Abstract
In their parallel careers, the contrasts of opportunity, affluence and ambition are striking. Tischendorf’s travels were part of a tradition pioneered by Curzon and Scholtz but he was secretive about his finds. Thanks to suggestions by Major Macdonald, SPT may have previously guessed the existence of the Codex Sinaiticus. In 1850, the scholars agreed to cooperate but Tischendorf became impatient with SPT’s disagreements over details. Although SPT helped him sell his MSS, Tischendorf publicly attacked him in print. With the announcement of Sinaiticus, there was some rapprochement but the relationship remained strained. When Simonides claimed to have written Sinaiticus, SPT’s support for Tischendorf was a further irritant.
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Notes
- 1.
An adequate, albeit somewhat over-admiring, recent account of Tischendorf is S.E. Porter’s Constantine Tischendorf: The Life and Work of a 19th Century Bible Hunter (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- 2.
E.D. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa. Part the Second: Greece, Egypt and the Holy Land: Section the Second (London: Cadell and Davies, 1814), 345–6, 348, 349.
- 3.
R. Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (London: Humphrey Milford, 1916 [1849]), 365–66. The twelfth-century MS of the Apocalypse is now in the British Museum (Codex 95 = #2040). It is described by SPT as ‘95 Codex Parham, “17.” Of the twelfth or thirteenth century brought by the Hon. R. Curzon, in 1837, from Mount Athos, now [1872] forming a special treasure in the Parham Library where it has been collated by Mr. Scrivener. This MS. breaks off at chapter xx. 11 of the Apocalypse’ (Tregelles, Greek New Testament Part VI: Introductory Notice). Scrivener improved on the story somewhat by attributing to the agoumenos rather than to Curzon’s servant, the suggestion that the MS might have a particular domestic usefulness! F.H. Scrivener, Six Lectures on the Text of the New Testament and the Ancient Manuscripts Which Contain It … (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell and Company, 1875), 83.
- 4.
While rejecting his views on textual criticism, SPT insisted that Scholz was ‘entitled to the respect due to a laborious scholar, devoted for years to one object: he has rendered no small service in pointing out where MSS. are preserved; and those who come after him may find from his list some documents worthy of their attention which were previously unnoticed’ (Tregelles, Account, 94–5). Cf. above Chapter 6, Footnote 65.
- 5.
John Martin Augustus Scholz, Travels in the Countries Between Alexandria and Parætonium, The Lybian Desert, Siwa, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, in 1821 (London: Phillips & Co., 1822), 46, 49.
- 6.
Tischendorf’s story has been told, repeated, translated and embellished many times. Reflecting my subject’s faith in the value of the oldest MSS, my brief account of the discovery is strictly based on Tischendorf’s earliest published version, which reads as follows: ‘Quum enim mense Maio anni 1844 in monasterio S. Catharinae ad montem Sinaiticum veteres libros scriptos investigando incidissem in sportam, in quam conjectae erant variorum codicum lacerorum perditorumque reliquiae, cuiusmodi plures iam furnus acceperat, detexi illa antiquissimi LXX interpretum codicis fragmenta’. A.F.C. Tischendorf, Notitia editionis codicis Bibliorum Sinaitici auspiciis imperatoris Alexandri II. susceptae… (Lipsiae: F.A. Brockhaus, 1860), 5. His expanded account was published in his Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst? (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1865) which was translated into English and French, the following year. It is reproduced in full in Porter’s biography.
- 7.
‘I shall merely mention that I found in a modern Greek manuscript, treatises upon astrology, natural history, medicine, and other similar studies, treated of in a peculiar manner’. Constantin Tischendorf, Reise in den Orient (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1846) translated as Travels in the East (London: Longman, 1847), 107.
- 8.
For the next century, Major Macdonald remained a very shadowy figure, but he is now recognized for his pioneer work in Egyptology; see J.D. Cooney, ‘Major Macdonald, A Victorian Romantic,’ Journal of Egyptian Archœology 58 (August 1972): 280–85; P.J. Dyke, E.P. Uphill, ‘Major Charles Kerr Macdonald 1806–67,’ Journal of Egyptian Archœology 69 (1983): 165–66.
