Category: Coptic

Manuscripts online now at the VMR

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Lots of Syriac, Arabic, Coptic and Persian mss are starting to appear at the VMR, here.  Contents contain all sorts of things; service books, bits of the bible, homilies, and so on.

When I first looked, I was using IE6 and couldn’t see any images.  But with Firefox it’s fine, even from behind a corporate firewall.  The images are nice, colour and clear enough to read the text and see the rubrics.  In short they are ideal for study purposes.

One less good feature is that you can’t resize the viewing window.  Often the whole image is larger than this, which means that you have to drag it around to see the whole opening.  This is undesirable.

The user interface is a bit clunky.  What you get is a list of manuscript shelfmarks.  Not having memorised the three volume Mingana handbook, I’d like to see a quick summary of contents.  In fact it would be nice if there was some way for me to enter the catalogue description in text form — it’s a PDF — so that I don’t have to click on a link, click on a PDF, just to see what each ms. contains.  But early days yet.  These are teething problems only.

Thanks for Tommy Wasserman at ETS for the update.

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Apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I mentioned earlier this Coptic text which records the abandonment of Coptic for Arabic.  A query to the Hugoye list produced a lot of info:

A text and translation can apparently be found here: J. Ziadeh (ed./tr.), “L’apocalypse de Samuel, superieur de Deir el-Qalamoun”, in: ROC 20 (1915-17), pp. 376-92/392-404. 

I’m not sure if this is online anywhere, but if it is I might translate it.  It does seem to be one of the Revue de l’Orient Chretien volumes which is NOT online.

The subject is discussed, including the Apocalypse of Samuel,  in Zaborowski, J.R., “From Coptic to Arabic in Medieval Egypt,” Medieval Encounters 14:1 (2008), 15-40.

And here comes something about the apocaltytic context: Martinez, Francisco Javier, ‘The King of Ruum and the King of Ethiopia in medieval apocalyptic texts from Egypt’, [in:] Coptic studies: Acts of the Third International Congress of Coptic Studies, Warsaw, 20-25 August, 1984, ed. by Wlodzimierz Godlewski, Varsovie 1990, pp. 247-259; and more about the transition process: Rubenson, Samuel, ‘Translating the tradition: some remarks on the Arabization of the patristic heritage in Egypt’ Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue, 2 (1996), pp. 4-14;

Another recent discussion of the Apoc. Samuel of Qalamun, setting it in the context of 10-11 cent. Egyptian church politics: Papaconstantinou, Arietta. “‘They Shall Speak the Arabic Language and Take Pride in It’: Reconsidering the Fate of Coptic after the Arab Conquest.” Le Muséon 120.3-4 (2007): 273-99. Also, as part of his forthcoming study on the Christian Arabic apocalyptic tradition, Jos van Lent has been working on the manuscript history of this text. Some of his findings were presented at the IACS in Cairo last September.

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Gospel of Judas, Coptic Paul, Greek Exodus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Sometime before 1983, peasants in Egypt found four manuscript books somewhere. They were smuggled out of the country, and first seen by scholars in 1983, in boxes. They were hawked around the art market for more than 20 years. One of these contained the ps.gospel of Judas; the others were a Greek mathematical treatise, a Coptic version of three of Paul’s letters, and a copy of Exodus.

In an evil hour, these papyrus books went sold to a US antiquities dealer named Bruce Ferrini, who dismembered them and sold them, a bit at a time, to his contacts.  Ferrini eventually double-crossed his supplier, and then went bankrupt.

It seems that Ferrini retained fragments of the books, despite undertaking not to.  Despite being bankrupt, he seems to have operated a shop on e-Bay at one period.  Some of fragments then bought by collectors are now going around again on e-Bay.  A scholar is intending to purchase at least some of them and thereby get them out of this circus.

Silence has largely descended on this business.  Dutch art-dealer turned game-keeper Michel van Rijn used to expose all the dealings, but his site shut down after death threats.  Yet three of the four manuscripts are still missing.  In all this silence, it’s impossible to say whether all the pages and fragments that went to Ferrini are recovered.  I think I know where the Greek mathematical treatise is; and the anti-social scholars who have been commissioned to publish it but have not done so.  The Exodus may be in pieces; the whereabouts of the majority of the Paul are utterly unknown to me.

The fact that shreds of the gospel of Judas are turning up online can only mean that even now the find is not in safe keeping.  And every shred, remember, is a word of the text.  It’s a little bit of ancient knowledge, gone forever unless we are lucky.  It’s enough to make anyone weep.

