Sinaiticus - Hermas, Barnabas linguistic, history anomalies

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andrewcriddle
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Re: Sinaiticus - Hermas, Barnabas linguistic, history anomal

Post by andrewcriddle »

Hi Steven

Just to clarify.

Am I right that we have no evidence that a journal called the Star of the East was in publication in 1843 other than the material presented by Simonides ?

Andrew Criddle
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DCHindley
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Re: Sinaiticus - Hermas, Barnabas linguistic, history anomal

Post by DCHindley »

andrewcriddle wrote:Hi Steven

Just to clarify.

Am I right that we have no evidence that a journal called the Star of the East was in publication in 1843 other than the material presented by Simonides ?

Andrew Criddle
Andrew,

I have already posted a link to one publication that antedated 1843 and another shortly after that, both of which indicate that a publication by that name was based in Smyrna. Seems it was sponsored by a mission of some kind. Shortly after that date I found that a publication by that name, based in Smyrna, was sponsored by an Evangelical Presbyterian mission (of which there were dozens in this period). A while ago on FRDB, there was a discussion (well, on my part) about the mission of John Hogg in Egypt. Hogg's mission was also sponsored by a Mission Board of an Evangelical oriented Presbyterian Church body, and Hogg himself had an intense interest in the discovery and text of the Didache, so it would not surprise me that someone might publish a review of a work by Simonides.

I'm not saying that someone did, but it would not be impossible by any means. There was a question of the "freshness" of the paper quality. Just around then wood pulp paper had pretty much replaced (cotton) rag paper, but with the disadvantage that it had acidic qualities that caused the paper to yellow and deteriorate fairly quickly.

Would a "newspaper" (more like a thin magazine today), with circulation of maybe a few thousand centered on church missionary circles, have used wood pulp paper (this is the norm today) or continue to use rag paper?

Lots of folks, academics included, obtain copies of reviews of their publications, sometimes multiple copies.

Also, would wood pulp paper remain in clean condition longer if pressed between the cotton paper pages of one of the books in Simonides' library?

How easy would it have been to have an "offprint" made of a review printed on yellowed and brittle wood pulp paper? Could it have been some sort of offset of facsimile copy made on new paper?

DCH
Steven Avery
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Star of the East - Barnabas

Post by Steven Avery »

Hi,
andrewcriddle wrote:Hi Steven Just to clarify. Am I right that we have no evidence that a journal called the Star of the East was in publication in 1843 other than the material presented by Simonides ?

Good question. David offered a lot of good thoughts.

The issue is publication specifically in Smyrna, and we have in a library stack 1841-1842:

The Library of the Hellenic Parliament provides access to the digital copy of the Star of the East
ΑΣΤΗΡ ΤΗΣ ΑΝΑΤΟΛΗΣ through the following link:
http://srv-web1.parliament.gr/library.asp?item=32790
Only years 1841-1842 (17/10/1841-22/05/1842) are available to the library's collection.
Catalog
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http ... alse&dov=1

True, that is not 1843, however library stacks are often not complete. And we know that the Athenaeum did no real checking, or was not honest about the situation.

Here are the other two pics we have available from the Star of the East.
StarOfTheEast_002.jpg
StarOfTheEast_002.jpg (207.67 KiB) Viewed 6472 times
StarOfTheEast_003.jpg
StarOfTheEast_003.jpg (460.76 KiB) Viewed 6472 times
DCHindley wrote: Hogg's mission was also sponsored by a Mission Board of an Evangelical oriented Presbyterian Church body, and Hogg himself had an intense interest in the discovery and text of the Didache, so it would not surprise me that someone might publish a review of a work by Simonides.
And I think it is worth emphasizing that if this is the authentic date, it was when Simonides was first writing. And afawk a few years before issues and accusations came up contra Simonides, he was still simply a young aspiring Greek scholar with Mt Athos connections (having been there in 1839-1840). The accusations begin 1847-1848 in Greece. (Simonides was accused of contributing to the attacks against the missionary Jonas King, and in 1848 Stephanos Kumanudes, 1818-1899, spoke against Simonides, as referenced by John Edwin Sandys in A History of Classical Scholarship - Vol 3, 1908, p. 38.) So there would be no response of .. gasp .. that is SImonides.

Clearly, a careful examination of various aspects of the text could be a great help.

