Colwell on Archaic Mark

For a while now I have been casually on the lookout for an article in the Emory University Quarterly, and so far I haven’t had access. I searched this morning and found it online: Ernest Cadman Colwell, “An Ancient Text of the Gospel of Mark,” (Emory University Quarterly 1.2 [1945]: 65–75).

E.C. Colwell
Credit: University of Chicago Photographic
Archive, [apf1-01777] Hanna Holborn
Gray Special Collections Research Center
University of Chicago Library.

It’s an interesting article—there is definitely a popular-level tone to it, and the way Colwell describes some aspects of textual criticism definitely reflects that. Of course we know now that Archaic Mark (which was once numbered 2427 on the k-Liste) is a forgery, but it had been my understanding that Colwell was always suspicious of it. I had been wanting to find this article to see if he voiced any such suspicions here. He does not do so explicitly, but he does talk about several unique aspects of Archaic Mark that are unlike any other manuscripts, and at one point he does make a statement that seems to hint that something was up:

The script of the manuscript is more than unusual; it is unique, The scribe of the Chicago Mark had several habits to which we cannot find parallels anywhere, and others to which no parallel exists in Greek manuscripts. He divides his text into words and even puts periods after abbreviations. These actions seem entirely normal to the twentieth-century American, but were unknown in the Greek manuscript tradition. Out of seventy-seven manuscripts photographed by W. H. P. Hatch on Mount Sinai, only one has word division, and it has other elements which suggest that it may be copied from the Greek text of a bilingual. In the large collection at Jerusalem, two manuscripts have word division, and both were written in the eighteenth century. [p. 68; emphasis mine]

That being said, do enjoy the article if you have a few minutes and haven’t seen it before.

SBL Presentation on “Archaic Mark” (GA 2427)

 

At the SBL Annual Meeting in San Diego I gave a presentation on Archaic Mark (GA 2427), "tying up some loose ends." This paper was originally slotted for another day, but since the session was turned into a virtual one it was moved to Friday, and so I know some friends (like Jeff Cate) missed it.  

However, I have now made a new recording of a longer (and therefore more relaxed) presentation of the paper which you can access on the IGNTP New Testament Textual Criticism youtube-channel here where there is a special playlist for SBL 2021. In case anyone else who presented in NTTC would like to upload a recording, you can contact Hugh Houghton who maintains the channel. Below is my conference abstract.

“‘Archaic Mark’ Revisited: Tying Up Some Loose Ends”

The Gospel manuscript known as the “Archaic Mark” (Greg.-Aland 2427) in the Goodspeed Collection of the University of Chicago (MS 972) is now known as a modern forgery and has been removed from NA28. An important breakthrough was made in 2006 by Stephen C. Carlson who identified Philipp Buttmann’s 1860-edition as the textual Vorlage, whereas the final verdict on the case including an evaluation of the physical and chemical make-up, the palaeography and iconography was published by Margaret M. Mitchell and her team in 2010. However, there are still some loose ends of the story. In this paper I will examine the codicology, palaeography, text and iconography of both Archaic Mark and a related manuscript in St Petersburg tracing them back to the same batch of parchment from which the two manuscripts were made, likely in a workshop in Athens around 1914, and likely involving the work of two prominent artists and friends. In this connection, I will also discuss the sometimes thin line between authenticity and forgery, in particular if we distinguish the text from the artifact.

"Archaic Mark" – Final Verdict

As we have known for many years now, Chicago MS 972 = Archaic Mark = Greg.-Aland 2427 is a modern production. In the latest issue of Novum Testamentum 52 (2010) 101-133, Margaret M. Mitchell, Joseph G. Barabe and Abigail B. Quandt have published an article, "Chicago’s 'Archaic Mark' (ms 2427) II. Microscopic, Chemical and Codicological Analyses Confirm Modern Production" in which they give the final verdict from their analysis of the manuscript in the following areas:

* physical and chemical make up
* palaeography,
* iconography,
* textual readings

It is nice to see that Stephen Carlson is duly acknowledged in the very first paragraph as the scholar who exposed "Archaic Mark" from the fourth perspective, textual readings:

The latter line of inquiry, into possible modern editions that might have been used to account for the codex’s surprising level of concurrence with Codex Vaticanus,3 has been taken up skillfully by Stephen C. Carl- son, who proposed that the exemplar used by the scribe of ms 2427 was the 1860 edition of the Greek New Testament by Philipp Buttmann,4 indicating that the manuscript is a modern forgery.