- 9.
For Newton’s recollection of this episode, see Wyatt MSS 4 (Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7059), 83, 119, 122.
- 10.
SPT recalled Tischendorf’s assurances twelve years later in a letter written from Leipzig in June 1862 (see Stunt, ‘Some unpublished letters,’ 19, 25).
- 11.
Years later Tischendorf liked to tell a very implausible story: ‘A learned Englishman, one of my friends, had been sent into the East by his Government to discover and purchase old Greek manuscripts, and spared no cost in obtaining them … but I heard that he … had not even gone as far as Sinai “for” as he said in his official report “after the visit of such an antiquarian and critic as Dr. Tischendorf, I could not expect any success”’ (Porter, Tischendorf, 125). We have yet to learn of a British government-sponsored scholar with a comparable commission in the 1840s and 1850s! It sounds like a garbled account of SPT conflated with Major Macdonald, suitably embellished for the telling.
- 12.
Tregelles, Account, separately paginated after p. 274.
- 13.
Tregelles, Introduction, ix.
- 14.
Samuel Prideaux Tregelles [ed.], Codex Zacynthius Ξ : Greek Palimpsest Fragments of the Gospel of Saint Luke, Obtained in the Island of Zante, by the late General Colin Macaulay and Now in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London: Bagster, 1861), xix.
- 15.
Tregelles, ‘Letters from the Continent,’ 454.
- 16.
Tregelles, ‘Tischendorf’s Greek Testament’, 216. John Kitto was the editor of the JSL until July 1853. His successors, Henry Burgess (1853–1861) and B. Harris Cowper (1861–1868), were less positive in their attitude to SPT.
- 17.
SPT’s collation of the Florentine Codex Amiatinus with Tischendorf’s annotations in red was acquired by James Rendel Harris and was housed in the Museum of the Woodbrooke Study Centre, Birmingham, see A. Falcetta, The Daily Discoveries of a Bible Scholar and Manuscript Hunter: A Biography of James Rendel Harris (1852–1941) (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2018), 432–3.
- 18.
The card with its mountings was also preserved in the Woodbrooke Museum, ibid., 432.
- 19.
Porter, Tischendorf, 35–40. With predictable adulation, Porter credits Tischendorf with the discovery in Cambridge in 1855 of ‘a manuscript by the Italian humanist Aonio Paleario’, which he translated and published in German (p.35, n.84). In fact, the text in question was a copy of the original printed edition (Venice, 1543) of Il Beneficio di Cristo (now usually attributed to Benedetto da Mantova), which had been recently [1843] found in the Library of St John’s College, Cambridge (with no help from Tischendorf ), by Churchill Babington who edited it for publication in 1855. Tischendorf’s German translation appeared in 1856. For the extraordinary history of this sixteenth-century book and the controversy it has aroused, see Philip McNair, ‘Benedetto da Mantova, Marcantonio Flaminio, and the Beneficio di Cristo: A Developing Twentieth Century Debate Reviewed,’ The Modern Language Review 82 (July 1987): 614–24.
- 20.
S. Prideaux Tregelles (Plymouth, 10 August 1853) to Sir Frederick Madden (London/BL, Egerton MSS 2845 ff 263–4).
- 21.
SPT to F. Madden, 18 August 1853 (London/BL, Egerton MSS 2845 ff 266–7).
- 22.
SPT to F. Madden, 27 August 1853 (Ibid., Egerton MSS 2845 ff 268).
- 23.
SPT to F. Madden, 21 October. 1853 (Ibid., Egerton MSS 2845 ff 291–2).
- 24.
SPT to F. Madden, 7 May 1855 (Ibid., Egerton MSS 2846 f.31).
- 25.
In a letter to the Bodleian library (6 May 1855) Tischendorf listed the individual prices, coming to a total of £800 (Oxford/Bod, Library Records b. 43, fol.297).
- 26.
