Tag: Coptic

More modern Coptic literature online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

John Rostom has written to tell us of other places where we may find words by the modern Copts:

Should you be interested in other books and publications by modern Coptic Orthodox writers, besides those authored by the late Pope Shenouda III, you can access and freely download these from another valuable online source known as The Alpha. It’s the new website for COePA: Coptic Orthodox Electronic Publishing Australia.

http://www.coepaonline.org/

It’s got a wealth of English publications by the late Pope Shenouda III, other Bishops, members of the Clergy and scholarly Laity. My advice is to click on the link “The Alpha Christian Orthodox Collection Downloads” located under the Main Menu and view the 13 subcategories, each with its own distinct collection. I’m assuming that since they are freely downloadable from a publishing company, therefore copyright shouldn’t really be a concern.

This is really valuable – thank you!

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Modern Coptic Christian materials online in PDF

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s not very easy for non-specialists to find material by modern Coptic authors in Arabic.  Yet it does exist, and much of it is even online.

In a series of comments, John Rostom has very kindly let us know about a bunch of links which are simply too useful to be left only as comments.  Here is a digest.

Firstly, over 40 books by the late Pope Shenouda III are online in PDF form, in English translation.  The URL is http://copticorthodoxy.com/BooksbyPope.aspx, and all the items are downloadable (with the exception of only 2 of the links, i.e. “The Spiritual Man.pdf” and “The Spiritual Means.pdf” which don’t work).

Second, the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria is online in Arabic, compiled and edited by the late Bishop Samuel, Bishop of Shebeen el-Qanter (all published in 1999):

In addition is another book:

This is by the late Father Samuel Tawadros al-Syriani which appears to have been published much earlier (1st ed. 1977), with the 2nd edition being the one presented by the online bookshop (2nd ed. 2002) and revised by Bishop Mattaos, current Bishop and Abbot of Dair al-Sorian (Syrian Monastery). This book covers the History of the Patriarchs from Pope Peter VII (109th Pope) to Pope Cyril VI (116th Pope), thus a bit of an overlap with Bishop Samuel’s books.  Why it is called “part 6” is not clear, but that title only applied to the 2nd edition.

Thirdly, the 4th volume (part) of Bishop Samuel’s edition of Abu’l Makarem’s History Of Churches & Monasteries – Part 4 is online here.  Together with links by Dioscorus Boles, that gives links to the entire Arabic text.  (Can anyone find a copy of the English text that exists somewhere?)

Thank you very much indeed, Mr Rostom – invaluable!

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Is there an Arabic text of the “History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church” online anywhere?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The monster history of the Coptic church, which Wikipedia says is called Ta’rikh Batarikat al-Kanisah al-Misriyah,  is online in English, at least as far as 1894.  But I know that modern authors have written continuations; and I wonder whether any of these are online.

Does anyone know?

I have someone who might be interested in translating some of it into English, you see.

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Translation of “The story of Joseph the Carpenter” (Coptic apocrypha) now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Anthony Alcock has uploaded to Archive.org an English translation of a 4th century Coptic apocryphon, The story of Joseph the Carpenter.  It’s here:

http://archive.org/details/JosephTheCarpenter

The text, in the Bohairic dialect of Coptic, was published by Paul de Lagarde in Aegyptiaca, (Göttingen, 1883), which is online here, with a pointer to the Google books volume (inaccessible to non-US readers).

The text was issued without a table of contents, and Dr Alcock has thoughtfully provided one:

Joseph the Carpenter: 1-37.
Dormition of Mary: 38 – 63
Wisdom of Solomon: 64 – 106
Ecclesiastes: 107 – 206
Psalms: 207 – 208
Apostolic Canons: 209 -291

He writes:

The principal text of Joseph the Carpenter is in Bohairic, with a complete Arabic text and fragments of a Sahidic text.

The Arabic text, published by Georg Wallin in Leipzig 1722 with a Latin version, is in Paris (the Bibliothèque Nationale).

M.R. James used the Latin version to provide a summary of the text for his Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1924) p.84ff.

The Sahidic fragments are in Rome (Catalogus codicum copticorum 1782 no. 121). Only sections 14 to the beginning of 24 of the Sahidic version have survived.

The English version is based on the Bohairic, and reference is made from time to time to the other two versions.

And:

The major study of this story was published in 1951 by Siegfried Morenz (Die Geschichte vom Joseph dem Zimmermann, Berlin and Leipzig).

Marvellous!  Get it while it’s hot.

