Codex 2427, also known as Archaic Mark, is a small, 88-page book of the Gospel of Mark with colourful pictures, dated to the 1300s. The opening pages are pictured above. In 1945, when its discovery was announced, Bible scholar Ernest Colwell of the University of Chicago said it preserved the Gospel of Mark:
“in a more primitive form than any other known manuscript”
Even though it was dated to the 1300s, the text closely matched that of the Codex Vaticanus of the 300s, but not exactly, so it seemed that the scribe was copying a yet older manuscript. It was considered one of the best ancient manuscripts of Mark. If you have a Catholic or Protestant Bible that was translated between 1993 and 2011, its Gospel of Mark was based in part on this book.
In 2006 the University of Chicago, which owns the book, put clear pictures of all 88 pages on the Internet. Within weeks it was found to be a fake! What Bible scholars did not see for 70 years was seen by an amateur, Stephen Carlson.
In 2009, Science Daily reported:
“A biblical expert at the University of Chicago, Margaret M. Mitchell, together with experts in micro-chemical analysis and medieval bookmaking, has concluded that one of the University Library’s most enigmatic possessions is a forgery.”
As if you needed all of that fancy science to tell it was a fake:
Just looking at the text you could tell that it was copied from a modern book. First, because it had some modern Greek words!!! Second, as Carlson noticed, the skips in the text do not match the lines of the narrow columns of ancient books, but the much longer lines of a modern book without columns. As it turned out, that book was:
Philipp Buttman’s 1860 Greek New Testament. Buttman was copying a copy of Codex Vaticanus and made 85 mistakes of his own. Archaic Mark copies 81 of those mistakes! And the skips match whole lines of text in his book.
All the “micro-chemical analysis” did was to narrow down when the copy was made. The parchment and leather cover were carbon-dated to about 1550, give or take 100 years. The ink was from some time after the early 1600s. But one of the paint chemicals, lithopone, was not available till 1874. The pictures were not retouched.
Archaic Mark comes from John Askitopoulos, an Athenian antiquities dealer. We do not know where he got it from. His family says it was found among his things after his death in 1917. It later made its way to the University of Chicago, which was hungry to build up its manuscript collection.
So the forgery was done sometime between 1874 and probably 1917. There were suspicions that it was a fake as early as 1947, but that did not stop it from becoming one of the “oldest and best” manuscripts of the New Testament from 1945 to 2006.
In 2012 it was stripped out of the footnotes of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, the 28th edition. Nestle-Aland is the version of the Greek New Testament that nearly all modern Catholic and Protestant Bibles translate – ESV, NIV, NAB, NASB, TLB, NRSV, etc.
– Abagond, 2021.
See also:
518
Abagond 
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