Leucius Charinus wrote: ↑Tue Dec 06, 2022 7:57 pm
Ulan wrote: ↑Tue Dec 06, 2022 7:54 amFurthermore, any hypotheses assuming a forgery after late antiquity and before modern times lack any motive.
Does this imply that you accept the hypothesis that it is dated to the 4th century?
I'm no paleographer, but the paleographic reasoning why this is considered a 4th century manuscript sounds solid to me. I think Nongbri suggested it could also be 5th century, so there's that. Anything later doesn't make much sense, given how writing evolved during that time frame.
Leucius Charinus wrote: ↑Tue Dec 06, 2022 7:57 pm
Whenever a manuscript like this is "discovered", the more ancient it is, the more valuable it is to various extremely wealthy parties. So a commercial motivation is quite viable IMO.
That's what I covered with "modern times". Before that time, old mansucripts weren't highly sought after, especially if they were hard to read like Sinaiticus. There weren't many people in the West that could read Greek, anyway. Manuscripts like Codex Ephraemi or Vaticanus came to the West after the fall of Constantinople 1453, and with it the final end of the old Roman Empire. The influx of scholars from the East then jumpstarted the Renaissance and with it the interest in old manuscripts. However, there were still Renaissance scholars that threw originals away after copying them, because they still followed the old habit to see those old books as garbage. Why keep a damaged and hardly readable original, if you have a new and perfectly readable copy? To move on from this mindset took quite a while.
This is why I consider your assumption of a 14th century forgery untenable. While the church had whole forgery factories, those actually came with the appropriate motivation, like land ownership, special rights vs. the rulers, dominion over other entities, which is generally stuff that made the church lots of money.
Why Tischendorf or Simonides didn't forge it has been thoroughly elaborated countless times on this forum.
Leucius Charinus wrote: ↑Tue Dec 06, 2022 7:57 pm
IMO the BL has abrogated its professional obligation which should be to send a few samples to the scientists in the radiocarbon lab.
"Professional obligation" to whom? Nobody in academia doubts the provenance or dating of the manuscripts. From that point of view, there's no need to investigate this. Nevertheless, the BL agrees that radiocarbon dating should be done at some point, but better on fragments that don't contain much text, like have been found in St. Catherine's Monastery. As far as I heard, that's still planned.