Category: Manuscripts

Coptic text of 2 Enoch recovered

Posted on by Roger Pearse

2 Enoch only exists in an Old Slavonic version.  But a Coptic version has been rediscovered in fragments from Nubia, from the now drowned site at Qasr Ibrim.  The fragments were discovered in the Egypt Exploration Society rescue expedition in 1963, as the waters rose behind the Aswan High Dam. 

Joost Hagen has been entrusted by the EES with the edition of the manuscript material in Coptic, the language of Christian Egypt and one of the literary languages used in the Christian kingdoms of Nubia.

The ‘Slavonic Enoch’ fragments, found in 1972, are four in number, most probably remnants of four consecutive leaves of a parchment codex. The fourth fragment is rather small and not yet placed with certainty, also because there is as yet no photograph of it available, only the transcription of its text by one of the excavators. For the other three fragments, both this transcription and two sets of photographs are available. The present location of the pieces themselves is not known, but most probably they are in one of the museums or magazines of the Antiquities Organization in Egypt.

The fragments contain chapters 36-42 of 2 Enoch… they clearly represent a text of the short recension, with chapter 38 and some other parts of the long recension ‘missing’ and chapters 37 and 39 in the order 39 then 37. On top of that, it contains the ‘extra’ material at the end of chapter 36 that is present only in the oldest Slavonic manuscript of the work, U (15th cent.), and in manuscript A (16th cent.), which is closely related to U. For most Coptic texts, a translation from a Greek original is taken for granted and the existence of this Coptic version might well confirm the idea of an original of the Book of the Secrets of Enoch in Greek from Egypt, probably Alexandria.

Archeologically it seems likely that the Coptic manuscript is part of the remains of a church library from before the year 1172, possibly even from before 969, two important dates in the history of Qasr Ibrim; a tentative first look at palaeographical criterea seems to suggest a date in the eighth to ninth, maybe tenth centuries, during Nubia’s early medieval period. This would mean that the fragments predate the accepted date of the translation of 2 Enoch into Slavonic (11th, 12th cent.) and that they are some several hunderd years older than the earliest Slavonic witness, a text with extracts of the ethical passages (14th cent.).

Thanks to Jim Davila for the tip.  Andrei Orlov runs a site dedicated to 2 Enoch.

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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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Bibliotheque National Francais – more bloodsucking

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Very angry this morning with the BNF.   They’ve just demanded $30 per page for a copy of two manuscripts. 

People will recall that I ordered reproductions of these two mss from them.  They charged me $400 — a huge, bloodsucking sum, enough to win them the March 2009 Bloodsucker award.  What arrived was some incredibly cheap and nasty scans of a microfilm!!! (I nearly typed “scams” instead of “scans” – maybe I was right first time!)  Worse, the results were actually unusable, because the ends of the lines were blacked out.

Their reaction was to offer me a refund!  They don’t seem to grasp that what scholars need is copies.  As far as they are concerned, they’re just selling products.

I’ve written them a courteous but angry email.  What all this means is that I cannot obtain a reproduction of those mss.   I’m trying to get work done on al-Makin, and simply can’t obtain the manuscripts to do so!

Still, with initiatives like the Virtual Manuscript Room, soon we will all look back at this exhibition of irresponsible greed and shake our heads.

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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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Mass manuscripts online? – The Virtual Manuscripts Room project

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Possibly a very important announcement here.  The project proposal is very badly worded, so I’m not quite sure of this, but it sounds as if the Mingana library is going to make all of its manuscripts available online.  A German NT group is also involved.  I’ve buzzed an email to the Mingana to see what it’s all about.

Later: OK, I think I understand what is going on.  Here’s my understanding, and yes, this could be HUGE!

A bunch of people at Birmingham called ITSEE are developing a website to allow researchers to work on texts.  If you want to see a passage in an ancient text, the idea is that you can just click and see the relevant manuscript witnesses, then and there, for each part of the text.   The site will be a kind of manuscripts workbench.

Imagine you want to work on some text.  First you get images of the manuscripts uploaded.  Then you go into the workbench, and start tagging the page images — image 1 shows text chapter 1, verse 1; image 2 shows text chapter 1 verse 19, and so on.  Repeat this for all the manuscripts in the system, and then you get a set of links for the text.  Then enter some kind of raw electronic text, and link that in the same way.  You then end up with a way to browse the text, and see whatever variants you want, in the manuscripts, at the click of a  button.

In order to make this work, they need to prime it by uploading lots of images of manuscripts.  This is the bit that will start everything else.  At the moment, they have two sources to draw on.

Firstly, the Birmingham people have access to the Mingana collection of oriental (Syriac and Arabic) manuscripts.   They’ve started to digitise these and upload them.  At the moment the website isn’t working or displaying anything much (because someone forgot to install a Python library on the server; early days, all this), but there are definite signs of Syriac mss there.

Secondly a German institute have a load of New Testament manuscripts in horrible low quality microfilm, and are going to input these.  Their particular interest is to make it possible to work on the critical text of the New Testament.

