@Red Sky at Morning
"So what's your thinking? @Golden Age Does it seem likely to you that the Sinaiticus is the genuine ancient document as it has been presented to us, or that other agendas were in play to promote this document to be an authority?"
I must say that I find the manner in which Constantine Tischendorf found (rescued!?) parchments from a basket in St Catherine's Monastery rather 'convenient' !?
Are we really expected to believe that monks kept these 'quires' for 1800 years and decided to consign them to the flames just at the moment Tischendorf walks in through the gates of the Monastery and rescues them for posterity!? It reads too much like a Hollywood screenplay for my liking.
[By the way, the Monks disagreed with Tischendorf's explanation about the circumstances in in which he discovered the Sinaiticus].
The 'quires' are in remarkably good condition for documents reputed to be between 1600-800 years old. This could be explained by the fact that they were stored in the very dry desert air of St Catherine's Monastery, which, we know does wonders for documents formed from animal skin and paper. Desert air is a natural preservative.
The Sinaiticus has many similarities with the Codex Vaticanus, (but bits of the Old Testament are missing and there are additional books and text in both the Old and New Testament). So this has to be a source of some reassurance for many Christians !?
However, important parts of the Bible referring to the resurrection are missing from the Sinaiticus. The resurrection narrative from the earliest Gospel of Mark is missing, indicating that this doctrine was still being developed and hadn't become a coherent idea when the scribes were at work writing the Sinaiticus. This seems to accord with the accepted Biblical academic view that Christian doctrine has developed over time.
My greatest concern is that the text displays signs of mistakes and corrections. Scholars believe there were three [primary] scribes of the Sinaiticus, but, we don't have their biographies. Then there were several correctors of the text that are also unknown.
However, this is a shortcoming of all early Biblical texts and is not a feature peculiar to the Sinaiticus.
So was the Codex Sinaiticus forged by Constantine Simonides?
Unlikely, [is my response]:
1] The Sinaiticus is a monumental piece of work of over 1,400 pages, with each page requiring 2,500 uncial letters to cover. That means that the entire Sinaiticus would have required 3,700,000 letters. Even with his cunning skills, that was a task beyond Constantine Simonides and certainly impossible to achieve in the just the period between 1839 - 1841.
2] Academics are also agreed that the Sinaiticus is the work of more than one scribe and several correctors. Academic techniques used to identify authorship were developed in the 20th Century and Simonides could not have been expected to foresee these and try to subvert them
3] Codex Sinaiticus at Isaiah 1:10, at Zechariah 14:8 and the Book of Revelation has Arabic notes in the margins. Simonides had no knowledge of Arabic
4] Influence of the Coptic language is also detected in the Sinaiticus
The Sinaiticus indicates a much earlier time frame for its composition than the 1800's. So on a balance of probabilities, I find it difficult to accept that Simonides authored the the Sinaiticus.