what is the smoking gun?

Steven Avery

Administrator
Hi,

A good question that I was asked today. I could not choose one, so I gave three.

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Would 3 smoking guns be ok? I'll try to keep it fairly simple.
We will bypass historical elements like the 1844 smoking parchment of Tischendorf faking going into the fire, and we will skip the 1859 red cloth fabric-ation.

One smoking gun is so simple that most of the New Testament theorists can not "handle the truth", The Tale of Two Manuscripts.

Since the Codex Sinaiticus Project placed the codex online in 2009, it is trivially easy (ok, we spent some hours double-checking everything) to see that:

the 90% 347 leaves 1859 St. Petersburg (sold to England) bulk of the ms. was colored by hand, erratically.
The colouring in the 1850s is a specific charge, lemon-juice mentioned, that was made in 1862/3, and never researched until after the CSP placed the four-in-one (two main parts) manuscripts online in 2009.

All this is seen by simply comparing the bulk of the "yellow with age" main 347 leaves 1859 British Library ms with the --
10%, 43 leaves, Leipzig (Codex Friderico-Augustanus) 1844 pages. Leipzig was brought out before the colouring.

(This element has multiple confirmations, e.g. the white Leipzig pages have virtually zero colour variability, the Brit pages have more variability than any other ms. we have seen. The British Library went out of their way to notice the variance, in the days before any authenticity concerns.)

And why was only part of the manuscript colored? For that we delve into the history, and how the Leipzig leaves were already deposited in a European library (Leipzig University Library) before there was a full plan of action. Once the leaves were placed there, it was impossible for that batch to be coloured. So what was done was to make sure the two sections were kept distant from one another, and to point people to a facsimile book that hid the difference.

While this does not by itself prove the modern production of the ms., it immediately makes the vulgate version of the manuscript non-functional. Why darken an ancient ms.? Why darken part of an ancient ms?

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The second smoking gun is simply the 43 leaves of pristine white parchment in a supposed ancient ms. When manuscripts yellow with use and age.

"White sheep or calves and goats will tend to produce white parchment, whereas animals with darker coats will produce parchment showing shadowy brown patterns. ... The colour of parchment varies with animal type, making process and condition or state of decline. New parchment can be near white but as it ages or is exposed to detrimental factors it will start to yellow and go brown-black if left to degrade completely. The colour change can also be influenced by the type of degradation and degree of gelatinization. (see fig. 14)"

CSP - Parchment Assessment of the Codex Sinaiticus - Gavin Moorhead - May 2009
http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/project/conservation_parchment.aspx
Amazingly, the Leipzig pages have overturned the known chemical processes of aging parchment.

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The third smoking gun is the flexible, supple pristine condition as a whole (visible on a British Library video) for a ms that is supposed to have been moved and handled continuously over 1,000 years, and then stored another 500. This is called "exceptional". Which is only true if you start circular with the Tischendorf claims. A more realistic appraisal would be "impossible".

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There are many other very important evidences .. those can stand as the three smoking guns.

Beyond that there are more historical elements, such as the lack of any provenance before 1840, that work as corroboration.
 
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