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The Qasr el-Wizz apocryphon

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Alin Suciu has another marvellous post on an item entirely new to me.

When the High Dam was built in the 1960s, almost the entire Nile valley between Aswan and Wadi Halfa had been inundated in order to create the Lake Nassar. As the waters were rising, many archeological sites were destroyed, while others, such as the well-known temples of Abu-Simbel, were removed from their original location and re-erected elsewhere. During the construction of the dam, more precisely in October-November 1965, the archeological team from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago was excavating a Christian monastery at Qasr el-Wizz, situated just a couple of kilometers north of Faras, in Lower Nubia. …

Perhaps the most exciting discovery of the Chicago team at Qasr el-Wizz was a small parchment book written in Coptic. The manuscript was found almost intact, virtually the entire text being preserved. The Qasr el-Wizz codex was initially housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, but was later been moved to the new Nubian Museum in Aswan.

The codex is quite short (only 17 folios), is dated to the 10th century, and contains  two items:

  1. A revelation of the risen Christ to the apostles, delivered on the Mount of Olives. “It contains a dialogue of the apostle Peter with the resurrected Christ concerning the eschatological and soteriological function of the Cross.”
  2. “A hymn sung by Jesus whilst the apostles are dancing around the Cross”.

The first item has long been known in Old Nubian, and was published by F. L. Griffith in The Nubian Texts of the Christian Period, Berlin, 1913 (online here).

The second is more interesting: it is an abbreviated version of the “Hymn of the Cross” found in the so-called “Gospel of the Savior”, P. Berol. 22220, published by Charles Hedrick back in 1997-ish — a report about it was one of the first items on my newly created website — and apparently this is also found in the so-called “Strasbourg Coptic Gospel”, which is unknown to me.

An English translation was prepared in typescript by Egyptologist George R. Hughes in 1965, for private use, which Alin rediscovered in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.  He did place it online, but felt obliged to remove it after a communication from Artur Obluski, whom he may have thought was writing on behalf of that institution. 

That is rather a pity, surely.  I have always thought of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago as a rather forward-looking body.  The availability of an admittedly obsolete translation of this obscure item can only benefit everyone by raising awareness of the text.  It is, after all, very obscure.  I had never heard of it, and, given my interest in ancient texts, that means that practically no-one has ever heard of it.

Perhaps I might write to that institution and ask whether they really have any objection.

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Where to find the “Clavis Coptica”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting post at Alin Suciu on some new Coptic fragments of ps.Severian of Gabala made reference to a mysterious “Clavis Coptica”.  A google search left me none the wiser, so I thought that I’d better write something.

It looks as if “Clavis Coptica” is an informal reference to a “Clavis Patrum Copticorum”, which exists in a pay-only-access database.  If you look at this page it gives you these details.

It’s very disappointing to find something like this offline.  Only a handful of people will ever be able to use it.

UPDATE: Alin Suciu has now posted himself on this question here.  He asked Tito Orlandi, who replied:

The Clavis Coptica (or Clavis Patrum Copticorum) is the complete list of the literary and Patristic works which form the Coptic literature, modeled on the example of the Clavis Patrum Graecorum (by Geerard) and the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca/Latina/Orientalis.

Each work has an identification number of 4 digits, which may be quoted as: cc0000.

The list is presently found on the web page of the Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari
(http://cmcl.let.uniroma1.it) accompanied by information on manuscripts, content, and critical problems.

The bare list (id. number, author-title) will soon be found for free on the Hamburg web page of the CMCL. A printed Clavis Coptica is in preparation.”

It is very good news that the list will be accessible to us all.

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A Coptic papyrus fragment and the idea that Jesus had a wife

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is a useful article here at Tyndale House by Simon Gathercole on this curious discovery of a 4th century fragment of papyrus with a Coptic apocryphal text on it.

I hope that the media attention may raise the profile of papyrology, and Coptic studies, and perhaps draw people into an interest in either of these disciplines.  Neither is particularly over-funded or over-well-known.  It’s a long time since Grenfell and Hunt had public money to go and look for papyri in Egypt.  Why shouldn’t there be a fund-raising drive to locate more such papyri today?

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10th International Coptic Conference at Alin Suciu

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Alin Suciu publishes the programme for the Coptic conference in Rome here.   The conference starts on Monday.

Now I’ve seen what is happening, and that most of the papers are in English, I wish that I was going.  So much of the material and papers being given is of interest, and I would certainly love to be in Rome with so many other people doing interesting things.

