The aforementioned private correspondence with the British Library put the matter clearly with regard to radiocarbon dating: it has no plans to perform C14 dating of Codex Sinaiticus, nor has it done any in the past. Additionally, the Codex Sinaiticus Project, which brings together the work of the four museums that house parts of the codex, confirms that no chemical analysis has been performed on the inks:
The Codex Sinaiticus inks have never been chemically characterized, and the type and proportions of ingredients mixed together have never been determined. Therefore, the composition of the writing media can only be roughly guessed by observing their visible characteristics and their degradation patterns.5
This is remarkable considering the case of Gregory-Aland Codex 2427 formerly known as 'Archaic Mark' whose text is extremely similar to Codex Vaticanus, a matter that is touched upon briefly and relevantly by Dr Cooper in respect of chemical analysis (although he makes a grave error in relation to Vaticanus as is noted below). Codex 2427 was highly esteemed by T.C. Skeat, palaeographer at the British Museum, and by Kurt Aland, whose work on the Greek New Testament text forms the basis for most modern translations. However, its genuineness was completely undermined in 2006 when its text was demonstrated slavishly to follow Buttmann's 1860 typographical facsimile of Vaticanus, including its mistakes, and it was confirmed in 2009 by chemical analysis that it is a forgery of later than 1874 since one of the inks used in its production was not marketed until that year.
A similar example (relevant to this review since Dr Cooper believes that Codex Sinaiticus was written in 1840 by Simonides) is recounted in the newspaper obituary of Constantine Simonides:
Simonides, the notorious Greek manuscript forger.. .had a most remarkable career, and as a forger of Egyptian and Syrian antiquities he stands without an equal. Among his exploits was the presentation to a committee of scholars of a manuscript of Homer...anterior to the Christian era. Eleven of the 12 members of the committee were convinced of the authenticity of the document, but the twelfth discovered that it was a faithful copy of the text of Homer as published by the German critic Wolff, and that the manuscript reproduced the whole of the printer's errors in this edition...Several of the greatest scholars of Europe were, indeed, deceived by the forgeries of this astute Greek.6
These embarrassing debacles underscore that through over-reliance on palaeography it really is possible to fool almost all of the people all of the time.
6 The Times, October 18, 1890. - p. 4-5