SPT to F. Madden, 7 May 1855 (London/BL, Eg MSS 2846 ff 31). SPT refers to the document as ‘the MS of the Acts of the Apostles’ which in his first letter (10 August 1853) he described as ‘A MS of the Acts of the Apostles, written in 1054’. Clearly, this is what is now listed as BL Add MS 20003 (see F.G. Kenyon, Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1926), 134. It had reached the British Museum by December 1855; see Tregelles, ‘Nitrian Palimpsest,’ 452.
- 27.
Falconer Madan [ed.], A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, Vol. V, Collections Received During the Second Half of the 19th Century and Miscellaneous MSS Acquired Between 1695 and 1890 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 483–85.
- 28.
H.B. Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge: University Press, 1902), 134–35. The Bodleian reference is MS. Auct. T. inf. 2. 1; the BL reference is Add MS 20002.
- 29.
‘Non possum quin hoc loco dicum, quam aegre feram recenti memoria tanta illum videri invidia ac malevolentia laborare; … quod vero pietate omni ac fide exuta illis non satis habet, sed fingendi calumniandique, indulget libidini’. Tischendorf, Novum Testamentum (1859): cxvii.
- 30.
For SPT’s account of the episode, see Tregelles, ‘Nitrian Palimpsest,’ 451–52.
- 31.
F.J.A.H[ort], ‘Notices of New Books,’ Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology 4 (1858): 211.
- 32.
Tregelles, Codex Zacynthius , xix; xxvi.
- 33.
B.H. Cowper, ‘Extraordinary Discovery of a Biblical MS by Dr Tischendorf,’ JSL 9 (July 1859): 392–94.
- 34.
This is not the place to delve into the dispute as to whether Tischendorf acted honourably in the acquisition of Codex Sinaiticus or to what the monks of St Catherine actually agreed. The case in favour of Tischendorf was strongly argued by Erhard Lauch, ‘Nichts gegen Tischendorf’ in E.H. Amberg, U. Kühn [eds.], Bekenntnis zur Kirche: Festgabe für Ernst Sommerlath zum 70. Geburtstag (Berlin, 1960), 15–24. Subsequently, the late Harvard Professor, Ihor Ševčenko, cast serious doubts on Tischendorf’s claims in ‘New Documents on Constantine Tischendorf and the Codex Sinaiticus,’ Scriptorium 18 (1964): 55–80. The subject has recently been revisited by C. Böttrich’s ‘Constantin von Tischendorf und der Transfer des Codex Sinaiticus nach St Petersburg’ in A. Gössner [ed.], Die Theologische Fakultät der Universität Leipzig (Leipzig, 2005), 253–75 and in a cautious restatement of the question by M.D. Peterson, ‘Tischendorf and the Codex Sinaiticus: The Saga Continues,’ Greek Orthodox Theological Review 53:1–4 (2008): 125–39. See most recently D.C. Parker, Codex Sinaiticus: The Story of the World’s Oldest Bible (London: British Library, 2010).
- 35.
The list included such leading biblical and textual scholars as Henry Alford, William Cureton, Fenton J.A. Hort, J.B. Lightfoot, James Henthorn Todd, B.F. Westcott and Christopher Wordsworth. The high regard in which SPT was held at Trinity College Cambridge is reflected in the significant number of sponsors who were fellows of that college.
- 36.
Sir John Fiennes Twisleton Crampton [1805–1886].
- 37.
Presumably, some months later, when nothing had been done, all the papers were returned by Shaftesbury’s secretary to Newton which explains why SPT’s letter to Shaftesbury, dated 3 March 1860, was among Newton’s papers which are now in the Christian Brethren Archive (Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 [19]). Some fifty years ago, all the commendatory letters were also in the Fry Collection and I was able to make Xerox copies of them, but since 1982 they appear to have been in the British Library (Add. MS. 61835); see R.A.H. Smith, ‘Department of Manuscripts: Acquisitions January-December 1980,’ British Library Journal (1982): 222.
- 38.
SPT (Plymouth, May 5 1860) to B.W. Newton (Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 [20]).
- 39.
