Codex Sinaiticus - the white parchment Friderico-Augustanus

[schillingklaus]

This cannot exclude modern forgery for it is possible to write modern forgeries on ancient parchment or papyrus.

[StephenGoranson]

It is indeed technically "possible" to write a forgery on ancient parchment or papyrus.
And it is indeed true that modern forgeries exist.

But
In the 1800s how could a forger know how old a piece of parchment or papyrus was?
And how many blank sheets of such prepared writing surface material were available then or are available now?

Plus, note that the post-2002 fake Dead Sea Scrolls were all on tiny bits of material.
And the fake "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" papyrus surface dated to medieval, not ancient, times.

Also, Sinaiticus has been studied in great detail. Forging many pages to match ancient text is a very hard job, imo.

[added:]
The late Barbara Thiering used to claim, iirc, that Dead Sea Scroll pesharim were written on much older skins that had been prepared as writing surface many decades earlier and long preserved for special use. Was that special pleading to support her claim that such texts refer to New Testament individuals?

[Steven Avery]

The late Barbara Thiering used to claim, iirc, that Dead Sea Scroll pesharim were written on much older skins that had been prepared as writing surface many decades earlier and long preserved for special use. Was that special pleading to support her claim that such texts refer to New Testament individuals?

Thanks, Stephen.

Not familiar on the Barbara Thiering claim, but it does sound interesting. I know she wrote on the Abgar documents and the Paul and Seneca correspondence. Some of her writing was on the YahooGroups email and likely sits on my porch computer. Wikipedia mentions from Edna Ullman-Margalit about one of her oddball theories:

" ...this theory must be considered altogether initially outlandish, given the scientifically definitive dating (based mostly on paleographical and on radiocarbon techniques) of the scrolls to a period well before the birth of Christianity (Thiering, 1992)."

That should be a challenge to the BAM (materials group from Berlin) results, but it may be within a relatively short range of a century or two. With Sinaiticus there is such an abundance of parchment and ink to be studied that you there should be very little in the way of testing challenges, even from outliers. Plus the results should be either AD 350 or AD 650 or AD 1840 for the first-hand writing, and the AD 1840 writing would likely be on parchment that was still rather recent.

With Thiering you have to separate wheat from chaff,

And it would be interesting to find her spot where she talks of the palaeography of the DSS.

The Talk section indicates it was only a response to carbon dating.

The Tucson carbondating tests of 1995, 1996, gave good evidence that the particular group of documents concerning the Teacher of Righteousness and his rival the Wicked Priest were composed for the first time in the 1st century AD. These persons appear only in one group. The evidence and argument are set out in an article in the professional journal Radiocarbon, vol 1, number 2, 1999, pp 169-182, by G.A. Rodley and B.E. Thiering, “Use of Radiocarbon Dating in Assessing Christian Connections to the Dead Sea Scrolls”. The essential points are, first, that a group of documents concerning the Teacher, of the genre of pesharim, are autographs, of which one copy only exists. Two in this group were tested. 4Q171 (4QpPs a, the pesher on Psalms) is carbondated 29-81 CE (AD), and 1QpHab(the pesher on Habakkuk) is carbondated 88-2 BCE (BC), permitting a subsequent date for use of its parchment. Attempts to explain these as anomalies are open to criticism. Further, a copy of CD (the Damascus Document, not a pesher), where the Teacher and his rival also appear, is carbondated 4-82 CE (AD). A certain fragment which was thought to make CD much earlier can be shown to have been mistakenly treated in terms of its semicursive script. It is an early source, which was incorporated in the main document CD.

Then there is a note that carbon dating does not tell you when a text was composed, and that Robert Eisenman "the man most responsible for its carbon dating."

For the later studies by BAM:

Non-destructive Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2008)
http://www.ndt.net/article/art2008/papers/209Hahn.pdf

[Steven Avery]

It is indeed technically "possible" to write a forgery on ancient parchment or papyrus.
And it is indeed true that modern forgeries exist.

But
In the 1800s how could a forger know how old a piece of parchment or papyrus was?
And how many blank sheets of such prepared writing surface material were available then or are available now?