The images will need lots of tagging.  This tagging will be a huge job, and the idea is to involve volunteers — suitably qualified scholars — to do this in their own interest as they work on the text.  The more people contribute, the more valuable the results will be.  We’ll start with raw manuscript pages, which will gradually — for some texts — grow tagging data (data like “this page starts at chapter 3, verse 2”, etc).

The project is being talked about a lot by people interested in the New Testament.  But that’s really accidental; that’s just one community around one text and one set of manuscripts.  But the clear intention is to provide this online workbench for all scholars to work — collaboratively or alone — on critical texts using the manuscript evidence from photographs. 

Because the Mingana Syriac and Arabic mss will be digitised, this will have a really important effect on Syriac and Christian Arabic studies.  Frankly it could revolutionise things!

If a community comes into being, as it will for the NT mss, then a Wikipedia-type effect will occur.  That would mean that far more can be done, far more quickly, than is presently possible.  Once the data base has a certain number of manuscripts in it, the hope is that it will snowball, and more and more material will be added.

There is a formal launch date in July.  They aren’t ready yet, tho.  But isn’t it exciting!?!

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What about “Google manuscript”?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just download manuscripts as PDF’s, rather than go through the gruesome and expensive process of obtaining whatever rubbish the libraries feel like selling us? 

Last week I wrote to Google suggesting that they do a project to make medieval manuscripts accessible.  We all know how difficult archives make it for us to access texts in this form!  Today I got a reply:

Hello Roger,

Thanks for your email and interest in Google Book Search.

I appreciate you taking the time to offer us this feedback about including ancient and medieval texts. I have passed along your email to the other members of my team. As this is still a young program, new ideas are under consideration and your feedback is very helpful. Please continue to share your suggestions with us.

Sincerely,

Tom
The Google Book Search Team

Interesting to know that Google DO reply.  If you’d like to see Google take an interest in getting text-only manuscripts online, why not tell them so?

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Syriac words in the Koran

Posted on by Roger Pearse

To what extent does the Koran contain Syriac words?  I’ve been reading a review of Christoph Luxenberg’s book about the Koran  by Martin F. J. Baasten in Aramaic Studies 2.2 (2004), pp. 268-272 (here), and finding it rather excellent.  It has been claimed — he cautiously states — that 80% of all loan-words in the Koran are from Syriac. 

Luxenberg has asked whether some passages in the Koran, which are difficult to understand, make more sense if you strip off the vowel-markings, thereby discarding the standard understanding of the text, and imagine that they contain Syriac loan words.

During the first century of the Arabic period, texts were written without all the marks above and below the line which indicate vowels, and indeed distinguish some consonants.  As Baasten rightly remarks, Arabic is a seriously defective script in this respect; worse than Syriac, where only two letters can be so affected.  Only seven Arabic letters — the rasm — are unique without some dotting.

Apparently some passages really do make much more sense if you do this.  Baasten gives a single example.

The implications of this for the transmission of the Koran are considerable.  If this can be proven, then it means that the Koran did not initially circulate orally, but passed through an early stage in written form, without vowel markings.  Only such a stage can account this symptom.

This would not be unreasonable.  There is no real reason to suppose that early followers of Mohammed memorised the new document, which was dribbling out chapter by chapter anyway.  It is likely that writing was used.  Thus we have the situation where early Korans differed, and a recension had to be created by the early Caliph Othman.  This situation also indicates that a good many people did NOT know the Koran orally, and relied on a written form of the text.

It seems that Luxenberg has overstated his thesis, however, and derived far more than this from Syriac sources, and much more tendentiously.  This is unfortunate, as it tends to undermine the credibility of his work.  But thus far, it would seem likely that he has indeed discovered something solid. 

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Two snippets

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The $400 PDF-microfilm of the unpublished 13th century Arabic Christian historian al-Makin was rubbish and unreadable.  I complained and was ignored.  I complained again two days ago, and threatened to involve VISA.  Today I got a note asking me to return the CD for checking, which makes no mention of the first note.  Clearly persistence is necessary in dealing with the BNF.   I always feel rather helpless, confronted by a massive bureaucracy.  I’ll let you know how I get on.

On a different note, I wonder just how many unknown medieval manuscripts of the bible there are?  I came across a press release by Norfolk Record Office (NRO), about an exhibition of manuscripts belonging to a now deceased collector, one Denys Spittle:

The oldest book in the exhibition is a copy of the four Gospels, probably from Constantinople that dates from the 10th century.

 This sounds like a job for CSNTM!  So I wrote to the NRO, asking if the ms. has an Aland number, etc.  No-one seems to know, and NRO won’t give me the contact details of the owners.  The Denys Spittle Trust isn’t in the Charities Commission database, nor at Companies House.  Still, if they’re willing to lend the manuscript for an exhibition like this, they ought to be willing to allow the experts at CSNTM to catalogue it properly and record it.  I’ve forwarded the details I have to them.

But of course this naturally leads you to wonder just what else exists in private hands?

I’ve been feeling rather unwell for the last few days, after an unsuccessful dental root treatment, so don’t expect much substantive from me this week.

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