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Notes on the Askew codex

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Not all gnostic literature comes to us from Nag Hammadi.  A series of codices in Coptic have leaked out of Egypt and onto the art market down the centuries.  One of these was the Codex Askewianus, as the older literature calls it.

On this item, the following information may be of use:[1]

The Askew codex, a volume of unknown provenance containing the texts of the Pistis Sophia treatises, was named after its first owner, A. Askew, a London doctor.  Askew was a collector of old manuscripts, and he bought the codex from a bookseller (probably in London) in 1772 [1].  After the death of Askew, the manuscript was bought by the British Museum.  A copy in the British Museum of the sale catalogue (1785) of Askew’s manuscripts contains the entry: “Coptic MS., £ 10.0.0.”  This reference was presumed by Crum to apply to the present document which appears in his catalogue as Add. 5114.[2]

1. J. G. Buhle, Literarische Briefwechsel von Johann David Michaelis, Leipzig 1794-6, vol. 3, p.69.
2. W. E. Crum, Catalogue of the Coptic Manuscripts in the British Museum, London, 1905, p.173.

Doubtless it emerged from the sands of Egypt, as other codices have done.  One wonders how it ended up in London.  The price is a considerable one, note: a curate around the same period could live (in poverty, admittedly) on £50 per annum, at least according to the novels of Jane Austen.

I was looking at some notes on this page, and came across the following footnote, alluding to the same source:

4. 1794. Buhle (J. G.). Literarischer Briefwechsel von Johann David Michaelis (Leipzig), 3 vols., 1794-96, iii. 69.

Under date 1773 there is a letter from Woide to Michaelis, in which the former says in reference to the [Pistis Sophia] Codex that Askew had picked it up by chance in a book-shop. There follows a description of the MS.

Now I confess that I never heard of Johann David Michaelis — he turns out to be an 18th century biblical scholar involved in orientalism –, but his letters are online at Google books.  Volume 3, page 69 may be found here.  The old fraktur letter forms are not easy to read, and the long-s is also deployed.  The relevant passage may be this (and please correct my errors):

Vermutlich ist dieses ein ahnliches Manuscr. [of those in the White Monastery]  Der herrn Dr Askew hat es zufalliger Weise in einem Buchladen gekauft.  Es is in 4º auf Pergamen geschrieben, und sehr stark gebraucht.  Es enthalt 354 Seiten, die mit Buchstaben numerirt sind.  Jede Seite hat zwei Columnen; und es fehlt an dem ganzen Buche nur ein Bogen S. 337-345….

I had hoped that we might get more, but this seems to be it. Sadly this gives us no more than we knew.  But how does C. A. Woide know this?  What is his authority for this statement?

The letter as a whole begins on p.20, and seems to consist of a very lengthy description of Bodleian Coptic manuscripts.

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  1. [1]Carl Schmidt and Violet MacDermot, Pistis Sophia, The Coptic Gnostic Library, Brill, 1978, p. xi. Google Books Preview here.↩

Coptic-Arabic gospel catena also known in Ge`ez?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This evening I found the following snippet in Google Books, given as in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1989, p.380:

… Ethiopia’s access to foreign commentaries (including that of Iso’dad of Merv and the other Syrian scholars) is through the Geez version of Ibn at-Taiyib’s exegetica and the Geez adaptation of Coptic-Arabic Catena….

Now call me daft, but this sounds as if the Coptic gospel catena published by De Lagarde, which was translated into Arabic, was then onward translated into Ethiopic, or more precisely Ge`ez.  And that someone out there knows this.  It’s in a book review of some kind.

Unfortunately I have no access to the article in which this appears.  Poking around the website for the JRAS of 1989, p.380 belongs to Michael Loewe, of “East Asian civilizations: a dialogue in five stages. By Wm. Theodore de Bary. (The Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures, 1986.) pp. xi, 160. Cambridge, Mass, and London, Harvard University Press, 1988. £15.95.”  That doesn’t sound right, nor does the abstract look right.  Cambridge University Press greedily demand 20 GBP to access the article, the swine. 

Wish I could find the article.  Anyone got any ideas?

UPDATE: I think the Google Books snippet must be in error in some way, probably in the page number?  I’ve found the book itself reviewed above, and it has nothing relevant in it.

UPDATE: Found it!  I took the snippet and pasted it into the general Google search, and up it came as a JSTOR review in JRAS 1990, p.379f.  The article is a review of Roger W. Cowley, Ethiopian Biblical Interpretation, CUP, 1988.  Now that sounds like an interesting book.  Amazon list it at a fantastic price, unfortunately.

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