Last week I called Chris Pinto of Adullam Films.
I told him that I had made a big mistake regarding Simonides
and his claim to have made what we call the Sinaiticus.
I didn't give Constantine Simonides a fair trial.
Hi, I'm David Daniels from Chick Publications.
Now "fair" isn't a term that appears anywhere in the US Constitution
or Bill of Rights.
However, the Sixth Amendment gives the person accused of a crime:
"the right to a speedy and public trial,
by an impartial jury."
So it's supposed to happen quickly and publicly, by people who are
willing to be swayed only by the evidence.
Those accused: 1) have to be told
the accusation against them, 2) have to be confronted
with witnesses against them, 3) have to be able to get witnesses
in their favor, and 4) have to have assistance
or counsel for their defense.
That, summed up, is what we call a "fair trial."
And nobody, including me, seems to have done that
with Simonides.
Even in the United Nations, the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights of 1948 states that a person is considered innocent
until proven guilty.
That's called "Presumption of Innocence."
But with Simonides we made an exception:
We presumed his guilt.
Why would anyone presume a man's guilt?
Because of what Simonides said he did.
He said he created the Codex Sinaiticus himself.
Why is that so important?
Because another famous man Constantin Tischendorf, said
that Sinaiticus was the oldest and best Bible in history.
And that was huge.
Because as a result, people copied the Sinaiticus, and
removed thousands of words and changed other words
(compared to the traditional text of the Bible).
They literally rewrote and republished a different Bible.
Then they acted as if it was the "New and Improved Version,"
based upon the "Oldest and Best" manuscripts.
And after that, we got so many Bible versions
flooding the world, each differing from the other and
taking out, adding to, or changing even more words,
based on whatever scrap of papyrus they found in a desert cave,
cemetery or monastery.
It was a free-for-all after that.
The Bible has never been the same.
And we have seen the result: because in the new versions,
the verses that now contradict each other
make Jesus to be a liar, a sinner, not part of the Godhead,
salvation to be based partly on works,
not fully on faith in what Jesus did to shed His blood
in payment for our sins, and to make people question doctrines
on heaven, hell, angels, devils and all sorts of Bible history,
including Jesus' physical resurrection and ascension into heaven.
And check the surveys for yourself.
That's not coming from the people who trust and read the English Bible,
based upon the traditional text, the King James Bible.
That's coming from the people who read the modern versions.
This is important.
I'm not standing at the beginning of a movement,
saying "This is what could happen."
No.
I'm standing at the end part of history saying,
"This is what already happened, and why it happened."
I'm only going to tell you what already happened.
Turning to the modern Bibles and reading what they said,
led to this.
There is no doubt.
It destroyed faith in millions of people, worldwide.
And it started with trusting Constantin Tischendorf
over Constantine Simonides.
Last year I spent some time showing, step by step,
how Tischendorf lied about what happened
when he first saw the Sinaiticus, how he lied
when he declared what color it was, how he lied
about his conversations with the librarian
at St. Catherine's Monastery, how he lied
about the baskets being used to put manuscripts to be burned,
how he lied about animal skins being burned,
how he lied over and over again, even to his own family.
And I stated how "Simonides was a known forger,
counterfeiter, liar," etc.
Here's the problem.
Unlike with Tischendorf, at no time did I point out
a single instance of Simonides telling a lie,
with proof that it was a lie.
That's because I didn't catch him in a lie.
Not one.
But I still "presumed him guilty!"
Do you know why?
Because I believed the stories told about Simonides.
They were well-written.
As Chris Pinto knows.
I wrote him when his movie Tares Among the Wheat came out.
I believed what FHA Scrivener wrote against Simonides.
Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, after all, said
he wrote the definitive Greek text underlying the King James
New Testament.
Scrivener was a friend of the Received Text.
That meant he was a good guy, right?
But he was also a textual critic.
He himself doubted a number of verses
belonged in the Bible.
And in the end, he was chosen by Westcott and Hort
to be on the Committee that created the English Revised Version of 1881.
But his criticism was so well-written.
In fact, amazingly, it seemed everybody's
analysis of Simonides was written to show him to be a liar
and a fraud, a forger and to top it off, an evil genius.
It was a very convincing story.
Except for one thing.
It had no evidence.
Nobody put forth any evidence.
It was one person's testimony against another.
Think about this.
It's really strange.
The more I read Simonides' testimony,
the more I read it, the more I noticed that
he gave dates, places, names, including people they could check
with for themselves.
And Simonides told where they could be contacted.
But I was too dead-set on the "fact," however unproven,
that Simonides was a liar.
I was working night and day (ask my wife)
to understand the story and make sense of history.
Yet even I didn't even allow Simonides
a fair trial.
Until lately.