Later:  I’ve just been to look for pieces of “manuscripts” generally on e-Bay.  There are offers of what is plainly pages from one manuscript, being dismembered and sold page by page by some reprehensible and greedy individual.  There are obvious fakes being offered.  The vision of destruction and dispersal, of the sheer lack of ethics, is horrible to see.

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Coptic Apocalypse of Daniel – now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve translated Macler’s version and placed it here.  This translation has no scholarly value, of course, but is more like research notes.  I place it in the public domain, so do as you will with it. 

If you’d like to support the site, please buy a copy of the CD of the Fathers.

The text was written, in Coptic, ca. 1187 AD.  That means that Richard the Lionheart could have met people whose first language was this last dialect of Ancient Egyptian!

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More on the Coptic Apocalypse of Daniel

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Frederic Macler’s articles in the RHR 33 (1896) * discuss the various Apocalypses of Daniel.  He knows of nine such texts; six in Greek, one in Coptic, one in Armenian and one in Persian, and lists the publications (p.33f).  Clearly it was a popular vehicle to express your sentiments on your own times!

The Coptic text was printed by Woide, Appendix ad editionem N. T. graeci e codici Alexandrino, Oxford, 1799.   This is a folio volume of 140 pages; let’s hope it comes online.  The manuscript is in the Bibliotheque Nationale, fonds copte, no. 58.

Macler notes in his article that none of the texts exist in French translation, and that producing one would be of more service to most people than a scholarly article.  Consequently he prints a translation of the Coptic and Armenian texts.  The nine texts have no real relation to one another, or so I gather.

* Non-US readers will need to use an anonymizing proxy to access this.

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The Coptic apocalypse of Daniel

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Ian Tompkins pointed me to an interesting article on this little known Coptic text, in RHR 33 (1896), 163-176.  Since I don’t know anything about this text, and M. Macler is willing to tell me (in French), here is a running translation of excerpts of his article.

It’s name, The fourteenth vision of Daniel, is because in the manuscript in which it is found, it follows the book of Daniel which is divided into thirteen visions, as in the Alexandrian manuscript. [Ms. BNF copt 58]

This apocalypse begins by imitating the canonical book of Daniel; it borrows from it the notion of four great monarchies; it even borrows entire phrases…

After a very detailed historical-seeming introduction, which resembles that of the canonical book, the prophet has a vision concerning the realm of the sons of Ishmael.  Nineteen kings of this race shall reign over the land (over Egypt); in the reign of the nineteenth and last, Pitourgos, his enemy will return, put him to flight and kill him; then the king of the Romans will rise up and govern the Ishmaelites; then Gog and Magog will shake the earth…then Antichrist will appear… then the Ancient of Days will come, who will put Antichrist to death, and whose kingdom will have no end.  Finally Daniel is commanded to seal up all these things until the time when they happen.

Our Apocalypse offers this characteristic, that at first sight all the quoted facts seem historical and easy to identify; but on looking at there more closely, this semblance disappears, and there remains nothing except a bizarre collection of treatises gathered by a less than faithful memory. If the reader, not wanting to remain in that state, reviews in more detail his study, he will see that the author of the Apocalypse has juxtaposed some historical facts which he remembered preciselywith other vague and erroneous data, intended to replace the events which he could not remember.  

We will add the results at which we arrived in the notes. We do not claim to have the complete story, but our hypothesis cannot be very far away from the truth.

The author of the Apocalypse enumerates nineteen kings, but he characterizes them only starting with the tenth; as he writes in Egypt, it is probable that he is speaking about Fatimids of Egypt, and in our explanatory notes we will see that Pitourgos indicates the Turks, and more especially Saladin; the Romans (Roumis) arrive, they are the Crusaders: so we believe that our Apocalypse was created around the time of the Third Crusade, a little after 1187.  

There then follows a French translation of the text, which I have translated into English and will put online tomorrow.

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A couple of interesting Coptic texts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email asks me whether I have come across a couple of texts, previously unknown to me; the Coptic apocalypse of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun. It continues:

The Apocalypse of Daniel was used during the Crusades to predict the downfall of Muslim rule. The Apocalypse of Samuel contains the strongest denunciation of language shift in the Middle Ages of Egypt by which Coptic was replaced by Arabic.

I think we can agree that both sound very interesting!  I’ve been unable to find out anything about either.  Does either exist in English, even?

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A little-known find of Coptic books in 1910

Posted on by Roger Pearse

While perusing the Book-Think blog, I came across mention of a find of Coptic books at the Monastery of St. Michael in 1910.  This was interesting, since although I am interested in Egyptian manuscript discoveries, I had never heard of it.

I find an article in the Catholic Encyclopedia which deals with the find.