The translated passages, from Tischendorf’s 7th edition of his Greek NT (1859), appeared as ‘New Testament Critics: Tischendorf versus Tregelles,’ JSL (July 1862): 369–76. For SPT’s reply, see his letter to the editor, JSL (October 1862): 178–79. It is apparent from Tischendorf’s letter (Leipzig, 2 April 1861) to Samuel Davidson (Glasgow/UGL, GB 247 MS Gen 527/1) that the anonymous translator was Davidson himself, SPT’s old antagonist. Tischendorf refers to Tregelles as ‘unseren gemeinsamen Gegner’ [‘our common enemy’].
- 40.
The full text of this copy of SPT’s letter (Leipzig, June 20, 1862) is in Stunt, ‘Some Unpublished Letters’ 19. It is also now accessible at https://www.brethrenarchive.org/manuscripts/letters-of-sp-tregelles/extract-of-letter-from-dr-tregelles. He wrote a similar but more restrained letter to the Cambridge scholar F.J.A. Hort which was published in The Guardian (13 August 1862) and is reproduced in J.K. Elliott, Codex Sinaiticus and the Simonides Affair (Thessaloniki, 1982), 23–24. In fairness to both parties, we should note that in a more guarded letter to B.F. Westcott, SPT observed: ‘I ought to say that in parting, Tischendorf was as amiable as possible’ (SPT, Leipzig 25 June 1862 to B.F. Westcott, Cambridge/CUL, Westcott Papers, Add.8317/1/215).
- 41.
Tischendorf’s reading of the MS on this point was only partially vindicated seventy years later, when examination under ultraviolet light confirmed that the text had originally stopped at verse 24. It also established that it was the original scribe (and not as Tischendorf claimed, a later corrector,) who added verse 25; H.J.M. Milne, T.C. Skeat, Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus (London, 1938), 12f. This finding and the agreement of several other scholars with Tregelles, at the time, suggest that his differing opinion was not entirely unreasonable.
- 42.
C. Tischendorf (Paris, 1 December 1864) to S. Davidson (Glasgow/UGL, GB247 MS Gen 527/7). The quoted extracts are from the translation by Dr James Bentley in his Secrets of Mount Sinai: The Story of the Codex Sinaiticus (London: Orbis, 1985), 124–25, 88.
- 43.
The raw materials for an account of the extraordinary career of Simonides may be found in J.K. Elliott’s analysis in Codex Sinaiticus and the Simonides Affair (Thessaloniki: Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies, 1982), passim. For a more chronological account, see ‘Greek Forgery: Constantine Simonides’ in J.A. Farrer, Literary Forgeries (London: Longman, Green and Co, 1907), 39–66. See also, most recently P.M Pinto, ‘Simonides in England: A Forger’s Progress’, in A.E. Müller, L. Diamantopoulou, et al. [eds.], Die getäuschte Wissenschaft: Ein Genie betrügt Europa – Konstantinos Simonides (Vienna, UP, 2017), 109–126.
- 44.
For most of SPT’s letters on the Simonides affair, see Stunt, ‘Some unpublished letters’ 23–25. SPT’s profound disapproval of Simonides’ behaviour was still apparent in an indignant letter that he wrote some years later, ‘Codex Mayerianus and Simonides’, Notes and Queries 4th series 3 [24 April 1869] 369. Having examined the original codex when visiting Tischendorf in Leipzig, Tregelles was able to confirm ‘as an eyewitness’ certain statements about the codex made by another scholar, F.H.A. Scrivener in a lecture given in Plymouth in October 1863. SPT disagreed with Scrivener on many matters but probably attended the lecture to give his support in person to Scrivener’s rejection of the claims of Simonides. F.H. Scrivener, A Full Collation of the Codex Sinaiticus, with the Received Text of the New Testament, to Which is Prefixed a Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell and Co, 1864), xxxi, n.6.
- 45.
Williams and Norgate were publishers and book importers with offices in London and Edinburgh.
- 46.
SPT (Plymouth, 29 December 1862) to B.W. Newton (Manchester/JRUL/CBA 7181 [36]).
- 47.
Bentley, Secrets, 88, 125, 123.
- 48.
Tregelles, Codex Zacynthius, xxvi.
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Stunt, T.C.F. (2020). Tregelles and Tischendorf. In: The Life and Times of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32266-3_10
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