Four Uncatalogued Apocrypha Manuscripts from Mount Sinai

September 6, 2019 by Tony

Update: the National Library of Israel responded to my query about the origins of their manuscript images. They were part of the same photographing initiative as the Library of Congress, though the library gave the date of this enterprise as 1968, not 1949–1950.

The St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai is well-known as a goldmine of manuscripts—almost 2300 of them in Greek alone, and another 1000 or so in other languages. Its library has yielded such treasures as the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Syriacus, along with a number of important manuscripts of apocryphal texts. And it seems to keep giving. In 1975 a number of new leaves and fragments—the so-called “New Finds”—were discovered during the renovation of the tower in the monastery’s north wall. And new technology is being used by the Sinai Palimpsests Project to read the underwriting of reused manuscripts. Recently I made some “new finds” of my own when looking for digitized manuscripts for the NASSCAL project Manuscripta apocryphorum.

The Sinai manuscripts were catalogued in piecemeal fashion in the late nineteenth century. A full list of all the manuscripts, prior to the New Finds, was completed by Murad Kamil in 1970. But this is not a catalogue with full descriptions of each item; Kamil gives only a few lines of information, often describing the manuscripts as simply “Theological Treatises” or “Lives of Saints.”

In 1949–1950 a group of organizations and private scholars joined together to perform a full-scale examination of the monastery’s holdings. The Library of …

Reconstructing a Ninth-Century Arabic Apocrypha Manuscript from Mount Sinai

August 17, 2020 by Tony

Though I have a number of important projects in progress at the moment, sometimes I throw them aside for a day or two while I chase down some information about an apocryphal text or manuscript. Yesterday was one of those days. So I don’t lose track of what I’ve learned, I thought I would compile it all in a blog post—and since my last blog pose was in February, I can justify this diversion as necessary for maintaining my social media presence, right?

My morning began by posting the latest entry in NASSCAL’s e-Clavis: the Six-Books Dormition of the Virgin, compiled for us by Alley Kateusz. The 6 Bks. Dorm. is extant in Syriac (CANT 123 and 124), Arabic (140), and Ethiopic (150). The Arabic text was published from a manuscript in Bonn in 1854 by Maximilian Enger (Ionnis Apostoli de Transitu Beatae Mariae Virginis Liber). Enger’s edition includes also a Latin translation, which was translated into French a few years later in Jacques-Paul Migne’s Dictionnaire des Apocryphes. Enger’s text was reprinted in Pilar González Casado’s doctoral thesis (“Las relaciones linguisticas entre el siriaco y el arabe en textos religiosos arabes cristianos”; Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2013) along with a Spanish translation. So, what is the problem that I needed to solve? Casado states in her introduction that Enger’s source is a ninth-century manuscript from Bryn Mawr College Library (p. 6), but later correctly identifies the source as the manuscript from Bonn (p. 181).

What is …

Library of the Deir al-Surian in the News

February 18, 2014 by Tony

VIA Paleojudaica: Egypt's Mysterious Monastery Hides Ancient Secrets by Teresa Levonian Cole in Spear's Magazine (made available here via AINA. Among the many finds at Deir al-Surian (the Monastery of the Syrians) is the earliest manuscript witness to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (purchased by the British Library; catalogued as Add. 14484). The manuscript also contains portions of the Infancy Gospel of James and the Assumption of the Virgin.

Book Note: Thomas Wayment, The Text of the New Testament Apocrypha

January 18, 2014 by Tony

One of the titles I mentioned in my SBL Diary back in November (and deserving of more attention) is Thomas A. Wayment’s The Text of the New Testament Apocrypha (100-400 CE) (London: T&T Clark, 2013). Wayment, an Associate Professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University, has assembled here a collection of the earliest Christian Apocrypha extant on papyrus and parchment from the first five centuries. Note, however, that only Greek manuscripts are featured in the volume.

Each chapter of the book focuses on a single text (e.g., the Didache, the Gospel of Mary) or a group of texts (Acts of the Apostles, Sayings Gospels) and provides a bibliography, orthographic notes, and critical editions (not merely transcriptions) of each manuscript. The back half of the volume contains photographs of each manuscript, the majority in colour. The images vary in quality—P. Bodmer V and X, for example, are clear and gorgeous to look at, but P. Oxy 840 is reproduced too small and the reverse side of each page bleeds through the papyrus, making the text difficult to read.

The full list of texts included in the volume is: Acts of the Apostles (John, Paul, Peter), the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Peter, the Infancy Gospel of James (including a complete edition of P. Bodmer 5 and two recently published manuscripts: P. Ashmolean inv. 9 and Cairo Greek Papyrus JE 85643), the Shepherd of Hermas (with …

Manuscript Images of Gospel of Peter/Apocalypse of Peter Online

August 27, 2012 by Tony

Jim Davila provided a link on his blog Paleojudaica to images from the 6-9th century Greek manuscript containing fragments of the Gospel of Peter and Apocalypse of Peter. The images can be viewed HERE.

A New Library for St. Catherine’s Monastery

June 1, 2012 by Tony

St. Catherine's Monastery is getting a new library and working to digitize its entire collection. Read about it HERE. My favourite part of the article:

“You wait so long you want to see some action,” says Father Justin, who can’t wait for the new library to be up and running. He hopes to blog about the construction.

“These days everyone has a blog,” he says.

60 Minutes on the Vatican Library

December 27, 2011 by Tony

The Christmas broadcast of 60 minutes featured a short piece on the Vatican Library. Watch it HERE.Earlier this year they did a longer documentary on the monasteries (and libraries) of Mount Athos (HERE).

Nag Hammadi Library Images On-line

May 5, 2011 by Tony

Courtesy of April DeConick's The Forbidden Gospels blog, here is the LINK to the Claremont College's Digital Library for on-line images of the Nag Hammadi Library. Not all pages are represented here, and I'm not aware of plans to include more material. The image here is Codex V, p. 34 from The (Second) Apocalypse of James.

Mount Athos on 60 Minutes

April 27, 2011 by Tony

Anyone interested in researching manuscripts, particularly Greek manuscripts, will have heard of Mount Athos, an isolated Greek peninsula that houses a number of monasteries. It is rare for television cameras to be allowed access to the area, but 60 Minutes managed to do so recently and aired their report last week. You can see it on-line HERE. Watch also the seven-minute travelogue which discusses the difficulties of filming the report. I used two manuscripts from Mt. Athos for my work on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas but have not (yet) visited the site.

Detecting a Gospel Forgery

January 12, 2010 by Tony

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 😉

Searching for Syriac Manuscripts

January 10, 2010 by Tony

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.

The Sisters of Sinai

November 16, 2009 by Tony

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 …

Manuscripts from the Deir al-Surian Monastery

February 18, 2008 by Tony

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.

Online Syriac Manuscript Catalogues

October 4, 2007 by Tony

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.

Old Georgian Palimpsest of Protevangelium of James

October 4, 2007 by Tony

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.