CARM - Abbott
Judging from the Kallinikos letters, the 1840 date for the creation of the Sinaiticus was no secret and was known to various churchmen up and down the line. Yet the monks at St Catherine's Monastery always maintained that Sinaiticus was of ancient origin - even when reporting it as a 19th...
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Another article about Simonides, which deals with another of his fabrications, again not mentioning Sinaiticus, is a book review in
The Classical Review, vol. 3 (Feb. 1889) page 64-66, reviewing
A Collation of the Athos Codex of the Shepherd of Hermas by J. Armitage Robinson [Cambridge Univ. Press 1888], reviewed by T.K. Abbott. The Athos Codex was a document sold by Constantine Simonides, the first appearance to modern eyes of the , in Greek. The interesting part of the article is lengthy but I shall do my best to transcribe:
[quote:]
Until about 30 years ago the
Shepherd was known only in a Latin version. ... [In] 1855, what purported to be the original Greek text of almost the entire work was offered to and purchased by the University of Leipsic. The vendor was Constantine Simonides. ... [To] us of an older generation it calls up the vision of a dignified and imposing gentleman with a long beard and plausible manners, having also great knowledge of old manuscripts, and a good store of interesting documents for sale, including such things as biblical papyri of the first century, some books of Homer's
Iliad written BC 87, and boustrophedon, the whole history of which moreover was said to be traceable.
He had also palimpsests, of which that of Uranios was the most famous, as it possessed the singular peculiarity that the obscure writing, or what professed to be the original, appeared to be written over, not under, the blacker text. It was this ms that was made the ground of a criminal charge against him, as he was prosecuted in Germany on the double charge of having stolen the ms from some library unknown, and of having forged it. We are not concerned to defend the logic of this double accusation. Certain it is, however, that some of his mss were genuine, but that others - and those the most interesting in their alleged character - were forged. Considering the extent and variety of his work, Simonides is perhaps the most remarkable forger on record.
At the time that he sold the copy of the
Shepherd to the University of Leipsic, his character was not as well known as it soon after became. The copy consisted of three leaves of a paper ms from Mount Athos in a fourteenth century hand, and a copy of six other leaves of the same ms which he had not been able to bring away with him. The text was immediately edited by Anger and Dindorf, who promised to add a volume of critical materials. This volume, however, never appeared, and for a good reason. Simonides was arrested on the charge above alluded to, of forging or stealing the ms of Uranios. His papers were seized (a circumstances of which his friends made great complaint), and amongst them was found another copy of the
Hermas ms, very different from the one he had sold to the Leipsic Library. This Simonides accounted for by saying that they were made from different mss. .... But the general opinion has been that the second copy (that found by the police) was a genuine copy of the Athos ms, the other having been constructed from it by alterations due to Simonides himself. In fact, these alterations actually appeared in the second copy, some in pencil and some in ink. It may be asked what was his object in thus falsifying the text when he possessed a correct copy. The answer is found in the fact that he also produced was professed to be a palimsest of the
Shepherd. It was doubtless with a view to the construction of this palimsest that he kept back his real Athos copy, so that it might present a different and what might appear to be a more ancient form of text.
Another Greek text of part of the
Shepherd was discovered by Tischendorf in the Sinaitic mss. Although this was only a fragment, yet by its substantial agreement with the Athos ms it was sufficient to prove that the latter was actually the original Greek, not, as Tischendorf had himself suggested, a middle age translation from some Latin version (different however from both those above mentioned). Nevertheless the bad faith of Simonides made it impossible to place full reliance on his copy.
Now comes this discovery alluded to, namely that of the original of Simonides's apographon in the monastery of St. Gregory on Mount Athos. The discovery was made by Dr. Spyr. P. Lambros, who was engaged in cataloguing the mss of the Athos libraries. The exact correspondence of the Leipsic leaves with those in Athos leaves no room for doubt that they are part of the same ms. even if we had not the confirmation given by the tradition of the monks that the three missing leaves were abstracted by 'Minas Minoides,' who also they say made certain annotations now appearing in the margin of the ms.
Professor Lambros's collation of the ms has proved that Simonides's copy was not only inexact, but even unscrupulous, as indeed his other performances would lead us to suspect. A man accustomed to alter and amend mss cannot be trust to copy correctly. .... Where there were gaps in the ms he did not always mark them, but filled them up. .... [For some reason, Simonides's copies lacked the concluding page of the
Shepherd.]
But here we meet his handiwork again. He was not to be defeated by a difficulty so trifling as the loss of a leaf of the Greek text. Four years after the sale to his corrupted copy to the Leipsic library he printed, along with other tracts, what purported to be the missing Greek conclusion. As by that time his character was irretrievably lost, no one would look at his publication.
[endquote]
The remainder of this article compares quotations from Simonides's Greek and the prevailing Latin text of the Shepherd to show that Simonides had contrived his Greek version by backtranslating from the Latin, with mistakes.
So we have two distinct frauds by Simonides - the Uranios ms which got him a prison sentence, and the Greek version of the
Shepherd of Hermas. These were detected in the Victorian Era, when scientific analysis of the parchment or paper was not what it is now. These two scandals involving Simonides were in Germany, and he may have hoped that English scholars were unaware of what had happened in Germany when he made his claims about the Sinaiticus in British newspapers about five years afterward.
