The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel - it does not look to modern eyes to be older

Steven Avery

Administrator
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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

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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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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, The
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.
 
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Steven Avery

Administrator
p. 483 previous chapter on Maden

p. 484 unsure

p. 485 missing requested!
Is there a bibliography or is this it?

p. 486 ocr

also proud to name Phillipps among his heroes and role models, ‘The Saga of Christianity’s Oldest Liturgical Book’, pp. 405-11 in J. H. Marrow, R. A. Linenthal and W. Noel, eds., The Medieval Book Glosses from Friends & Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel, ’t Goy-Houten, 2010.

The letter of Simonides to the Guardian in 1863, quoted on this page. is from L. Diamantopoulou, ‘Konstantinos Simonides: Leben und Werk. Ein tabellarischer Uberblick’, pp. 305-25 in Muller et al., eds., Die getauschte Wissenschaft, as above, p. 305.

The denunciation of Simonides in the Allgemeinische Zeitung of November 1853 appeared in English in The Athenaeum, no. 1478, 23 February 1856, p. 233, which 1 have read in British Library 1700.b.4, a volume of newspaper cuttings relating to Simonides; it was also published in French in L’Athenaeum Franfaise, December 1853, pp. 1185-6.

The remark of Patriarch Arthimus IV echoes the sentiment of the Caliph Omar on the destruction of the library of Alexandria in the mid-seventh century: ‘if these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed’ (R. Ovenden, Burning the Books, Cambridge, Mass., 2020, p. 32).

Simonides may nonetheless have staged a show excavation in Constantinople. “He declared that at a certain spot an Arabic MS in Syriac characters would be discovered by digging. Workmen were accordingly employed, Simonides himself not being allowed to descend. By-and-bye a pause was made for luncheon, and not long afterwards Simonides called out, ‘There it is, bring it up.’ The soil about it, however, was quite different from that of the ground. The workmen . . . when interrogated confessed that during luncheon the Greek came out for a short time and jumped into the pit, and began to burrow” (London Evening Standard, 1 October 1867, and other newspapers, including The New York Times, 20 October 1867).

Phillipps’s habit of staying up late (this page) is confirmed by Madden on a visit to Middle Hill: “Sir Thos. always keeps me up, and shows me MSS till my eyes ache” (journal, 31 August 1846; Bodleian, MS Eng. hist, c.159, p. 362; elsewhere Madden says that Phillipps often did not go to bed at all but stayed downstairs fully dressed on the sofa).

The various different forgeries (and probable forgeries) bought from Simonides by Phillipps at different times are listed in his catalogue under the following titles, (l) “Panselinos tom Zojgraphom, or Manual of Painters” (MS 13871; Sotheby’s, 4 July 1972, lot 1730;
now St John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, Kacmarcik MS 21, Area Artium Collection); (2) “Meletius’s
History of Byzantine Painting” (MS 13872; Sotheby’s, 1972, as above, lot 1731; A. Freeman, Bibliotheca Fictiva: A
Collection of Books & Manuscripts Relating to Literary Forgery, 400 bc-ad 2000, London, 2014, pp. 376-7, no. 1504, with
plate; now the Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore); (3)-(5) “A MS. in Arrowhead Character on
Vellum”, “Euleri Ethnica” and “Neocomi Historia Byzantina” (MSS 13873-5; together, Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1732); (6)
“Homeri Ilias” (MS 13877; Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1724; now Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn d543, bought
from Professor Takamiya on the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection Fund, 2019); (7) “Hesiodi
Opera” (MS 13878; Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1725); (8)-(9) “Anacreontis Carmina” and “Pythagoras Aurea Carmina” (MSS
13879-80; together, Sotheby’s, 1972, part of lot 1726; now Beinecke MS 581); (10) “Tyrtasi Odas” (MS 13881;
Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1727; now Beinecke MS 580; C. E. Lutz, ‘A Forged Manuscript in Boustrophedon’, Yale University
Library Gazette, 53, 1978, pp. 28-44); (ll) “Phocylidis Carmina, &c.” (MS 13882; Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1728; now
Beinecke MS 582); and (12)-(13) “A Charter ..“Another similar Charter ..“A third Charter more suspicious
than the others” (MSS 13883-85; together, Sotheby’s, 1972, lot 1729; now Beinecke MS 583). Beinecke MS 251,
which is genuine, is listed in B. M. W. Knox et al, ‘The Ziskind Collection of Greek Manuscripts’, pp. 39-56 in The
Yale University Library Gazette, 32, 1957, p. 51.

Phillipps’s suggestion that the scrolls might be made from boa constrictor skin occurs in his letter to S. L. Sotheby, who printed it in his Principia Typographica, II, London, 1858, p. 136e. I am grateful to Professor Takamiya for advice on the Homer and for allowing me to see it.

