While looking rather carelessly through the online volumes of the Revue de l’Orient Chretien, whose Syriac contents are listed here, I found myself looking at something interesting and non-Syriac.
In ROC 19 (1914), on p.79f. and 302 f. (the article was split into two parts, issued in successive quarters), A. Perier publishes the Arabic text of a letter of St. Pisentios, Coptic bishop of Qeft, to his flock. The letter exists in four manuscripts in the French National library, the Bibliotheque Nationale, and Perier gives a French translation.
The second half of the letter consists of a prophecy of the coming of the Moslems, and their leader Mamadanous (Mohammed) whose name, in Coptic letters, is said to add up to 666.
Unfortunately the letter cannot be genuinely by the pre-Islamic bishop. The predictions of the actions of the Turks, the very general terms in which Moslem atrocities are described, the whole feel of the letter suggests a later composition, in which past history and current woes are depicted in apocalyptic terms as a prophecy. Several Coptic apocalypses are of the same kind, which I think means that we are probably dealing with a literary genre here, rather than several attempts at forgery.
It is rather too long and diffuse for me to turn the French into English, sadly, with my current concerns.
But it is by no means uninteresting. It makes the point that the ROC contains a great deal more than just the Syriac articles. It contains, indeed, publications of texts from the Near East. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone would digest down a table of contents of these articles also?
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