It's a pretty intriguing story, part comedy and part tragedy, where German Rationalists, Orthodox monks, and Scofield Adherents all play a role.
accept scofield uses the majority manuscripts, the ones that are alleged frauds are the Sinaiticus manuscripts (the one's the NIV, ESV, NASB use). The fact that there are whitened leaves, and the ones that are not whitened are not as old as they should be for the 4th century. It looks like there was tampering to say the least, and one guy actually confessed to tampering it: Simonides. Here is an interesting tidbit from another thread on this topic: Before the
Codex Sinaiticus, the first five letters of Barnabas were not known to us, but with the "discovery" of the
Codex Sinaiticus we were able to know what was in them. The
Codex Sinaiticus was found by
Constantin von Tischendorf in
1845. The only problem that we have is that in 1843, a good 2 years before the discovery of the
Codex Sinaiticus, Constantine Simonides had published a book called the "
The Letters of Barnabas" which he even had the first 4 letters that were first found in the
Codex Sinaiticus. They were exactly the same, word for word. So the question lies, doesn't it naturally follow that only two sources at that relative time claimed to have the books, and one source claims to forge the second source? Doesn't that add validity to his claim? There is a second source that claims He forged it:
In
Oct 15, 1862, Kallinikos Hieromachos, wrote a letter, were it stated that
...I do myself declare to all men by this letter, that the Codex of the Old and New Testaments, together with the Epistle of Barnabas and of the Shepherd Hermas, which was abstracted by Dr. Tischendorf from the Greek monastery of Mount Sinai
, is a work of the hands of the unwearied Simonides himself. Inasmuch as I myself saw him in 1843 ... in the month of February writing it in Athos...Dr. Tischendorf, coming to the Greek monastery of Sinai in 1844, in the month of May (if my memory does not deceive me), and remaining there several days, and getting into his hands, by permission of the librarian, the codex we are speaking of, and perusing and re-perusing it frequently, abstracted secretly a small portion of it, but left the largest portion in the place where it was, and departed undisturbed...And I know yet further, that the codex also was cleaned with lemon-juice, professedly for the purpose of cleaning its parchments, but in reality in order to weaken the freshness of the letters, as was actually the case."
this adds validity to the fact that 10% of the manuscript is whiter than the rest of it. It would naturally follow that that was the part that was cleaned with lemon juice.