Apocryphicity

There is an interesting article on the Friends of CSNTM (Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts) page on the recent uncovering of a forged NT manuscript (HERE). I don't know, though–let's see, it was written on one side of a page, the page had paragraph divisions, capitalized names, and no nomina sacra. What was their first clue? Thankfully, Morton Smith knew well enough not to make these blunders

In my neverending work on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, I have begun the process of collating copies of the Life of Mary edited by E. A. W. Budge over a century ago. Some of the manuscripts, however, are quite difficult to obtain (indeed, it may be that they are now lost forever). I was hoping some experts in the field might know how to find manuscripts from Diyarbakir, Mardin, Alqosh (specifically the convent of Notre-Dame de Sémances), and Urmia.

I have just finished reading Janet Soskice’s popularization of the discovery of the famous Sinai palimpsest by Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Smith Gibson (The Sisters of Sinai: How Two lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). The “Hidden Gospels” alluded to in the title refers not to non-canonical texts (as it often does) but to a fourth-century Syriac translation of the canonical gospels hidden under a seventh-century collection of tales of women saints. The palimpsest represents our earliest complete witness to the gospels, albeit in translation, and caused quite a stir upon its publication in the late nineteenth-century.

The Smith twins found the manuscript on a trip to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. Soskice documents the struggles of their various trips to the monastery to work on this and other manuscripts, and their struggles to be taken seriously as scholars in nineteenth-century England, a time when women were not allowed to obtain university degrees. Along for one of the trips to the Sinai were other famous scholars from Cambridge: Rendel Harris, Francis Burkitt, and Robert Bensly. One of the book’s most interesting stories is the infighting that took place among the expedition over the division of labour transcribing the palimpsest and over who would take the glory for the find.

Soskice also discusses the discovery of Codex Sinaiticus by Constantin von Tischendorf, who preceded the twins in his own well-known trip to Sinai and whose suspicious activities in securing Sinaiticus made it difficult for other scholars to gain access to the monastery library. But the twins were involved in other discoveries beyond the Sinai palimpsest. They were instrumental also in recovering and publishing thousands of Syriac manuscripts from Sinai and other locations, and were involved in the discovery of the Hebrew manuscripts from the Cairo genizah.

The book is an enjoyable and recommended read but admittedly has little to do with Christian Apocrypha, though it gives the reader a sense of what tribulations other scholars of the time had to endure to find and publish biblical and non-biblical manuscripts. As it happens, too, among the manuscripts published by the Smiths was another palimpsest, purchased in the Suez but originally hailing from St. Catherine’s, that contains the Protoevangelium of James and the Transitus Mariae (their edition of this manuscript is available HERE).

A story is making the rounds of the blogging world of a manuscript discovery from the Deir al-Surian monastery in Egypt. The story (found HERE) focuses on the recovery of a missing page of a codex housed at the British Library. The missing page, a list of Christian martyrs from Edessa in 411, was recently found beneath a floor in the monastery. But what is most interesting about the story (to me, at least) is the following:

The fragments were among hundreds discovered beneath a floor in the Deir al-Surian, which is itself a treasure trove of ancient books. Dr Brock and his colleague, Dr Lucas Van Rompay of Duke University in North Carolina, are now working on the first catalogue of the many manuscripts that are more than 1,000 years old.

Let’s hope some apocryphal texts will be found among the manuscripts.

Roger Pearse at Thoughts on Antiquity drew my attention to recent additions of on-line manuscript catalogues to the Syriac Studies Reference Library. This information is very useful to those of us who study Syriac apocryph–myself included, as I continue my work on a critical edition of the Syriac version of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

I discussed a few weeks ago the topic of palimpsests in CA studies. Anyone interested in the topic may want to see the recent publication J. Gippert, Palimpsest Codex Vindobonensis georgicus 2 (Monumenta Palaeographica Medii Aevi: Series Ibero et Caucasia. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). This Old Georgian codex contains a number of biblical, hagiographical, and homiletic texts, but the text of interest to us is a version of the Protevangelium of James from the fifth to the eighth century. More than 95 % of the codex has been deciphered.

While we're on the topic of technology and manuscripts, take a look at this video currently making the rounds on the internet (sorry, I don't know how to embed the video in this post). It is a skit from a Norwegian TV show.

Recently I finished reading Reviel Netz’s and William Noel’s The Archimedes Codex: Revealing the Secrets of the World’s Greatest Palimpsest. The book details the acquisition of a thirteenth-century Christian prayer book that contains, as its underwriting, several works by the third-century BCE Greek mathematician Archimedes. One of these works, Floating Bodies, is found in no other source. But in some places the underwriting is incredibly difficult to read. The Archimedes Codex describes the pioneering scientific efforts to recover Archimedes’ works.

The book led me to thinking about palimpsests of CA texts and the possibility that advances in reading palimpsests could aid in recovering our texts. I am aware only of one such palimpsest: Vindobonensis 563, an eighth-century manuscript written over a fifth-century collection of the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and selections from the Gospel of Matthew. Constantin von Tischendorf was the first scholar to see the manuscript and was able to decipher much of it; Guy Philippart (“Fragments palimpsestes latins du Vindobonensis 563 [V^e siècle?]: Évangile selon S. Matthieu, Évangile de Nicodème, Évangile de l’enfance selon Thomas”, AnBoll 90, p. 391-411) revealed more of it in 1972.

The manuscript is important for the study of Infancy Thomas as it is the earliest known source we have for the text; unfortunately, only a handful of pages from the original manuscript were used by the eighth-century recycler. Virtually all of this material is readable (save for a few lines on two folios). The Gospel of Nicodemus material is far more extensive, stretching over 35 folios. Philippart was able to read more of the text than Tischendorf but did not include the new readings in his article—he believed it needed an edition all its own. I am not aware of such an edition, though the AELAC team working on an edition of Nicodemus may be using it.

Are there other palimpsests of CA texts? Is it possible to use the new technology to recover their contents with greater accuracy?

But there is another option. According to an article in the International Herald Tribune, St. Louis University has copies of “nearly half of the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts” from the Vatican archives. The University has been stockpiling the material (on microfilm) since the 1950s; the collection even includes a copy of the Codex Vaticanus. I wonder: perhaps a microfilm order from SLU would arrive far quicker than from the Vatican.