Plus, note that the post-2002 fake Dead Sea Scrolls were all on tiny bits of material.
And the fake "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" papyrus surface dated to medieval, not ancient, times.

Also, Sinaiticus has been studied in great detail. Forging many pages to match ancient text is a very hard job, imo.

Simonides did not claim that the parchment was ancient, and he gave an explanation of the source. Remember, this is Mt. Athos, where parchment is abundant. And it was a one-time event, for a specific purpose (Simonides claimed it was for the Tsar and that they would receive a printing press in return. The other possibility was a rather clumsy forgery. Either way, Simonides was chastised for leaving it incomplete by Kallinikos. One theory is that it turned into a draft copy. Btw, there are tons of homoeoteleuton scribal errors, some of which match perfectly with Claromontanus as the source document.)

Sinaiticus did not have to match an ancient text.

The script was easy, the text was prepared by Benedict.

[StephenGoranson]

"The script was easy...."

Really?
Simonides, long ago, fooled some people.
But scholars today who are experts in Greek manuscripts and paleography may be harder to fool, including B. Nongbri, and, as far as I know, they conclude Sinaiticus to be ancient.

[Steven Avery]

But scholars today who are experts in Greek manuscripts and paleography may be harder to fool, including B. Nongbri, and, as far as I know, they conclude Sinaiticus to be ancient.

Brent Nongbri has not addressed the full palaeography of Sinaiticus.

e,g he wrote me in 2014

That's interesting about Sinaiticus. I don't know a great deal about Sinaiticus (just the usual stories from the introductory books). So, I'm glad that there's someone out there studying this stuff. It's always good to scrutinize these well-known "discovery stories."

My hope is to point Brent to some additional palaeography features beyond the small script he studied in the recent paper. He is one of the few in the manuscript and textual professions who would like to be guided by the evidence, not the presuppositions.

Most Sinaiticus study involving scripts is circular. It starts with the Tischendorf (and Skeat-Milne following Tischendorf) dates and tries to put round pegs into square holes. As an example, the Three Crosses Note is said to be hundreds of years after production, yet it is quite obviously a note from the time of production. But that does not fit the Tischendorf house of cards about the scripts.

Another example is the Arabic writing, which orientalist Richard Goesche (1824-1889) told Tregelles was "very recent". Arabic writing could easily come from the St. Catherine's monastery after 1840.

Another curiosity is Tischendorf writing of notes that were incomplete, chopped at the edges, as explained by multiple English reviews. Yet no such notes exist in the manuscript today.

Anomalies abound.

(Just scratching the surface.)

Remember, Leipzig canceled the tests planned by BAM on the day they showed up in 2015.

[StephenGoranson]

I can't speak for BN, but he may have learned more about it since 2014.
Otherwise why would he write, in 2022, about the possible date range quite specifically as follows:

" I also suggest that this particular range of possible dates (ca. 300 – 425 CE) makes the codex a good candidate for radiocarbon analysis."

ca. 300 - 425 CE

[Steven Avery]

Simply taking the standard dates and adding his new information of his paper.

(No need for him to speculate further, unless he has done personal study.)

[StephenGoranson]

I do not understand.
Are you claiming to be an expert in paleography?
Are you claiming that BN--who has often proposed revised dates for mss--did not make up his own mind about dating?
That he didn't independently arrive at the 300-425 estimate before publishing in the Oct. 2022 issue of J. of Theological Studies and on his Variant Readings blog?

[Steven Avery]

Since Brent has never claimed to study the various anomalies in Sinaiticus, palaeographic and historical, I do not criticize him for not speculating in that area. He takes the scholar's approach of starting with the existing "consensus" and proposing changes. In his recent paper we see such a challenge.

Brent studied one specific anomaly, and felt it changed the terminus post quem.

(There is some question though as to why that script could not appear later, or much later. That is left vague in the paper. In general palaeography is far better at terminus ante quem than terminus post quem. Why? Nobody can predict a future script, past scripts can be copied at any later time.)

Historically, Hilgenfeld and others had argued for a later date, but were bulldozed by Tischendorf. A fascinating history.

Hardly anybody could really work with even one of the major sections, Leipzig or London, much less compare the two.
Until 2009.