Antiquitopia

For my second installment of updating my sidebar to make it more useful for those seeking to find online resources for ancient manuscripts, texts, and translations, I have now added a section for Nag Hammadi and Relate Literature.  For manuscripts, all I have are the Tchacos Codex high resolution photographs.  If the digitized manuscripts Nag Hammadi Codices, Berlin Codex, etc., are also online, I am unaware of it. I didn't see anything for the Coptic text itself online.  But there are a couple online translations.  I have a link to both English and French translations of the Nag Hammadi Literature. If anyone has any other links for texts or translations for Nag Hammadi and related works, please send them to me and I will add them to my website.

Alin Suciu reports on newly found Coptic fragments that appear to belong to Codex Tchacos, especially its Allogenes!  (or the "other" Allogenes).  This is exciting because, in my opinion, that treatise is by far the most interesting from Codex Tchacos.  The Gospel of Judas is ok, but when I first read the published codex, I was enthralled by this Book of Allogenes.

August 3's edition of the New Yorker has an article by Joan Acocella discussing Judas traditions with special focus on the Gospel of Judas. Did Judas deserve this fate? If Jesus informs you that you will betray him, and tells you to hurry up and do it, are you really responsible for your act? Furthermore, if your act sets in motion the process—Christ’s Passion—whereby humankind is saved, shouldn’t somebody thank you? No, the Church says. If you betray your friend, you are a sinner, no matter how foreordained or collaterally beneficial your sin. And, if the friend should happen to be the Son of God, so much the worse for you. For two thousand years, Judas has therefore been Christianity’s primary image of human evil. Now, however, there is an effort to rehabilitate him, the result, partly, of an archeological find. In 1978 or thereabouts, some peasants digging for treasure in a burial cave in Middle Egypt came upon an old codex—that is, not a scroll but what we would call a book, wi...

I was previously unaware of the collection of online images of surviving fragments and manuscripts of the "other gospels" online collected by Andrew Bernhard. He also has available English translations and background material. His collection contains: Gospel of Judas (and all of Codex Tchacos) Gospel of Mary Gospel of Peter (which is the newest addition) Egerton Papyrus 2 Oxyrhynchus P840 Infancy Gospel of Thomas Infancy Gospel of James Without MSS: Gospel of the Ebionites, Nazareans, Hebrews Secret Mark Not all of these sources have links to their papyri, but many do--a most useful webpage.

I have been away for the last week and was happy to see when I returned that my copy of the critical edition of the Codex Tchacos was waiting for me in the mailroom. Of course, it is entitled the "Gospel of Judas together with the Letter of Peter to Philip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos" with the Gospel of Judas in much larger print than the other titles for marketing purposes, to be sure. But I am particularly excited to read the books getting less press. Two of them, the Letter of Peter to Philip and James, are attested in the Nag Hammadi Codices, and so FINALLY we can see variant readings of the same text and begin to discuss issues of transmission history in ways that we cannot for most NHC documents. But the real gem, in my view, is the tentatively-titled "Book of Allogenes," which appears to be almost a midrash on Jesus' temptation in the desert and the Transfiguration all wrapped into one, but instead of saying "Jesus" t...