It is good to now also have a comprehensive analysis of the three other areas, not only to confirm the MS as a forgery, as I see it, but to gain insights from the methods and results in order to expose other forgeries in the future - the subtitle to Abigail Quandt's portion is telling: "Reconstruction of the Forger’s Technique." She concludes:

In summary, the materials and processes used in the creation of the “Archaic Mark” reinforce, on the one hand, what is already known about manuscript forgeries during the modern period and, on the other hand, give us an even deeper understanding of the careful work that went into creating such a complex and ultimately successful forgery that has mystified scholars up until the present day.

In Mitchell's final portion titled "The Forger’s Textual Dependence" Stephen Carlson's "keen detective work" is acknowledged, but also Wieland Willker:

The most extensive list of comparisons of ms 2427 with Buttmann’s 1860 edition, following on and confirming Carlson’s proposal, was made in an excellent online contribution by Dr. Wieland Willker. Willker lists nine “first rate indications” of agreement between ms 2427 and features unique to Buttmann, and seven instances as “additional supporting evidence.” Tracing the genealogical history accounting for these “unique features” and “very rare or unusual readings” in the Buttmann edition allows us to confirm how strong and decisive the case is for its use by the forger of ms 2427.

Wieland's online contribution “Ms 2427 – a fake” (2006) is available here.

Epilogue: Another Fake by the Same Scribe?
A while ago I wrote a long report on the story of "Archaic Mark" here. Towards the end I hinted at another manuscript which was probably copied by the same scribe and illuminator who worked on "Archaic Mark," and in the comments, Wieland Willker correctly guessed that I was talking about Greg.-Aland 2537 in the Hermitage of St. Petersburg. The original claim was made in an article: Mary Virginia Orna et al, “Applications of Infrared Microspectroscopy to Art Historical Questions about Medieval Manuscripts,” in Archaeological Chemistry IV (ed. Ralph O. Allen; Advances in Chemistry Series 220; Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1989) 270. It is clear that the text of MS 2537 is different. The question is whether it was copied from a real manuscript or another edition? A brief report from anyone who wants to check by e.g., going through Text und Textwert is welcome and could be published on this blog.

Another Forged Manuscript Comes to Surface (Again)

Dan Wallace has published an interesting story, "Photographing a Forgery", on the website of CSNTM about how his team encountered a forged manuscript written on fine vellum, but only on one side. As the team examined the MS Wallace says, "The scent of a fake was beginning to rise up from the dusty pages of these old vellum leaves." For example, there were no nomina sacra at all.

Eventually Wallace found out that J. Edgar Goodspeed had reported on this forgery already in 1937. It wasn't as good as Archaic Mark (2427), which Goodspeed acquired in that same year, 1937, and which was exposed by Stephen Carlson just a few years aog (although there were early suspicions), and, eventually Margret Mitchell & Co through a more systematic examination. Read that story here.

Archaic Mark Epilogue

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.

Archaic Mark (Greg.-Aland 2427): A Story of a Modern Forgery

In 1945 E. C. Colwell announced a manuscript containing “the text of the Gospel of Mark in a more primitive form than any other known manuscript.” The codex had been found among the property left of John Askitopoulos, an Athenian collector and dealer of antiquieties, who had died in 1917. Almost twenty years later, in 1935, it was offered for sale to Edgar J. Goodspeed by a nephew of Askitopoulos. In 1936, or early 1937 the MS was sent to the University of Chicago where it resides today in the Goodspeed Manuscript Collection (Chicago MS 972). The MS was subsequently registered as Greg.-Aland 2427, and became known as "Archaic Mark." For a long time several questions concerning this MS remained unresolved, above all, was this manuscript authentic?

Already in 1947 in a review of a Festschrift for W. H. P. Hatch, Munera studiosa (eds. M. H. Shepherd Jr. and S. E. Johnson), Journal of Religion 27 (April 1947): 148-149, Robert P. Casey concluded that the MS was "in every way extraordinary and the curious anomalies of its script and text form a pattern strikingly similar to that of its miniatures" (p. 148). He expressed his suspicion that the manuscript could have been copied from a 19th century critical edition:

Through the kindness of my colleagues in Chicago, I have examined this manuscript and discussed its text with its closest student, Dr. M. M. Parvis. . . . The parchment is indubitably old, the text agrees not only with B but with the modern misreadings of B and there are modern Greek words here and there. . . . It is to be hoped that in the forthcoming edition a chapter may be written by an advocatus diaboli who would do his best to prove that the codex was a manufacture of the nineteenth century, executed by a workman with the skill and limitations of a Simonides, familliar with Lachmann's edition and the modern Greek Bible, and thinking in Greek. Perhaps he had an Armenian friend living in Constantinople or Kaiseriye who was a skillful artist. The failure of the attempt to prove this thesis would do much to clear the ground for confidence in this remarkable possession. (p. 149)

Some twenty years ago Mary Virginia Orna, Robert Nelson (specialist on Byzantine illumination), et al. published an article on "Applications of Infrared Microspectroscopy to Art Historical Questions about Medieval Manuscripts," Advances in Chemistry 4 (1988): 270-288, republished in Archaeological Chemistry IV (ed. R. O. Allen; Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1989), 265-288.

