Sunday, December 06, 2009

Archaic Mark Epilogue

8
The University of Chicago published the following news in an article "Scholarly sleuthing, exhaustive examination uncover a forgery in Library":

The Divinity School’s Margaret M. Mitchell, together with experts in micro-chemical analysis and medieval bookmaking, has concluded that one of the University Library’s most enigmatic possessions is a forgery.

[...]
Mitchell said experts from multiple disciplines made the findings possible. “Our collective efforts have achieved what no single scholar could do ― give a comprehensive analysis of the composite artifact that is an illustrated codex. The data collected in this research process has given us an even deeper understanding of the exact process used by the forger,” said Mitchell. “It will, we hope, assist ongoing scholarly investigation into and detection of manuscripts forged in the modern period."

[...]
Mitchell completed the analysis with a study of the textual edition the forger had used. She confirmed and refined Stephen C. Carlson’s proposal that the modern edition from which the forger copied the text was the 1860 edition of the Greek New Testament by Philipp Buttmann.

Congratulations to Stephen Carlson, he was right all the time!

Read the whole story here.

Read the whole (almost) story of the forgery here.

Thanks to "Jorwed" who sent me the link.

8 comments

  1. Right. So we can scrap that "codex" for sure. Peter Head's presentation on the late origin of distigmai scraps them. What next?-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Peter's argument was convincing, but we should of course hear out Payne's full response. (I consider his appearance in the actual session in which Peter presented as an "ad hoc- apology.") I understand that Payne is now working on a more detailed response, whatever may come out of that. In any case, I look forward to reading it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. And I should add that I had already discarded Archaic Mark from being authentic years ago; Stephen Carlson did it for me. I guess Mitchell & Co. didn't have any choice but pursue their investigation because of their investment in this project at the outset. However, I think their fuller investigation can be very useful to look to in the future in terms of a broad range methodology for exposing other artifacts.

    ReplyDelete
  4. ... exposing other fake artifacts, that is.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I agree, this adds but little to Carlson (who was able to do his study because of the earlier Chicago publication).

    ReplyDelete
  6. The late origin of the distigmai takes care of the Johannine Comma, but why are we having such a hard time identifying so many of the other locations as textual variants, if the distigmai are no older than the end of the ms period?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Carlson (who was able to do his study because of the earlier Chicago publication)

    Yes, their collation published in NovT was most helpful.

    ReplyDelete