A Review of 'The Forging of Codex Sinaiticus' by Dr W.R. Cooper against detailed background of the discovery of the Codex
Dr Cooper makes much of 'emendations'. Given that until the mid-nineteenth
century there was no critical edition containing the first chapters of Barnabas in
Greek, but only fragmentary Greek citations that may have been corrupted or
written from imperfect memory, scholars made some educated guesses about what
the Greek text might originally have read, based on evidence from the translations of
these books into other languages, principally Latin. When the Sinaitic text of
Barnabas was discovered, some of these suggestions by scholars working back from
the Latin translation were found to have been correct. Dr Cooper states (p.105)
p. 79
The Codex contains a text of the Epistle of Barnabas which.. .complies with many of
the scholarly emendations of that Latin text that had been suggested and
recommended by scholars who lived and worked during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Dr Cooper obtained this information from James Donaldson, whom he quotes (p.51):
The Greek of the first four chapters and a half.. .contains many of the conjectural
emendations previously proposed by scholars.
Dr Cooper immediately adds his commentary on Donaldson's statement, and
commits a hideous fallacy:
This shows that this version of Barnabas was written under tire influence of a recent
scholarship - from around the 17th - 19th centuries, in other words.
That is not at all what Donaldson was saying, and it is disgraceful to twist his
meaning into such an absurdity. To make a suggestion that a certain word may once
have been written in a lost ancient document, based on an extant translation of it,
and be shown eventually to be correct, does not imply that one exercised the
slightest influence over the original writer's choice of that word.
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