχος later when Simonides corresponded with him, i.e. a monk who became a priest. Simonides claimed (The Guardian, June 17, 1863) that he was an ordained priest who took up arms in the Greek Revolution (1821-30), was thereby disqualified from public priestly duties thereafter, and so entered Mount Athos, i.e. he was a priest who became a monk, hence a hieromonk, and ‘he spent a long time in a monastery at Mt. Athos, where I made his acquaintance’. He was thus a hieromonk before Simonides ever knew him (according to his story). This demonstrates that the Καλλινικος μοναχος listed in the Lambros catalogue (a layman) is not the same person as Καλλινικος Ἱερομοναχος (a clergyman) of Simonides’ imagination.
Additionally, although Simonides invented a scrappy, shaky cursive style for his Kallinikos as an ‘old man ready to die’ to differentiate it from his own, but which would fool no trained graphologist, he also made some mistakes. Simonides had two brothers, at least one in Alexandria, so could send packets to them with enclosures of letters written in the name of Kallinikos for them to post back to him, thus attracting the appropriate postmarks. At least once he mistakenly enclosed a letter to himself purportedly from Kallinikos but with the envelope addressed in his (Simonides’) usual hand and without changing to a different source of paper. (Review, pp. 74-75, note 171)