Tag: Manuscripts

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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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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Donate to get more NT mss online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just discovered the link for donations to the Centre for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.  They’re going around photographing manuscripts, and accustoming their holders to the idea of digital photography, and of putting manuscripts online.  This makes them trail-blazers for us all, even if — like me — NT manuscripts are peripheral to your interests.  They’re breaking down the barriers.

They take Paypal, credit cards, etc.  Why not give them a quick $20?

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Koln archive wins the Darwin award, puts selves in hole

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been blogging on the disaster at Koln, where the municipal archive fell into in a large hole in the ground when the building collapsed.  I speculated that the archive probably saw requests for photographs as a chance to make money, rather than an opportunity to record and preserve.  The local university has put out an appeal for anyone who did manage to get any photos to contact them, so I asked whether my suspicions were true.

And they were!  It seems that the Koln archive really did prevent readers photographing!  They really did charge the few people interested in their documents absurd prices for copies.  They had the chance to get much of their archive recorded, and they put a tax on those who wanted to do so!!!   And they’ve been caught out.

What we need to do now is fire the ass of the people who made that particular decision.  Accidents happen; but the loss of much of the material is not accidental; it followed directly from the decision to charge for photographs.

Anyone know who the politicians are, with responsibility for this archive?

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