https://books.google.com/books?id=DIZdEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA339
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The numbers seem wacky
p. 315 is this but p. 339 is the start of the chapter
p. 315 - SHOWS THAT Christopher determines by visual
https://books.google.com/books?id=5n5dEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT315
p. 353
* A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice *The acclaimed author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts introduces us to the extraordinary keepers and companions of medieval manuscripts over a thousand years of historyThe illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest...
books.google.com
Finally, I looked at the
Homer. It has recently been transferred to the Beinecke Library from the celebrated manuscript collection of Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya, of Keio University in Tokyo, who had acquired it as a charming curiosity in the history of bibliophily, knowing it to be a notorious fake. I had lunch with him in New Haven later that same day, and he spoke of Simonides and Phillipps with tolerant amusement as his fellow fanatics. The Homer is a baffling and astonishing display of calligraphic virtuosity, not large, unrolled to about the length and width of a necktie. One cannot but admire the craftsmanship.
Simonides is said to have darkened it with tobacco juice to create an effect of antiquity, the “brown spots” inspected by Phillipps, but even still it
does not look to modern eyes to be older than the nineteenth century. Phillipps wilfully considered it probably the most precious of all his manuscripts.
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https://books.google.com/books?id=5n5dEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT329
traditional old style of the early Church. The monastery’s resident scribe, Dionysius,
declined the task, and young Simonides agreed to undertake it. He found a large
bound manuscript “prepared many centuries ago” but hardly written and still with
very many remaining leaves of blank parchment. He removed a short text at the
front and copied the whole Bible and two other works quickly into the volume,
stopping only when the supply of pages ran out. In the meantime, Uncle Benedict
died (in the early summer of 1840, according to the Biographical Memoir) and the
project was abandoned. Simonides carried his new Bible to Constantinople, where
the former patriarch Constantius took possession of it in August 1841 to present
instead to the monks of St Catherine on Mount Sinai. In 1846 he confirmed to
Simonides that this had now been done. In 1852, Simonides himself went to Sinai
and he saw it intact there, he said, except that his dedication to the tsar had been
erased and the manuscript had been artificially aged to make it appear older.
Tischendorf and others rightly dismissed the claim as absurd. William Aldis
Wright (1831-1914), then librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, wrote to the
Guardian in response that the Greek Bible consists of about 4,000,000 uncial letters
and that it would be impossible to write and correct such a vast text in a little over
nine months at most. He noted that Simonides was born - according to his own
Memoir - in November 1824 and that therefore he was at the time only just (or
hardly) fifteen. An official from the diocese of Salonika observed that it would have
been illegal for a boy under twenty to stay on Athos. Others pointed out that the
Leipzig leaves of the manuscript had already been abstracted from Sinai by
Tischendorf in 1844, a fact Simonides evidently did not then know.
Reality never disconcerted Simonides, however. He simply saw these critics as
enemies conspiring against him. After a short time, he too wrote back to the Guardian
in January 1863 emending the published date of his birth, which he had previously
given with such dogmatic precision, recalling now that he was actually born earlier,
on 5 November 1820, bringing him more plausibly to nineteen when the Bible
manuscript was supposedly made, and usefully producing a fresh-looking birth
certificate to prove it. He revised his memory of seeing the manuscript at Sinai in
1852 and recalled now that the monks had damaged it and perhaps it was after all
already missing some leaves by then. In the mid-1860s, the debate was still hurtling
back and forth in the press, both in America and in England. Some journals,
especially the Literary Churchman, were uncritically sympathetic to Simonides. Others
checking anxiously with Mount Athos found no Abbot Benedict recorded. Simonides
countered that a monk Kallinikos had been there at the time and would confirm the
story, and when he proved unfindable on Athos, Simonides reported having just
conveniently received two letters from Kallinikos the Hieromonk himself now in
Alexandria and on his deathbed (effectively ending further correspondence),
corroborating everything exactly as Simonides had claimed. When the monastery at
Sinai denied receiving any visit from a Simonides in 1852, he explained that he had
been travelling under another name. Finally, he insisted that he could prove that he
wrote the manuscript since he had left personal inscriptions on several specified
pages. When checked against the manuscript which was by then in St Petersburg,
every one of these pages was missing or had been mysteriously mutilated. That, said
Simonides, was further proof of conspiracy against him.
It is perhaps not generally known that the Leipzig portion of the Codex Sinaiticus
was in London in 1865. It was brought over by Tischendorf to exhibit at a lecture he
was to give in French at the Royal Society of Literature. On 3 February he took it to
show to Sir Frederic Madden at the British Museum. Madden wrote, “Of course, we
all looked at it with the greatest interest. For myself, I have never for a moment
doubted its genuineness, in spite of the atrocious lies of Simonides, which will be a
great satisfaction to English biblical scholars.” In 1933 the principal part from St
Petersburg (by then Leningrad) was sold by the cash-pressed Soviet government to
the British Museum for a then unprecedented figure of £100,000. It is now Add. MS
43725 in the British Library.
*
The preposterous claim that Simonides created the Codex Sinaiticus has never quite
died out. My mother’s late cousin as a little girl put her sixpence in the collecting
fund to help pay for it in 1933, but she told me sadly that she recalled that the
manuscript was afterwards declared to be a fake.
I actually decided to write this
chapter after receiving an unsolicited email from an otherwise apparently rational
American assuring me that Sinaiticus had been forged by Simonides and asking for
my help in proving it. I told him that such nonsense belonged with those credulous
conspiracy theories such as that
the moon landings of 1969 were faked, and he
replied that indeed they were. He referred me to a book, which I have now read, T
he
Forging of Codex Sinaiticus. An Illustrated Consideration of the Anomalies and the Many
Indicators of 19th-century Forgery Contained in the Manuscript by Bill Cooper. The author is
described as Adjunct Professor of Providential History and Apologetics at the
Institute for Creation Research School of Biblical Apologetics. The gist is that
Tischendorf was in a secret plot with the Vatican and the Jesuits to defraud
evangelical Protestants of the received text of their English Bible and that
Sinaiticus, together with the Codex Vaticanus and the Bodmer papyri and other
great early biblical witnesses, are all fakes, and that Simonides had been
unknowingly tricked into being an accomplice. I came down the stairs after reading
this in the British Library shaking my head in despair at human nature, and I made
for the Library’s Treasures Gallery. There on permanent display is one volume of the
Codex Sinaiticus in an area of the exhibition called ‘Sacred Texts’, appropriately
open in the Gospel of Matthew. I gazed yet again at its huge pages, ancient
undulating parchment and impeccably fourth-century script. The Codex Sinaiticus
was not - let me repeat, was absolutely not - forged by Constantine Simonides.