The visits of Simonides to the British Museum, this page, are recounted in Madden’s journal for 22-23 February 1853. The quotation “At first..is Bodleian, MS Eng. hist, c.166, p. 65. Madden also wrote a recollection of the same visit in his journal on 23 April 1856, quoted by Munby, Phillipps Studies, IV again, pp. 116-18.

That is the source for the discreet aside by Barker, traveller and orientalist (and member of a family of shipping agents in Alexandria), who died of cholera in the Crimean War.

Madden’s purchases of authentic manuscripts from Simonides are now BL, Add. MSS 19386-93 (Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the Years MDCCCXLVIII-MDCCCLIll, London, 1868, pp. 228-9);

on 1 March 1853 he recorded the agreed price as £35 but in the later account remembered it as £42. On 3 March 1853, the dealer William Boone showed Madden several Greek manuscripts which he too had evidently bought from Simonides. The two versions of Simonides’ visit to the Bodleian Library occur in The Athenaeum, no. 1479, 4 March 1856, included in the volume of newspaper cuttings cited above, and in
the Biographical Memoir, pp. 26-9
. The encounter is also described in W. D. Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, A.D. 1598-A.D. 1867, [London], 1868, pp. 280-81, and H. H. E. Craster, History of the Bodleian Library, 1845-1945, Oxford, 1952, p. 88.

Bodleian, MS Barocci 33 is a collection of texts by Matthaeus Blastares, Gemistus Pletho and others, in its original blind-stamped binding. I owe the translation of the letter to Coxe, cited on this page, entirely to the kindness of Dr Mae A. Goldgraben and her mother, Dr Giannoula I. Mihailidou.

The story of Simonides in Paris is from L’Athenaeum Fnanfaise, V, 23 February 1856, pp. 156-7, supplemented by Farrer, Literary Forgeries, p.


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p. 487 highlights OCR
Another forgery of the same momentous year attempted to debunk Christianity from a supposed manuscript source: the Wichtige historische Enthullungen uber die wiridiche Todesart Jesu, Leipzig, 1859,
Wichtige, Historische Enthüllungen über Die Wirkliche Todesart Jesu. Sechste Auflage
https://books.google.com/books?id=qW4VuQEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://archive.org/details/bib_fict_4103026
went through at least six editions, claiming to publish an ancient manuscript found in a cave in Alexandria showing that the Resurrection was a hoax perpetrated by the Essenes; it was later shown to derive from a novel published in 1800 (Freeman, Bibliotheca Fictiva, pp. 354-5, nos. 1387-9).

Hodgkin
For his dealings with Simonides I used two volumes of papers in the British Library, Add. MSS 42502 A-B (some of it in Greek, which I have not read), assembled by the antiquary John Eliot Hodgkin. His family were Quakers and looked for the good in all people; the twentieth-century artist Howard Hodgkin was a direct descendant. The first volume includes the deposition of Simonides (in English), fols. 359-85, which gave me several quotations here in the voice of Simonides. His report of the Mayer hieroglyphics (this page) was published as FmoToXipaia nepi icpoy/.u<piK(ov ypappawiv diarpifirj (A Brief Dissertation on Hieroglyphic Letters), London and Liverpool, 1860, in the form of an epistolary essay addressed to Mayer “as a small mark of personal attachment”; citing Egyptian sources, including his own Uranius, Simonides stubbornly explains hieroglyphs as purely symbolic, not alphabetical or phonetic, as in the interpretations of Champollion (1822) and Lepsius (1837). Stobart’s confirmation that he had acquired papyrus scrolls in Egypt and sold them to Mayer is in The Athenaeum, no. 1781,14 December 1861, p. 807, and Mayer in turn confirmed that the scrolls had come from both Stobart and Sams, categorically not from Simonides (The Athenaeum, no. 1783, 28 December 1861). Stobart had previously offered his papyri to the British Museum (Madden’s journal, 19 September 1856; Bodleian, MS Eng. hist, c.169, p. 307); Madden had a low opinion of Sams, “a sad rogue, I believe” (journal, 7 December 1850, MS Eng. hist, c.163, p. 389). Tischendorf had found a fragment of the Codex Sinaiticus in 1844, but the principal part in 1859, almost simultaneous with Darwin’s Origin of Species

Kirk
Write to Christopher de Hamel on HODGKIN correspondence, Forging Antiquity
Also quote about determining ms. Age





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END SIMONIDES
 
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Steven Avery

Administrator
the plate between pp, 44 and 45. There is a long and useful article by F. H. A. Scrivener, ‘Constantine Simonides
and His Biblical Studies’, in the guise of a review of Fac-Similes and of Tischendorfs publication of the Sinaiticus
New Testament in The Christian Remembrancer, 46, July 1863, pp. 175-208, again rehearsing and refining the stages
of the discoveries and critically assessing the accompanying claims. Simonides’ edition of The Periplus of Hannon,
 
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