Orna and her team had applied "Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy" to Byzantine manuscripts in the Special Collections Department of the University of Chicago Library, including a sample from an illumination in 2427. Although the illuminations in 2427 were based on a cycle that also appeared in a late 12th-century gospel book in the National Library in Athens, codex 93, the team found that the sample contained a chemical from a pigment, Prussian blue, that was not produced until the 18th century. However, the lack of authenticity observed for the illuminations did not necessarily mean that the text was late, since the illuminations could have been added much later – there are plenty of such examples.

Three years ago an article appeared in Novum Testamentum: Margaret M. Mitchell and Patricia A. Duncan, "Chicago’s 'Archaic Mark' (Ms. 2427): A Reintroduction to Its Enigmas and a Fresh Collation of Its Readings," Novum Testamentum 48 (2006): 1-35.

The article announced the public release via the Internet of a full set of interactive digital images of Gregory-Aland 2427, and included a collation in order to facilitate an accurate accounting of the manuscript in further editions and textcritical studies. Moreover, Mitchell and Duncan provided a history of research and a critical appraisal of the complex questions involved in its dating. On the issue whether the manuscript was a modern forgery they pointed out: "At the very least such a suspicion still awaits the testing of the codex’s readings against the various available collations and critical texts of the New Testament published in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to see if dependence can be established" (p. 7).

The manuscript images were made available here.

Peter Head commented on the article on this blog:

I personally found this article both very helpful and very frustrating. Like it says in the sub-title: Reintroduction to Its Enigmas! There is no attempt to solve any of the enigmas, it is basically clearing the ground for future reports on further research that remains to be done. The main feature of the article, the collation, is itself incomplete and only designed to supplement (and occasionally correct) the information in NA27. But that just means that anyone wanting to work on the text of 2427 has to compile a complete collation for herself, before beginning to work on it. Surely the Chicago folk must have done that, why not share it with everyone else?

In the same year, on 24 February, Stephen Carlson announced on his blog Hypotyposeis that he had sent in the following proposal to the SBL Annual Meeting New Testament Textual Criticism section::

The Nineteenth-Century Exemplar of “Archaic Mark” (MS 2427)
Gregory-Aland no. 2427 is an unprovenanced, illuminated manuscript of the Gospel of Mark, written in what appears to be a medieval hand. Its illuminations have been found to contain a modern pigment, but that finding does not settle the question of its curious text, which is closer to Codex Vaticanus (B) than to any other manuscript. Ever since Westcott and Hort (1881), B has been considered one of the most important manuscripts of the New Testament, so 2427’s closeness to B has attracted the attention of textual critics. However, Westcott and Hort were not the first to base a critical text largely on B. Some twenty years earlier, Philipp Buttmann (1860) published a recension of the Greek New Testament based on Cardinal Mai’s edition of B (1857, 1859). In the Gospel of Mark, Buttmann’s text departs from B at about 90 variation units, with which 2474 agrees more than 80 times, except where 2427 has a singular reading. Significantly, 2427’s support for Buttmann’s departures include his mistakes that otherwise lack manuscript attestation. Even more significantly, 2427 contains scribal errors occasioned by the unique page layout of the 1860 Buttmann edition. This evidence shows that the exemplar of MS 2427 is the 1860 Buttmann edition of the New Testament or its stereotypic reprints.

So finally the advocatus diaboli that Casey anticipated over 60 years ago had appeared, and he was a jurist by profession! Carlson had already raised a strong case against "Secret Mark" in his The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark (Baylor University Press, 2005). His attractive proposal on this other Mark was of course accepted and Carlson presented his paper at the SBL Annual Meeting in Washington on Tuesday 21 November in the Textual Criticism session. Interestingly, Mitchell presented a paper on the same MS at this SBL meeting (in another session). Carlson reported on his blog that he had a good colloquy with Margaret Mitchell over 2427. I have since heard that Mitchell was mostly withholding immediate judgment at that point.

