Ulan wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2023 6:12 am
Just a comment regarding this:
The whole codex consists of quires of eight leaves (with a few exceptions), a format which came to be popular throughout the Middle Ages
That doesn't mean what you probably want to stress here: The start of the Middle Ages is usually set in the 5th century, and the common dating of the manuscript is just shy of that date, which fits the quoted statement.
And the end of the middle ages is usually set in the 15th century.
Leucius Charinus wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2023 3:46 am
What if it's from (say for example) the 14th century? C14 can provide the approximate century. Confirming and knowing when the codex was produced would be important.
Here we come to the point why the interest in doing these tests is rather mild: The manuscript doesn't make sense as being from the 14th century.
But that's the whole point. We have our chronological frameworks of what makes sense and what doesn't and these frameworks might be way off historical reality. The whole point in engaging with a scientific dating is to bypass what we think we know, what we think makes sense, and allow the scientists to tell us what the age of the codex actually is.
Steven Avery's hypothesis at least makes sense from a point of possible motivation: personal posturing by a forger. Steven's hypothesis is just dead in the water, because the surrounding facts disprove his thesis.
What I can't get over is the statement by Constantin von Tischendorf that the manuscript was
"found in a rubbish bin" in a church monastery in the 19th century. Can you really believe that?
On the other hand, what would be the reasoning behind forging something like this in the 14th century?
The question becomes not one of forgery but rather what has motivated the church to try and pass off a 14th century manuscript as a 4th century manuscript. I have the same basic problem with Codex Alexandrinus which was
donated to Britain by Constantine Lukaris, the Patriarch of the Church of Constantinople in the 17th century, nd is being passed off as another codex from late antiquity. YES it may be that old. But NO it could be a product of a much later century. C14 will tell us which is true and which is not.
Pointing at the certainly existing and very productive clerical forgery workshops is moot, as those forged only documents that resulted in monetary gains, like land deeds, social standing or royal privileges. Nobody doubted the age of the church, and old manuscripts were copied and thrown away. Forging a huge and expensive manuscript in the style of the 4th to 5th century would only make sense when interest in real historical knowledge awoke, together with actual knowledge of the times for which it was forged (clerical forgeries most of the time lacked that historical knowledge, which makes them easy to identify as forgeries, like with the Donation of Constantine). This leaves us with only a few windows in time in which such a document makes sense as having been produced.
Again what makes sense and what doesn't make sense is irrelevant to C14 dating. If you give me a room full of theological professors and a C14 radiocarbon lab, and ask me who to believe in regard to the date of these 4 great and early codices, I will take the opinion of the scientists over the theologians every time.
As far as I understood it, this doesn't make any difference at all for your own hypothesis, anyway, right? Nobody claims this manuscript is pre-Constantine. Whether it's from the 4th, 5th or 6th century isn't really such a big deal. It would be one of the few oldest manuscripts in all of these cases.
My own hypothesis involves the claim that we have been utterly mislead by the church [industry] from the very beginning. Both in regard to the history of the NT and Christian orthodoxy and also in regard to the history of the heretics - the authors of the NT apocrypha. I maintain that is is a reasonable position to hold that fraud and forgery were part of their business model from the rise of the Nicene church in the 4th century. C14 dating can expose any misrepresentation of chronology of manuscripts that has occurred prior to c.1950 CE.