Tag: Coptic

Syriac origins for the Gospel of Thomas? Not convinced, I think

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Paleobabble is a useful blog on some of the factual mistakes that go around.  He’s suspicious — as I am — of the idea that the Gospel of Thomas is “obviously” earlier than the canonical gospels; the way in which this idea is asserted and disseminated has that characteristic smell of a bit of paleobabble.

The Gospel of Thomas: Is it Really Earlier than the Canonical Gospels?

Many scholars think so, especially those trotted out by the Discovery Channel, PBS, etc.  A lot of scholars disagree, and for good reasons, but that isn’t as media-sexy.

Here’s a good article on recent re-consideration of the “earliness” of Thomas. It’s by Nick Perrin of Wheaton College, whom I know. Nick spoke as part of a lecture series I coordinated in Bellingham, WA a couple years ago on this topic. The article is a bit technical, but I think non-specialists in biblical studies will follow it.  I post it since there is so much paleobabble surrounding the Gospel of Thomas. You all ought to know that it’s not so neat a picture as the popular media would have it.

The article by Nick Perrin is interesting.  But in truth it is merely a summary of research, reflecting its origins as a paper given as an address.  I think to be happy with the thesis made, we would need to see all the supporting evidence.  Bits of this paper make me feel unhappy with the argument.

The first bit to do this appears on p.69, where a table of Matt. 8:20 with its version in the GoT and the Diatessaron appears.  This is given to show that the GoT agrees with the Diatessaron.  But … the table is in English!   We need, instead, the original languages, albeit with an English gloss.  I feel deeply uneasy relying on quite as many layers of translation as this table must involve!

The general argument seems to be that there are more “link words” between the sayings if we translate the text into Syriac than if we do into Greek, or in the Coptic.  The reason is that the same Syriac word may represent more than one word in Coptic, thereby creating links not visible in the other two languages.  Likewise the fact that in Syriac families of words all derive from one tri-literal root naturally creates links that won’t exist in other languages.

But … won’t the same apply to every translation into Syriac?  I’d like to see a control test; look at one of Chrysostom’s sermons, extant in Greek, and its Syriac version, and see if exactly the same thing happens, and how often.  It seems to me that it must do.  Because, after all, both things are features to the language.  If so, the statistics quoted may be simply meaningless, unless adjusted for a possible general feature.

The other issue that will come to mind is to ask why the Diatessaron is not, then, using GoT?  If the latter was composed in Edessa (? why?), surely such a thing is likely?  We’re not told this.

In my bones, the paper feels forced.  It feels clever rather than convincing.

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Scribe, take down an apocalypse

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Intrigued by some notes in the edition of the apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun.  It says that bits seem copied from older apocalypses, such as those of Pisentius or Ps.Methodius, although not verbatim.

Are we dealing with a genre here? — A way to describe the failings of events up to your own time, ascribe them as a prophecy to some long-dead person, and then end with a conventional set of statements about the return of Christ (or something of the kind) as a coda.  If so, the history of the genre would be interesting to read, and it would allow us to make use of them as historical documents.

Maybe it was a way to blow off steam, more edifying, perhaps, than diatribes against bankers.

The apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun is a very moving document, probably from ca. 1000 AD (because of the description of the Caliph el-Hakim).  The author is grief-stricken at the destruction of coptic culture, at the loss of “our beautiful coptic language, which is like honey in the mouth”.  He tells how the lives of the saints are no longer read, because people can’t understand them.  Many of the books are simply lost.

This may explain the find of Coptic books at Qurna near Luxor a couple of years ago by the Polish Mission in the ruins of a monastery.  I recall that one of them was a life of St. Pisentius.  If you had a bunch of books that you couldn’t read but were fairly sure were ‘holy’, you might bury them.  Probably there are treasure troves of Coptic patristic literature to be found near many old monasteries in Egypt.  Indeed it makes you wonder a little about when the Nag Hammadi books were buried.  Could it have been much later than we usually suppose?

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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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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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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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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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