Minuscule 2427 - Forgery

Forgery

The manuscript found some early critics upon arriving in Chicago. Robert P. Casey "voiced his suspicion in 1947". In 1988 Mary V. Orna found that one of the illustrations contained Prussian blue (KFe), produced since 1704 only. This did not resolve the question of authenticity, however, as it was "conceivable that the illuminations could have been retouched in a naïve attempt at restoration.

In early 2006 the University of Chicago announced that digital images of the manuscript had appeared online in an effort to "foster further research." By February Stephen Carlson had announced his findings that the codex was a forgery, and proved his case beyond a doubt at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Its text has been copied from Philipp Buttmann's 1860 Greek New Testament edition (based on Cardinal Mai's edition of Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209), this is especially obvious since the forger also followed Buttmann in 81 out of 85 places where his edition departed from the Codex Vaticanus text. Furthermore, in three places the copyist of 2427 had accidentally omitted a line (6:2, 8:12, 14:14), and it transpired that in each verse the omitted text corresponds exactly to the lineation of Buttmann's edition.

Furthermore, microscopic, chemical and codicological testing eventually proved in 2009 that the manuscript had been made in 1874 at the earliest.

What made the text a forgery was that it was carefully manufactured in the style of a medieval codex, when it was in fact a very recent creation, no older than the late 19th century. What originally made scholars so suspicious was that it was textually the closest known manuscript – in fact, virtually identical – to Codex Vaticanus, but of a much later date. Furthermore, Greek codices of a single gospel are extremely unusual, further contributing to the suspicion that it was made as a souvenir.