The most important of these discoveries was undoubtedly that of the library of the Monastery of St. Michael in the Fayûm (Spring, 1910). Most of the fifty-eight volumes of which it consisted found their way to Paris, where they were purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (Dec., 1911), in whose library (at New York) they are now preserved. 5000 volumes remained in Egypt, and, with a few fragments of the same origin, are kept [in Cairo]… Mr. Morgan’s collection is no less remarkable as a group of dated manuscripts of absolutely certain provenance. … the Morgan collection contains eighteen dates ranging from A.D. 832 to 914… Many of the manuscripts are still in their original bindings…

Why do we have so many fragmentary books?

One of the most important features of the Morgan collection is that it consists of complete volumes, while other collections, yet reputed so valuable, those of Rome, Paris, and London (see below under British Museum Collection), to name the principal ones, consist mostly of fragments. It is an inveterate habit with the Arabs of Egypt to tear the manuscripts they discover or steal, so as to give each member of the tribe his share of the spoils, and also in the hope of securing higher prices by selling the manuscripts piecemeal, a process fatal to literature, for while some leaves so treated will be scattered throughout the public or private collections of Europe and America, a good many more will either meet destruction or remain hidden indefinitely by the individual owners. Most of the manuscripts of the Monastery of St. Michael had already been divided into small lots of leaves and distributed among a number of Arabs when they were rescued at the cost of untold toil and expense.

The same happened to the Gospel of Judas, the Exodus, the Greek Mathematical Treatise and the Letters of Paul manuscripts, half a century later.

The Catholic Encyclopedia article lists the books (bless them!).  There are biblical texts, liturgical stuff, and masses of Saints’ lives.  There are also some homilies by Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Athanasius, Shenuda, among others.

Interestingly, at the end of the page in the CE, are details of other purchases by the British Museum of Coptic mss.  Among the texts found is a “discourse of Eusebius of Cæsarea on the Chanaanite woman” [Ms. Or., 5001, item 10].   Has this ever been published, or translated?  The article gives as sources:

On Or. 5000 and Or. 5001 cf. CRUM, Catalogue of the Coptic Manuscripts of the Brit. Museum (London, 1905), Nos. 940, 171; WALLIS BUDGE, The earliest known Coptic Psalter in the Dialect of Upper Egypt from the unique Papyrus oriental 5000 in the Brit. Museum (London. 1908); IDEM, Coptic Homilies in the dialect of Upper Egypt (from Or. 5001 text and English tr., London 1910).

The last item is at Archive.org, which is a blessing, believe me.  For I saw a bound copy of this book, thick, small, fat and with a tight binding impossible to photocopy, and my heart failed me and I passed by on the other side and did not try to scan it.  Thankfully someone else has.   From this I find that the homily is of Eusebius of Caesarea in Cappadocia!

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Coptic monastic revival

Posted on by Roger Pearse

While I was in Egypt, I was interested to learn that the Coptic church has been undergoing a quiet revival over the last few decades.  This has centred on their monasteries, from which the Coptic Patriarch is always chosen.  By 1960, one of the most important monasteries, that of St. Macarius in the Wadi al-Natrun (the Nitrian Desert, or Scete) had only six frail old monks, and the building was in considerable disrepair.  Today it has 130.

Much of the credit belongs to the late Fr. Matta el-Meskeen.  He had created an independent monastic community in the Wadi al-Rayan during the 60’s.  In 1967 he and his dozen monks were ordered by the then Patriarch, Cyril VI – today widely considered a saint – to go to St. Macarius.  They did so, and Fr. Matta then revitalised the community, and began the current revival.  Monasteries are filling up with monks; men who have completed their military training, had a professional education, but have been drawn to the monastic life.  Abandoned monasteries are being reopened, although this has sometimes led to land disputes.  New monasteries are being built.

Books by Fr. Matta have been translated into several languages, and are available from the monastery here.

Fr. Matta was not always able to avoid politics.  As a senior monk in the church he was a natural candidate for patriarch, twice nominated and twice passed over.  As an important copt he was one of those consulted by President Sadat at the time when the Coptic Pope Shenouda III was sent into internal exile.  His closeness to Sadat meant that he was able to enjoy state protection, and to add land for cultivation to the St. Macarius monastery.  But the same factors meant that Shenouda’s supporters regarded him with suspicion, and attempts were made to find theological heresy in his books.  Such communal struggles are inevitable in this life, and should not detract from the immensity of his achievement.  He was able to find a way for Copts to reconnect with God in the modern world, and was the Lord’s implement to renew his people in a Moslem land. 

I have been unable to locate any English biography of him.  The Wikipedia article has several links which are helpful.

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