James E. Snapp #124
Farrer seems to have been only poorly informed about the details of Codex Sinaiticus' contents, and somewhat gullible where Simonides’ claims are concerned: the basis for Farrer’s insistence that there was a person named Kallinokos who wrote letters to Simonides are very faint; it’s as if he has assumed that the existence of the name Kallinokos in a colophon implies that the person who wrote the letters must have been that person. Whereas the real inference is that Simonides knew that a copyist named Kallinokos worked, or had worked, at Mt. Athos, and Simonides borrowed that name when he wrote letters to himself to provide a second witness for his claim.
Regarding the idea that Simonides had access to collations of Vaticanus: the question is not that he had access to collations to Vaticanus (although I don’t think it’s been shown that he did), but that anyone with access to those collations would be able to make the text of Codex Sinaiticus by relying on them. (For example, the collations are collations of the text of the manuscript; from what source would Simonides have obtained the marginalia in Acts which matched up (in many details) with the marginalia that appears in Acts in Vaticanus?) Scholz’s collation, made in 1830, which echoed the 1669 collation that had been made by Bartolucci, was inaccurate at many points. Plus, Sinaiticus diverged from Vaticanus frequently: there are over 3,000 differences between the two manuscripts in the Gospels, and Sinaiticus clearly had a non-Alexandrian exemplar for John 1:1-8:38. Yet they both share some rare readings, such as APOSKIASMATOS in James 1:17, and the reading in Matthew 27:49 which states that Jesus was pierced before He died.
Thus the proposal that the teenaged Simonides produced Codex Sinaiticus requires that Simonides sifted through Vaticanus, and adopted some of its extremely rare readings, but rejected others, and sometime wrote several pages (in Tobit, and at the beginning of John) without consulting Vaticanus at all. But Simonides’ claim was that he had written the codex, not intending to create a forgery, but as a present for the czar. In which case, there would have been no need to pick-and-choose variants from collations of Vaticanus, or to adopt one exemplar for John 1:1-8:38 and a different one for the rest of the Gospels.
When I explained that the copyists who made Codex Sinaiticus carelessly copied and bound together pages containing the same text (in First Chron.), you wrote, “When the smoke keeps rising up you have to ask yourself if there isn't a fire somewhere.”
Why does it seem incredible that a group of copyists, working on lots of manuscripts, could not carelessly lose their place and repeat a portion of the text? Look at the alternative that you are proposing: to maintain the idea that Simonides made Codex Sinaiticus, you must believe that Simonides deliberately repeated this portion of text, and added corrections to its first appearance, but not to the repetition.
You wrote, “I see a very serious problem here. Tischendorf had 23 leafs of Jeremiah out of those first 43 that he obtained in 1844. Why then does he make a big fuss about transcribing one page of Isaiah-Jeremiah in 1853. It was as if he had never obtained all those leafs from Jeremiah back in 1844. It would seem obvious that he is trying to cover something up, but what?”
I must confess that I do not understand what you are saying. Your question seems to be based on some confusion about when and where Tischendorf did what.
You asked, “You think Tischendorf was lying when he said he found them in a basket destined for the fire?”
Either Tischendorf lied about that, or else he misunderstood what the monks told him they were doing with the manuscript-pages in the basket that Tischendorf saw.
You asked, “How long would you employ someone that was so sloppy and careless with skins that are worth a year's wages?”
Not long, but I’m not a bishop in Caesarea spending someone else’s money.
You wrote, “If Simonides was so superior in paleography as many claimed, and so practiced at creating forgeries, than you should be able to put aside all of the arguments based on paleography.”
No; that does not follow. Here's one reason why. An expert at palaeography, making a present for the czar, would have no reason for changing his handwriting (and adding other features of the different scripts of the copyists who produced Codex Sinaiticus -- different spelling, different decorative flourishes, different abbreviations) back and forth. A person who was merely making a present for the czar, if he noticed that he had made a bad mistake, might re-write the pages on which the mistake had appeared -- but would he do so in different handwriting, and with different spelling, and with different treatment of the sacred names, and with a different use of the diple-mark? No, Rejoice44, he would not. But there are replacement-pages in Codex Sinaiticus, and they have all these features which are different from the other pages.
The case that Codex Sinaiticus is what it appears to be – a manuscript produced in the 300’s, very probably at Caesarea – is based on a number of factors. I hope that you will take the time to read the books and articles I recommended, especially the work by Milne & Skeat, and by Jongkind.
I believe we have given this tangent more attention than it deserves.