As I showed you, the statements written by the monk
Kallinikos told the truth, as far as I could verify.
The events Kallinikos the monk said he witnessed really happened.
He was one of the only ones who talked about
changing the color of the remaining parts
of the Sinaiticus, after Tischendorf
grabbed a number of sheets in 1844, took them to Saxony
and called them the Codex Friderico Augustanus
(CFA).
Those sheets, as you may remember,
were, and still are, white.
The rest of the Sinaiticus is darkened.
So Kallinikos was right about events.
Then I started reading Simonides' testimony
with new eyes.
When you don't believe someone's testimony,
you can gloss over everything they tell you.
Why would you even care about the details?
If you don't believe a word of it, then nothing they say
can make you change your mind.
But when you find out that many things they say
happen to line up with provable facts,
then suddenly every detail becomes important.
So I took a different approach in the last month.
I decided to make a timeline, and to see if I could fit
what Simonides and Kallinikos wrote on that timeline,
without contradicting 1) historical facts
and 2) each other.
Let me just summarize what I found.
I will go into more detail on the timeline in the next video
in the series.
Simonides told the truth about:
The Isle of Symi, his mom, and his uncle Benedict,
really great-uncle Benedict, his mom's uncle,
so his mom's side of the family from the tiny island north of Rhodes.
He also told the truth about the monastery
where he was baptized, and had intimate knowledge of its names.
I was amazed to find out that almost every location in Greece
seems to have had two or three different names.
Simonides told about the historically verifiable
Academy or College of Cydonia, where his uncle,
named Basilaeus and Bessarion, taught for 35 years.
He had a certain theory about the Septuagint
and the church fathers.
We'll get into that, later.
He retired after 35 years.
Then he went, as the Symians knew,
to become a monk on Mount Athos, starting at Esphigmenos monastery
on the Aegean side of Athos.
That's where he took the name of Benedict.
Then he was allowed access to a bunch of manuscripts,
both that he purchased, and kept safe there,
that he, as a scholar, could study to his heart's content.
Simonides told the truth about the Greek revolution
against Muslim Ottoman rule, and how the fighting
forced his uncle off Mt. Athos to a safer place.
He told the truth about his uncle eventually going
to the tiny island of Poros, and about the specific monastery there,
and who it was dedicated to.
This matched up with the history of
the first ruler of independent Greece, Ioannis Kapodistrias,
who came to that island with ambassadors from England,
France and Russia, to map out the new State of Greece.
Kapodistrias appointed Benedict the head of a small college
at the monastery, starting with 12 or 15 students.
This matched up as well with the Symian history
of Benedict petitioning Kapodistrias to add the Isle of Symi
to the islands belonging to Greece, to release them
from the Muslim Ottoman rule.
This also matched up with the history of Poros Island
and of the monastery.
Simonides was right and his biographer,
Charles Stewart, was wrong about the date when
Simonides was born.
There were two brothers, Constantine and his
4-year-younger brother Photius.
And of course, Simonides' testimony matched up with his birth certificate,
that he had to carry around with him.
That's good enough for starters.
I haven't even started into things like: The real year
his great uncle Benedict uncovered the hidden manuscripts,
and why that is important,
How and where Simonides learned his skills in writing,
Why Benedict wanted a printing press from the Tsar, and
not from Athens,
Who Simonides met at Mt. Athos, and why it matters,
The church leaders Simonides showed the Sinaiticus to,
How many times Sinaiticus really left Simonides' hands,
What Simonides did when he got the Sinaiticus back,
The famous man Simonides got to help him publish
his Barnabas book,
Where Simonides got his advanced education,
Who financially backed Simonides, and
the influential people they knew,
When Sinaiticus started to be tampered with,
Why it was always the Russians people were trying
to get Sinaiticus to,
And more.
Again, why is all this important?
And why would you even want to learn all this?
Because the entire Bible was changed after
Tischendorf convinced modern textual critics and paleographers
that Sinaiticus was one of the oldest and best Bible manuscripts
in history.
That earthquake shook every modern Bible, and
emboldened people to continue changing the Bible,
right up to the New King James in the present day.
And just one man, a Greek, stood up and said,
Sinaiticus is not ancient, but modern.
I created it as a project for my uncle, to give to the Tsar of Russia,
to get in return a printing press, to print up the many manuscripts
found and kept on Mount Athos.
That man was Constantine Simonides.
And after piles of intensive checking of facts,
I am forced to make a change.
I can no longer presume Simonides to be a liar,
guilty until proven innocent.
I now am forced by the evidence to treat him as I should have,
in the first place: innocent until proven guilty.
And I never could gotten to this point, if I hadn't made that timeline.
That's enough introduction for now.
Until next time,
God bless you and have a wonderful day.