Later in the same year Carlson published his finding of the fake in the SBL Forum:

Stephen Carlson, "'Archaic Mark' (MS 2427) and the Finding of a Manuscript Fake," SBL Forum, n.p. [cited Aug 2006]. Online:http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=577

When Wieland Willker had heard of Carlson's SBL paper (which Carlson had also announced on Willker's textual criticism discussion list on 24 February, he decided to collate 2427 against Buttmann's edition. Willker subsequently reported in a message on his discussion list that he had found nine significant agreements in error between the texts, features that were unique to Buttmann's edition, and other signs of a late origin. However, Willker was still hesitant to call it a "forgery":

Is it a forgery? We cannot really know. Perhaps it was originally simply intended as a present to Mr. Askitopoulos? Or created for private entertainment? The MS turned up in the remains of Mr. Askitopoulos in the 1920s. The "who, where, when, how and why" are unknown.

However, in his subsequent on-line essay he labelled it "a fake": Manuscript 2427 - a fake, which I think is a correct description – there are a lot of examples of such forgeries in the 19th and early 20th century, not least in Athens. In the essay Willker confirmed Carlson's finding and concluded that "the probability that these errors happened independently is almost nil." On the other hand, Willker had also found many disagreements, some of which could be explained as harmonizations or as influenced by the Byzantine text, but others for which he could not find any explanation. Apparently, the scribe of the MS did not just copy Buttmann's edition, he seemed to have used other sources as well.

In any case, the matter was finally settled: both the illuminations and text of 2427 are of modern origin. Note, however, that Carlson's very important finding has not yet been referenced in the bibliography available on the Goodspeed Manuscript Collection website accompanying the on-line images! The Novum Testamentum article by Mitchell and Duncan is the last entry.

Just a few days ago, 26 October, there was a workshop on the manuscript at the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago:

"A Report on the Results of Chemical, Codicological and Textual Analysis"

Joseph Barabe, Abigail Quandt, Margaret M. Mitchell

At this special session of the Workshop, jointly sponsored by the Library's Special Collections Research Center, the final results of a multi-year commitment by the University to solve a decades-long enigma - is this miniature codex a genuine Byzantine manuscript preserving a very early text-type of the Gospel of Mark or a modern forgery? - will be announced. The manuscript itself will be available for viewing, and Barabe, Quandt and Mitchell will document their findings and their implications in advance of their forthcoming article in the journal Novum Testamentum. All interested parties are welcome to attend. A light reception will follow. (Please note special evening time.)

I do not know what was announced on this occasion. The question whether the MS is a forgery has of course already been settled, although the more comprehensive analysis to be published in Novum Testamentum is always welcome. I assume that Stephen Carlson's convincing exposure of the origin of the text will be duly acknowledged there, and I hope that reference to his work will be made in the manuscript description and bibliography on the webpage of the Goodspeed Manuscript Collection of the University of Chicago as soon as possible.

However, the story is not entirely over yet. During my work on this story I found an interesting detail that casts doubt on another manuscript. More soon!

Bibliography
Carlson, Stephen, "'Archaic Mark' (MS 2427) and the Finding of a Manuscript Fake," SBL Forum, n.p. [cited Aug 2006]. Online:http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=577

Casey, Robert P., Review of Munera studiosa, edited by Massey Hamilton Shepherd Jr. and Sherman Elbridge Johnson, Journal of Religion 27 (April 1947), 148-149.

Clark, Kennet W. A Descriptive Catalogue of Greek New Testament Manuscripts in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), p. 271.

Colwell, E. C. “An Ancient Text of the Gospel of Mark,” The Emory University Quarterly 1 (1945): 65-75.

New Testament manuscript traditions. An exhibition based on the Edgar J. Goodspeed Collection of the University of Chicago Library, the Joseph Regenstein Library, January-March, 1973 (University of Chicago. Library. Dept. of Special Collections Exhibition catalogs; Chicago: n.p., 1973), 36, nos. 64-65.

Mitchell Margaret M. and Patricia A. Duncan, "Chicago’s 'Archaic Mark' (Ms. 2427): A reintroduction to its enigmas and a fresh collation fo its readings," Novum Testamentum 48 (2006): 1-35.

Orna, Mary Virginia, et al., eds., "Applications of Infrared Microspectroscopy to Art Historical Questions about Medieval Manuscripts" Advances in Chemistry 4 (1988): 270-288, republished in Archaeological Chemistry IV (ed. R. O. Allen; Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1989), 265-288.

Parvis, M. M., The Story of the Goodspeed Collection (Chicago: n.p., 1952), 23.

Wikipedia Minuscule 2427

Willker, Wieland, Manuscript 2427 - a fake

Willoughby, H. R. "Archaic crucifixion iconography," in Munera studiosa (ed. M. H. Shepherd Jr. and S. E. Johnson; Cambridge, Mass.: The Episcopal Theological School, 1946), 123 -144.