Steven Avery
Administrator
see Epp about p. 100-102
Page 100
Then, to Tischendorf s rage, almost as soon as his momentous discovery was made public, the claim was made that the entire codex was a forgery. The claim was made by one of the greatest forgers of the nineteenth century, the Greek scholar Constantine Simonides, who said he had written the manuscript himself. Simonides had pursued a bizarre career selling both genuine documents as well as forged ones. During a stay in England between 1853 and 1855 he failed to sell his forgeries to Sir Frederick Madden of the British Museum one day, and then turned up the next day selling genuine manuscripts. He did successfully sell thirty-one forgeries to the noted and gullible English collector Sir Thomas Phillipps.
Page 101
Now, just as Tischendorf was about to produce his magisterial folio edition of the Codex Sinaiticus, Simonides claimed to have forged the whole manuscript during a stay on Mount Athos in 1840. Simonides even produced a Greek monk named Kallinikos, who was willing to testify that he had witnessed the forgery. Moreover Simonides was sufficiently skilled at calligraphy for many to find his claim highly plausible. He asserted that his uncle Benedict had suggested he make the forgery and present it to the T sar; but tiring of this idea, he stated that instead he had handed the document to a former archbishop of Sinai. In this way the forged codex, Simonides claimed, had reached the monas¬ tery of St Catherine and eventually fallen into the hands of Tischendorf.
Page 101
As A.J. Farrer, the twentieth-century expert on literary forgeries, observed, ‘The implication that Tischendorf had mistaken a manuscript of the nineteenth century for one of the fourth century naturally roused that irascible theo¬ logian to a condition of fury’. Tischendorf knew that Simonides was taking a humorous revenge after a pre¬ vious episode. When he had tried to sell the forged copy of the Shepherd of Hernias in Germany, Tischendorf had exposed him. In a letter to the Syriac scholar, the Revd William Cureton, Tischendorf expressed his amazement that although some scholars had thanked him for this, others had wanted the whole affair kept quiet, out of shame at being tricked by Simonides. Now he raged at Simonides’ malice. ‘With the many articles about the Simonides swindle,’ he complained to his friend David¬ son, ‘I have nowhere seen, by the way, that anyone proved how Simonides came to his extraordinary idea concerning the authorship of the Codex Sinaiticus. ^(/as it
Page 102
that his fellow-scholars were still smarting at being tricked by Simonides until Tischendorf proved them all wrong? Maybe, he suggested to Davidson, the Berlin professors were so filled with vanity that they would never come to a proper appreciation of his own critical skills. Hardly anyone, he lamented, spotted that fact that the impudent cheat Simonides’ behaved so maliciously to him simply ^because I revealed in such a devastating fashion his frauds’.
Page 102
In fact a good number of scholars did see this, including the hapless Tregelles. Tregelles even generously wrote that he was ‘as absolutely certain of the genuineness and antiquity of the Codex Sinaiticus as of his own existence . (Such generosity did not make Tischendorf treat Tregelles any better. Later scholars found that whenever in his editions of the Bible Tischendorf used information dis¬ covered by Tregelles, he omitted to mention its source!) And though Codex Sinaiticus was obviously not a forgery, doubts about its status sowed by Simonides delayed its impact on Biblical scholarship. Because of Simonides, Codex Sinaiticus took longer to make its proper mark on the Christian world.