Antiquitopia

There may be more evidence pointing to the Coptic fragment concerning "Jesus' wife," that it is a forgery.  And what gave it away?  I rare transcription error found in the first line that otherwise only occurs in a modern interlinear edition of the Gospel of Thomas.  See discussion by Mark Goodacre here .

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.

I just saw this website by Laval in Quebec for the study of the Nag Hammadi Library.  Begun in 1974 at Université Laval (Quebec, Canada), the project of editing the Nag Hammadi Coptic library is the only important francophone initiative devoted to these manuscripts; its goal is to produce critical editions of these texts, accompanied with French translations and explanatory commentaries. The manuscripts, which are kept at the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo, are available in a photographic edition produced under the authority of UNESCO and of the Antiquities Service of the Arab Republic of Egypt; this edition reproduces the papyrus leaves as they are. In order for these texts to be used with profit, specialists must first provide critical editions of them, where possible restoring damaged passages, as well as providing a translation into a modern language accompanied with an explanatory commentary. I have also posted this resource on the side column under "Coptic Resourc...

Breaking News:  At the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies (meets every four years), Karen King has revealed the possible existence of a new gospel, of which only a fragment (in Coptic) survives, that says, "...Jesus said to them, My wife..."  Initial testing has suggested it is, indeed, ancient.  See discussion here , which contains a further link to King's paper. April DeConick has a short comment on it here .  See more here and here , leading to other sites. DeConick has a fuller translation of the fragment with discussion here .

AWOL (Ancient World Online) has posted on a site Coptica that gives a great wealth of digitized Coptic material collected together, including free unicode fonts and digitized manuscripts. It will prove to be an invaluable resource for those of us interested in Coptic literature and language. I will also place this site in my sidebar.

A book I co-wrote on the Coptic poem, Thunder: Perfect Mind, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com or you favorite book distributor. I co-wrote it with Hal Taussig, who works on ancient meals and just wrote a new book on sociology of ancient meals, and my friends Maia Katrosits, Justin Lasser, and Celene Lillie. Here is the blurb: What do Toni Morrison, Umberto Eco and Ridley Scott have in common? All of them have been fascinated by an ancient poem from the Nag Hammadi codices, The Thunder: Perfect Mind, and have evoked its words in their work. This poem of provocative self-declarations by a mostly female, sometimes divine figure has already had a full life in the contemporary public imagination. Yet scholarship on Thunder has been limited, and has paid too little attention to the powerful and puzzling I at its center. What might this poem have meant to its ancient audience? How does it complicate and change contemporary images of early Christianity? What are the poem's po...

From Rant/Rave : It is generally believed that Coptic is an extinct language, alive only in the prayer books and scriptures of Coptic Christianity, which is one of the major branches of the Christian faith tradition. Coptic is the language of ancient Egypt. Unlike Arabic , it is not Semitic but Afro Asiatic. In its earliest from, it was written with hieroglyphics. Later, it was written with a phonetic alphabet which is mainly Greek but has added characters for sounds not found in Greek. The Islamic conquest of Egypt involved harsh repression of coptic as a spoken language. Indeed even today, the adherents of Coptic Christianity endure civic liabilities in Egypt that are unimaginable in the west. The most commonly believed time line of the Coptic language lists the mid 1600’s as the time in which the last speaker of this language died. Now there are reports that the language may still be spoken, still a living language. The most solid report of Coptic language survival comes from the Co...

I saw this via Agade; Al-Ahram Weekly reports on the cataloging and restoration of many deteriorating Coptic Manuscripts in the Coptic Museum archives: The Coptic Museum archives, considered to be the world's most important Coptic library and containing more than 5,000 manuscripts and books, are being given a facelift. Serenity, peace and complete quiet are the overwhelming sensations in the museum library, despite the presence of two dozen experts and restorers who have spread themselves to each corner of the reading room. Since January, the library has been converted into a scientific laboratory so that a comprehensive survey to assess the current conditions of its treasured manuscripts and books can be carried out. Armed with white gowns, masks, small brushes, glass plaques, small pieces of cottonwool and special liquids, junior and professional restorers sit in front of their improvised desks examining the piece of manuscript win their hands. They are looking for parts of each...

Jim Davila reports message from Andrei Orlov, whose own site on 2 Enoch is here (and on my sidebar): No longer ‘Slavonic’ only 2 Enoch attested in Coptic from Nubia During his work preparing the publication of Coptic manuscripts from Qasr Ibrim in Egyptian Nubia, Joost Hagen, doctoral student at Leiden University, The Netherlands, very recently came across some fragments he could identify as part of the text of the so-called ‘Slavonic Enoch’ (2 Enoch), the first time a non-Slavonic manuscript of this intriguing text has been found. The fragments were discovered at Qasr Ibrim, one of the capital cities of Christian-period Nubia (southern Egypt, northern Sudan, 5th-15th cent. AD), during excavations by the British Egypt Exploration Society (EES) which started in 1963 and have brought to light an astonishing number of finds, textual and other. Joost Hagen has been entrusted by the EES with the edition of the manuscript material in Coptic, the language of Christian Egypt and one of the lit...

Next month, the International Association for Coptic Studies will be having its ninth international congress. For a listing of topics that will be discussed, you can see April DeConick's posting from a year ago here . The meeting will be held in the Sonesta Hotel in Cairo from Sept. 14 until Sept. 20. I wish I could go! If any of my readers are going, I would love to hear a report (the highlights anyway).

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...

Because I have been engrossed in Coptic language, including the gritty text-critical issues, etc., for the past year, I have decided to add a few online sites (which I lifted from "Forbidden Gospels") to my sidebar. So, for all the aspiring Coptologists out there, check these sites out, and if you know of any more, please send them to me!