Excuse me, but now it's starting to sound like you're grasping at ad hominem straws. Because you happen to deem something implausible is hardly evidence...and you've ignored a rather large amount of text from Metzger above.Have you ever thought about the sheer implausibility of Tschendorf's story? He was a thief, and his removal of a national treasure from a foreign country was scandalous and inexcusable.
And where is the manuscript now? It has been photographed and x-rayed to death.
Surely the new thieves can finally return it. It is no longer needed for purposes of scholarship...
When it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, its a criminal.
As far as Tirschendorf's story -- what is so fantastic about it? Nothing in it is implausible. A synopsis of the story:
The discovery of this manuscript, now nearly a century ago, was the supreme triumph of the great Biblical scholar Constantine Tischendorf. In the year 1844 he was travelling in the East in search of manuscripts, and in the course of his travels he visited the monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai. While working in the library he noticed a basket containing a large number of stray pages of manuscripts, among which he was astounded to behold several leaves of the oldest Greek writing he had ever set eyes on, and, as a short inspection proved, containing parts of the Greek Bible. No less than forty-three such leaves did he extract, and the librarian casually observed that two basket loads of similar waste paper had already been consumed in the furnace of the monastery. It is therefore not surprising that he easily obtained permission to keep the leaves which he had picked up; but when he discovered that some eighty more leaves of the Old Testament from the same manu­script were also in existence, difficulties were made about letting him see them; and he had to content himself with informing the monks of their value, and entreating them to stoke their fires with something less precious. He then returned to Europe, and having presented his treasure to his sovereign, King Frederick Augustus of Saxony, published its contents under the name of the Codex Friderico-Augustanus. These forty-three leaves be­longed, like all that Tischendorf had yet seen or heard of, to the Old Testament, containing portions of 1 Chronicles, 2 Esdras, Tobit, and Jeremiah, with Esther complete; they are now, as we have seen (Ch.V, p.67), at Leipzig, separated from the rest of the volume to which they once belonged. In 1853 he returned to Sinai; but his former warning, and perhaps the interest aroused in Europe by the discovery, had made the monks cautious, and he could hear nothing more concerning the manuscript. In 1859 he visited the monastery once again, this time under the patronage of the Tsar Alexander II, the patron of the Greek Church; but still his inquiries were met with blank negation, until one evening, only a few days before he was to depart, in the course of conversation with the steward of the monastery, he showed him a copy of his recently published edition of the Septuagint. Thereupon the steward remarked that he too had a copy of the Septuagint, which he would like to show to his visitor. Accordingly he took him to his room, and produced a heap of loose leaves wrapped in a cloth; and there before the astonished scholar's eyes lay the identical manuscript for which he had been longing. Not only was part of the Old Testament there, but the New Testament, complete from beginning to end. Concealing his feelings, he asked to be allowed to keep it in his room that evening to examine it; leave was given, "and that night it seemed sacrilege to sleep." He tried to buy the manuscript, without success. Then he asked to be allowed to take it to Cairo to study; but since the monk in charge of the library objected, he had to leave it behind. The Superior of the monastery, however, was at Cairo; and he, at Tischendorf's request, sent for the manuscript, and placed it in his hands, a few sheets at a time, for copying. Then Tischendorf suggested that it would be a graceful act to present it to the Tsar of Russia, as the protector of the Greek Church; and since the monks desired the influence of the Tsar in connection with the election of a new Archbishop, they consented to this, and after dilatory negotiations, Tischendorf was allowed to take the precious manuscript to Russia for presentation to the Tsar. In view of stories put about subse­quently by later generations of monks at St. Catherine's, it should be emphasised that Tischendorf's behaviour was quite correct throughout. He acted all through in agreement with the monks, and when there was some delay in the arrival of the counter-gift which, in accordance with Oriental usage, was expected from the Tsar, he intervened and secured the transmission of a sum of 9000 roubles and some decorations. To the end of his life he remained on good terms with the Sinai community, as contemporary documents show.
[The full story may be found in a pamphlet issued by the Trustees of the British Museum in 1934 (The Mount Sinai Manuscript of the Bible).]
The romance of the Codex Sinaiticus was not yet over, however. Since the year 1856 an ingenious Greek, named Constantine Simonides, had been creating a considerable sensation by produc­ing quantities of Greek manuscripts professing to be of fabulous antiquitysuch as a Homer in an almost prehistoric style of writing, a lost Egyptian historian, a copy of St. Matthew's Gospel on papyrus, written fifteen years after the Ascension (!), and other portions of the New Testament dating from the first century. These productions enjoyed a short period of notoriety, and were then exposed as forgeries. Among the scholars concerned in the exposure was Tischendorf; and the revenge taken by Simonides was distinctly humorous. While stoutly maintaining the genuine­ness of his own wares, he admitted that he had written one manuscript which passed as being very ancient, and that was the Codex Sinaiticus, the discovery of which had been so trium­phantly proclaimed by Tischendorf! The idea was ingenious, but it would not bear investigation. Apart from the internal evidence of the text itself, the variations in which no forger, however clever, could have invented, it was shown that Simonides could not have completed the task in the time which he professed to have taken, and that there was no such edition of the Greek Bible as that from which he professed to have copied it. This little cloud on the credit of the newly-discovered manuscript therefore rapidly passed away, and the manuscript reposed, still unbound and in the cloth which had wrapped it at Sinai, in what was presumed to be its final home. It had, however, one more transmigration to undergo. In 1933 it became known that the Soviet Government was not unwilling to sell it, having little use for Bibles and much for money. Indeed, negotiations had previously been opened with an American syndicate; but the financial crisis supervened, and America's difficulty gave England an unhoped-for opportunity. After prolonged negotiations a bargain was concluded by which it passed into the possession of the Trustees of the British Museum for the sum of £100,000 (much less than the sum contemplated in the American negotia­tions), of which half was guaranteed by the British Government. Accordingly, just before Christmas, 1933, the great Bible entered the British Museum, amid scenes of much popular excitement. There were, of course, those who criticised the purchase. Some used the argument of Judas Iscariot in John xii.5, but found that its parentage made it unpopular; some revived the legends of Tischendorf's misconduct and the claim of Simonides, but these also had little success. Others, more plausibly, argued that since an excellent photographic facsimile had been published by the Oxford University Press (New Testament, 1911; Old Testament, 1922) from photographs taken by Professor Kirsopp Lake, the original was of no further importance; but even this (which never commended itself to those who had experience of MSS. and photographs) has been disproved by a study of the scribes and correctors of the MS. by Messrs. H. J. M. Milne and T. G. Skeat of the British Museum (published 1938), which never could have been carried through without access to the MS. itself. The manuscript has now been beautifully and securely bound by Mr. Douglas Cockerell, and one may hope that it has now reached its final resting-place.
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