Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

As Brown notes, with reference to Anastasopoulou's report on the subject, a document like the Mar Saba fragment is particularly susceptible to a successful demonstration of its artificiality, if that were true about its handwriting: Forging a document is not a simple matter of picking up a pen and i...

Anastasopoulou commented: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/venetia-anastasopoulou-can-a-document-in-itself-reveal-a-forgery/ When a large document is consistent, we have a first indication of genuineness and this applies to the Secret Mark letter. The Se...

A few comments on handwriting analysis and on the Mar Saba fragment that I have written are here:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=12019

Where there's an expectation that comments made are based on mutual respect.

Something not done here by Tselikas -- such as providing comparison with other writing with respect to the amount of discontinuity in the writing -- can also be done at the descriptive level, in a verifiable way. This has been done by Timo S. Paananen and Roger Viklund, who (like most of us) also a...

Commenting outside of his own discipline, and writing after Anastasopoulou published, Tselikas offered criticism in category (b), stating that “the scribe of the letter would not use the own personal style” and implicitly rejected the validity of the methods used in handwriting examination when cons...

https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/ws/files/125297411/An_Eighteenth_Century_Manuscript_FINAL_REVISION_v13_with_APOCRYPHA_modifications_with_language_check.pdf Tom Davis formulates the methodological basis of handwriting comparison in the following way: “a given writer will tend to produce writing that is idi...

Forensic document examiners have a genuine area of expertise. For example, here is a 450 page monograph based on empirical studies, involving collecting data about handwriting, that documents characteristics of disguised writing: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/20535754.pdf As an area of expertise, ...

At the time that Tselikas was asked for his expert opinion as a paleographer, and by the same people (BAR), the professional forensic document examiner Venetia Anastasopoulou was simultaneously being asked to publish. https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/wp-content/uploads/secret-mark-handwriting-res...

I made an earlier post in a similar thread here To paraphrase: Tselikas did not strictly speaking establish that the handwriting is later than the 18th century, What Tselikas did claim to establish is that although the handwriting is in one sense an 18th century Greek cursive, the scribe is not wri...

The Mar Saba letter has the plural here (iota, not sigma): https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=169090#p169090 https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=169661#p169661 https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=169711#p169711 So the question of how Morton Smith interpreted the ...