Ancient Book of Mark Found Not So Ancient After All

[Adsos Letter]

Source: Science Daily

A biblical expert at the University of Chicago, 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. The book, a copy of the Gospel of Mark, will remain in the collection as a study document for scholars studying the authenticity of ancient books.

Scholars have argued for nearly 70 years over the provenance of what's called the Archaic Mark, a 44-page miniature book, known as a "codex," which contains the complete 16-chapter text of the Gospel of Mark in minuscule handwritten text. The manuscript, which also includes 16 colorful illustrations, has long been believed to be either an important witness to the early text of the gospel or a modern forgery, said Mitchell, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature.

"The mystery is now solved from textual, chemical, and codicological (bookmaking) angles," said Mitchell, who first became intrigued by the codex when she saw it as a graduate student in 1982. Comprehensive analysis demonstrates that it is not a genuine Byzantine manuscript, but a counterfeit, she said, "made somewhere between 1874 and the first decades of the 20th century."

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."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091211203717.htm

[Ken Burch]

1. The giveaway was when they realized the book was written entirely

on "Hannah Montana" stationery.

[Blue_Tires]

3. There were also references to how God blessed Beitar Jerusalem

all the way to winning the league championship...and links to Mark's ads on Craigslist when he was moving out of the loft...

[struggle4progress]

2. MS 2427 (Archaic Mark) Online (Apr 05)

Stephen C. Carlson
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
... This MS is .. interesting because some questions have been raised about its authenticity, particular of its illuminations, about which one scientific article has reported the presence of a modern pigment (Orna et al., "Applications of Infrared Microspectroscopy to Art Historical Questions about Medieval Manuscripts" Archaeological Chemistry 4 (1988): 270-288) ... http://www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2005/04/ms-2427-archaic-mark-online.html

"Archaic Mark" (MS 2427) and the Finding of a Manuscript Fake
"Archaic Mark" is the moniker given by Ernest Cadman Colwell to an unprovenanced, illuminated manuscript .. acquired by the University of Chicago nearly seventy years ago from the estate of an Athenian collector ... 2427's text of Mark is not of the usual Byzantine text-type that so dominates the medieval transmission of the Greek text, belonging instead to a much older and interesting Alexandrian text-type. In fact, 2427's text is closer to the text of the famous fourth century Codex Vaticanus (B) than to that of any other manuscript ... Robert P. Casey voiced his suspicion in 1947 that the text could have been derived from a nineteenth century critical edition of the Greek New Testament, and, in the 1970s, Colwell himself endeavored to find such an exemplar for 2427 but to no avail ... My interest in 2427's authenticity was piqued when I found what looked like a line omission in Mark 8:11 ... When the collation was published this February, I read it and noticed two other possible line omissions at Mark 6:2 and 14:14. This reinvigorated my interest, so I decided to make one more attempt to find a possible nineteenth century exemplar for 2427 ... After coming up short at Georgetown and the Library of Congress and looking at a dozen old editions at Catholic University, I finally found an edition that had the line breaks in just the right places to warrant further inquiry. This edition was Philipp Buttmann's 1860 edition of the New Testament for the Teubner classical library, based primarily on the text of Codex Vaticanus ... In the Gospel of Mark, Buttmann's text departs from B at eighty-five variation units; 2427 agrees with Buttman's text more than eighty-one times, except in four cases where 2427 departs from both (usually with a singular reading). The dependence of 2427 on Buttmann's edition of B extends to Buttmann's selection of corrections. Significantly, many of 2427's readings in support of Buttmann's departures from B include his mistaken reliance on the inaccurate collations of B. Furthermore, of some 105 corrections in B, Buttmann followed the corrector in seventy-eight instances and the original hand in twenty-seven cases; the scribe of 2427 followed Buttmann's selection in all but five cases, all involving trivial differences such as modern spelling. This evidence led me to conclude that the exemplar of MS 2427 is the 1860 Buttmann edition of the New Testament or one of its stereotypic reprints ...
Stephen C. Carlson, Fairfax, Va.
http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?articleId=577

Chicago's Archaic Mark:
A Report on the Results of Chemical, Codicological and Textual Analysis
Presented by the Early Christian Studies Workshop and the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago ...
Monday October 26 from 6-8 pm
Special Collections Research Center
Joseph Regenstein Library 1100 E. 57th Street
At a special session of the Divinity School's Early Christian Studies Workshop, ... Barabe, Quandt and Mitchell will document their findings and their implications in advance of their forthcoming article in the journal Novum Testamentum ...
http://lib.typepad.com/scrc/2009/10/index.html

[saltpoint]

4. Recommended. But wait, that's not all.

I feel that anyone who doesn't read and appreciate the posts Adsos Letter brings to DU should be taken out and shot.

I'll pay for the bullets.