And we should remember that his definite pre-publication of a Greek Hermas text before Sinaiticus (and remember most of the Sinaiticus Hermas text seems to have been disappeared, based on the New Finds appearance of an end-section) was a major element of the Sinaiticus controversy. About which James Anson Farrer wrote:
"The coincidence seems almost more singular than can be accounted for by chance"
James Anson Farrer, Literary Forgeries, 1907, p. 60
So that at least tells us that there is a precedent, a possible Hermas / Barnabas convergence :) of texts, where Simonides worked on a Greek text that has important similarities to Sinaiticus, way before Sinaiticus was published. And that the pre-publication of a "Sinaitic" Barnabas by Simonides is a consistent very real possibility. And those are also the two texts where the learned James Donaldson took the linguistic stance that they really were not antiquity.

Steven Avery
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Hermas in the New Finds - Uspensky reference

Post by Steven Avery »

Hi,
Steven Avery wrote: Hermas in the New Finds - full book, mostly dumped?
Tischendorf only had the first section of Hermas published, about 1/4 of the text.... very strong circumstantial evidence that more of Hermas had been there when Tischendorf first started to work with the ms. The Genesis fragments that got to the New Finds are closely linked to Tischendorf and Uspensky manuscript "takes". It is a solid supposition that the Hermas sections got there at the same time, in the 1844-1859 mystery period. (And I've asked my Russian scholar friend to look at the Uspensky reference to see exactly what he said about Barnabas and Hermas.) viewtopic.php?p=22259#p22259
We do have the Uspensky section. He mentions Barnabas and Hermas being with the New Testament. Uspensky knew his New Testament and auxiliary texts, and he made no mention at all of Hermas being only partial.
Uspenski described:
«Первая рукопись, содержащая Ветхий Завет неполный и весь Новый Завет с посланием ап. Варнавы и книгой Ермы, писана на тончайшем белом пергаменте. (...) Буквы в ней совершенно похожи на церковно-славянские. Постановка их прямая и сплошная. Над словами нет придыханий и ударений, а речения не отделяются никакими знаками правописания кроме точек. Весь священный текст писан в четыре и два столбца стихомерным образом и так слитно, как будто одно длинное речение тянется от точки до точки.» (Порфирий (Успенский), Первое путешествие в Синайский монастырь в 1845 году, Petersburg 1856, с. 226.)
ап. Варнавы и книгой Ермы, == apostle Barnabas and book Hermas (an. == apostle)

While this is a silence it is a glaring silence and another corroboration that the bulk of Hermas was dumped in the 1844-1859 period. Clearly Uspensky specifically went through the New Testament in the codex, he noticed that that the full NT was there, and he noticed that Barnabas and Hermas were there as well. If Hermas was chopped after a small part, he almost surely would have said "part of Hermas". Another corroborative evidence that the full Hermas was there in 1844-1845, and dumped before the public presentation in 1859.

Steven Avery
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James Donaldson linguistic studies on the Greek Hermas and Barnabas manuscripts

Post by Steven Avery »

There has been some continuing discussion coming out of the new book by David W. Daniels.

This topic of the Hermas linguistics is being discussed on CARM:

James Donaldson linguistic studies on the Greek Hermas and Barnabas manuscripts
https://forums.carm.org/vb5/forum/theol ... anuscripts

Is the 'World's Oldest Bible' a Fake?
David W. Daniels
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product-reviews/B078XKXDW8

===========

Steven Avery
Steven Avery
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Re: Sinaiticus - Hermas, Barnabas linguistic, history anomalies

Post by Steven Avery »

It is interesting to look at Tischendorf's linguistic attacks on the Athous Hermas of 1856, written before the 1859 Sinaiticus. Some of the cases will be in the sections of Sinaiticus we do not have, and it is also possible that an attack works against Athous but not Sinaiticus.

e.g. this book gives some of the Tischendorf arguments:

Hermas et Simonides: Étude sur la controverse (1858)
P. J. Jallabert
https://books.google.com/books?id=sLJWAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA6

p. 6-9 is helpful for overall context (or the whole first section.)

p. 92 begins Chapter II on the authenticity of the manuscript.

p. 95, 112-113, 118-120 discuss linguistic issues, maybe more.

We hope to have a review of the linguistic argument of Tischendorf that are in this book.
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