People have raised the question: How could Greek Orthodox people,
like Simonides and his uncle Benedict,
have created a Bible text that is totally contrary
to their own Orthodox church?
How could they have done that?
They couldn't do that, could they?
They were Greek Orthodox!
Right?
But the Sinaiticus is totally not Greek Orthodox!
But is that so hard to believe?
Maybe not.
I've shown in earlier videos my own professors,
in what was supposed to be a conservative seminary,
teaching totally heretical, Bible-doubting, unbelieving doctrines.
Parents send their kids to Bible schools and seminaries,
and they have no idea their kids are being subverted
in the process.
But I'm not here to tell you what could have happened.
I'm here to tell you what did happen.
Here is a case of where an entire town
does know the liberal, unorthodox teachings of the professors,
and supports them, and defends them
against their own church!
Welcome to the town of Cydoniae.
The town of Ayvalik, or Cydoniae, was an unusual case
in the history of how the Muslim Ottoman
Turkish Empire treated the Greeks.
They actually showed some compassion.
In 1773, the Ottomans granted the Cydonians
special privileges.
First, the Muslim residents had to leave Cydoniae.
And other Muslims were forbidden to settle there.
The city was declared independent.
It was no longer under the Muslim governor of the region.
Even Muslim observers seemed to have left.
To the Muslims, these privileges were being granted
to the Christians of Cydoniae.
We call them people of the Eastern Orthodox religion.
Other Greeks heard about these new freedoms
and immigrated into the city.
Many of them came to be free from the pirates who struck
around the Aegean Sea.
The city had three major districts: upper, middle and lower.
The upper district was "traditionally important families,"
who more or less ran the community,
with some help from the middle district.
The middle district was wealthy businessmen and merchants
who had no social status, along with business employees
and craftsmen.
The lower district was mostly sailors, farmers and other workers.
Religiously, Cydoniae was directly under
the Orthodox diocese of Ephesus, not the mother church
of Constantinople.
And it had 12 parish communities.
The biggest one in the lower district was Zoodochos Pigi
(the "life-giving spring or fountain," referring to Mary).
Seven years later, in 1780, a church was built
in the lower district, called the Virgin of the Orphans.
This church had a courtyard.
This must have been quite a big courtyard.
According to The Encyclopedia of the Hellenic World,
in that courtyard were built: a small nursery;
an elementary school; and a Greek school.
It also had a library and living quarters for the teachers
and out-of-town students.
It even had a hospital!
According to the Encyclopedia, this is where 4 teachers taught:
deacon Evgenios of Vourla, Frantzeskos of Kea,
Theodosios of Mudanya and the fourth,
who is most interesting to us, Vissarion of Symi.
It received its support from charitable contributions
by the churches and wealthy citizens of Cydoniae.
Vissarion of Symi began teaching in the fourth year of the school, in 1784,
according to a tiny reference in a letter by Constantine Simonides.
Vissarion we have met before, under the name "Benedict."
Vissarion was a given name of Simonides' Great-Uncle!
Simonides wrote:
"First, that my uncle Benedict, being by profession a theologian,
and versed in twelve languages ... began this work
while Professor in the College of Cydon,
in the year 1784."
Simonides stated that Benedict:
"Having removed to Mount Athos in 1819, for the sake of retirement,
and embraced the monastic life in the Monastery of Esphigmenos,
he was named Benedict ... having formerly had
two names, Basilaeus and Bessarion."
Simonides also tells us what Vissarion, or Benedict, did
when he taught, and when he retired:
When he taught, Vissarion was
"...intending to publish both the Old and New Testaments,
and the writings of the Apostolic Fathers,
with exegetic scholia of the ancient commentators
[Bible commentaries], and specially to reply to
what had been written against the Septuagint."
This was during the years when he taught.
When he retired, Vissarion, now Benedict:
"While at Athos he gave himself up particularly
to the study of the Sacred Scriptures.
He collected the most ancient MSS.
of both Testaments, and of their commentators, and
at considerable expense prepared his work for the press."
That means Simonides' Great-Uncle Benedict, or Vissarion,
was a teacher at the school of Cydoniae for 35 years.
But for Simonides' story to ring true, we have to believe and prove
some amazing things.
The Orthodox religion clearly used a New Testament
that was pretty close to our King James New Testament.
It was completely different from the Alexandrian Greek
that is in Sinaiticus.
How could Vissarion, now Benedict, have gotten away with
pushing a completely heretical text on his students for up to 35 years?
It looks like I found the answer.
Hi, I'm David Daniels from Chick Publications.
It is exciting to search through other sources
and find backup even for the minor things stated
matter-of-factly by Simonides.
That's the mark of a truth-teller.
A liar may lie, even when he doesn't have to.
But a truth-teller states facts, even when nobody
will look them up.
--Okay, well, I did, but I'm not normal.
You get the point.
So let's go back to the school started in 1780
in the lower district of Cydoniae, in the courtyard of the
Virgin of the Orphans church.
There were three notable students.
I will tell each of their stories, one at a time.
Ready?
The three well-known students of this school were
Veniamin Lesvios, Theofilos Kairis and
Grigorios Saraphis.
The first student was Veniamin Lesvios, or
Benjamin of the Isle of Lesbos.
Ten years after the school opened, in 1790,
the wealthy patrons of the school gave Veniamin a scholarship
to study in Western Europe.
When he returned six years later in 1796,
Veniamin taught physics, mathematics, metaphysics
and ethics.
(Fellow student Grigorios Saraphis taught Greek.
But we'll get back to him later.)
The school became so popular that Veniamin was invited to teach
in schools all over the Aegean Sea.
But he said No.
He brought with him all the latest books from Europe's Enlightenment,
paid for by donations from the wealthy patrons.
