[citation needed] Simonides lived in the monasteries on Mount Athos between 1839 and 1841 and again in 1852, during which time he acquired some of the biblical manuscripts that he later sold.
Frederic G. Kenyon writes that Simonides created "a considerable sensation by producing quantities of Greek manuscripts professing to be of fabulous antiquity – such 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 (!
[4] After this was exposed as a forgery, the print run was destroyed by Oxford University Press after a small number of copies had been sold.
Also, in many other complicated questions he had his own, usually controversial, point of view, but after ascribing the authorship of the Codex Sinaiticus to himself, the rest of his credibility was destroyed by the British press.
[citation needed] In 2006 a papyrus book-roll was exhibited at Turin which appeared to be part of Book II of the lost Geographical Descriptions of Artemidorus Ephesius.
[11] Following the controversy about its authenticity, the papyrus has been tested with the radiocarbon method, which produced a date between 40 BCE and 130 CE with a 95.4% level of confidence.
[12][13] After examining the text of the papyrus and the data of the radiometric analyses, the philologist Giambattista D'Alessio concluded that "the identification of this papyrus as a forgery by Constantine Simonides involves a great deal of altogether fantastic ad hoc hypothetical constructions that, far from providing a more economical explanation of the evidence, force their advocates into more and more implausible fictions".