His science laboratory had all the latest telescopes, prisms,
reflectors, maps, instruments, etc.
At this point, some of the most advanced
Greek education wasn't done in Greece, but in Asia Minor
(now called Turkey).
The three schools, as I mentioned in another video,
were located at Chios, Smyrna and Cydoniae.
They were all located less than 100 miles
from each other.
In 1798, 2 years after Veniamin
returned from his studies in Western Europe,
the aristocrats and the merchants basically settled their disputes
and decided together to start an academy.
Two years later, in 1800, Veniamin founded
the Academy of Cydoniae.
But it only took 2 more years, 1802-1803,
for the progressives at the school to threaten the traditional Orthodox
religious leadership.
That's when the Patriarchate of Constantinople
put Veniamin Lesvios under the magnifying glass.
Veniamin wanted the progressive European
Enlightenment thinking to continue.
He quickly sent the second student, his friend Theophilos Kairis
to Europe, so he could replace Veniamin
regardless of what happened to him, when Theophilos returned.
Meanwhile Veniamin was charged
by the Patriarchate of Constantinople with teaching carnal love and
unscriptural teachings about the movement of the earth.
A letter from the Synod publicly called upon Veniamin
to recant his teachings and teach like the conservative monk
Athanasios Parios.
(Most of those teachers had been Athanasios' students.)
It also announced
that the third student, Grigorios Saraphis,
would replace Veniamin.
It appears that Grigorios, unlike the other two,
learned locally and never absorbed the Western European
thinking of the day.
So they believed they could trust him
with maintaining traditional Orthodox teaching
after they fired Veniamin.
There were two opposing sides: The Patriarchate of Constantinople
and supporting monks, who wanted traditional religion, and
the colleges and academies, who wanted academic freedom
to pursue the Western European ideas,
instead of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Those were two different worlds.
Some of you probably realize that one of the big ideas
in Western Europe at this time was the falsely-called science
of paleography, created by Catholic Benedictine
Maurist monks Mabillon and Montfaucon.
It was the con job that said a person could look at
shapes of letters and forms of writing, and from that judge the age
of a papyrus or vellum or other writing that looked ancient.
What the students always forget is the fact that anyone
can copy an older form of text.
We tried that in elementary school!
To even begin to figure out the actual dates of manuscripts
requires scientific chemical tests.
The Catholic system was good at manufacturing forgeries
of ancient documents.
The Benedictine Maurists had just perfected the con.
So they taught Protestants to supposedly "date" the manuscripts
that they manufactured, getting them away from
the preserved Bible manuscripts and down the rabbit trail
of "older and better" Bibles.
So the stage was set.
Constantinople thought they were going to get
the Academy of Cydoniae to go back to traditional teaching.
Wishful thinking.
When have you heard of a Bible college or university
going back to conservative ways?
More than that, the Patriarchate also wanted
Veniamin excommunicated and then replaced by conservative
Gregorios Saraphis!
But as I mentioned, Cydoniae wasn't under Constantinople.
It was directly under the jurisdiction of Ephesus,
specifically the metropolitan of Ephesus,
Dionysios Kalliarchis.
He had his own way to settle the matter.
Metropolitan Dionysios asked for Veniamin's
teaching notebooks to be sent to him.
Then he read them and refuted the charges himself!
You see, Dionysios was a progressive,
just like the Academy and the wealthy and influential people
of Cydoniae.
The merchants of Cydoniae sent letters supporting Dionysios
and Veniamin, because they believed the Synod
didn't have the right to dictate what they saw as
educational matters.
So in reality, Cydoniae wasn't really
a traditional Eastern Orthodox city at all.
It was a college town.
And proof of this wasn't far off.
In 1812, Theophilos Kairis returned from Europe,
carrying the same Progressive ideas as Veniamin,
and literally took his place, as promised.
Veniamin Lesvios simply resigned, citing ill health.
After that, the matter was basically settled.
But if you noticed, Veniamin won.
Western-influenced Theophilos, not Eastern traditional Grigorios,
became the head guy.
They continued in their liberal ways until 1821,
when the Turks destroyed the city and Academy.
And that, Brothers and Sisters, was the environment in which
for 35 years Vissarion, Simonides' Great-Uncle Benedict,
taught and did his life's work.
Does it sound like an Academy that would use a
traditional Byzantine text?
Or does it sound more likely that they would favor a Western-taught
paleographically "older and better" Greek text,
as was taught in Western Europe
reading Mabillon and Montfaucon?
Even if they hadn't settled upon what that text was,
it is likely that they were very open to something other than
what the religious establishment of Constantinople
had so rigidly enforced.
It was the perfect seedbed for Great-Uncle Vissarion
to collect manuscripts that were different from
the Orthodox New Testament, and to justify it,
using Western Paleography.
So maybe Vissarion, when he became Benedict,
didn't just want a printing press from the Tsar
in return for his remade Codex.
Maybe he wanted that to be the beginning of a change
in the churches from the Orthodox Byzantine Bible
to an Alexandrian one.
All he needed was a good exemplar, a master, so to speak,
from which to make it.
Benedict spent 45 years perfecting a text,
but finally all that working day and night,
under candlelight, ruined his eyes.
That is why he asked his great-nephew,
a master calligrapher from his childhood, to help.
Then in utter respect for his great uncle,
Constantine Simonides started working on the Alexandrian texts
that were prepared for him to copy.
It sounds like motive, to me.
I've already shown you the means and opportunity.
Both Benedict and Simonides had intellectual and educational
means.
And on Athos, since they are both
documented as being there, both had opportunity.
Now we have motive.
The three elements of a probable deed are
motive, means and opportunity.
Now you have all three.
And I haven't even covered the political side of things yet.
I hope you'll consider these facts.
God bless you, and have a wonderful day.