Re-Discoveries of Ancient Texts

Someone just posted a comment asking if I could write about "how they're looking for lost texts."

First of all, thanks for the comment. It's always nice to hear from a reader. It hasn't happened enough yet that it's even beginning to get old.

But, to be honest, I can't really say much that I haven't said in other posts. And the most important thing I have to say is: ask an expert. I'm not an expert. If you're interested in ancient Jewish texts or early Christian texts, then ask a Professor who specializes in biblical studies, or early Christianity, or biblical archaeology, or some related field. If you're interested in ancient, non-Christian Greek or Latin, ask a professor of Classics.

I should ask these professors more questions myself.

If there's anyone out there who's read all of the posts in this blog -- first of all, thank you -- and also, the following will be somewhat repetitive for you.

My especial interest is in Latin, and I know less about ancient texts in other languages than I know about Latin. Most of the recent discoveries of ancient texts, as far as I know (check with an expert!) have been in Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, and Hebrew.

The biggest thing that's happening these days in re-discovering ancient texts, the biggest just in terms of sheer volume of texts, is the project concerning the tremendous number of scraps of papyri found by Oxford professors Bernard Grenville and Arthur Hunt around the turn of the 20th century at Oxyrhynchus, the site of an ancient city in Egypt.

These papyri, ironically, have been found in garbage dumps. What people threw away in Oxyrhynchus between the 3rd century BC and the 6th century AD is precious treasure to us today. Grenville and Hunt found so many pieces of papyrus at Oxyrhynchus that, to this day, more than a century later, scholars are still editing and publishing them, and have still only published a small fraction of the entire find. Almost all of the Oxyrhynchus papyri are written in Greek, but there are also some written in Latin, Coptic and other languages. They include Bible passages and other Christian writings, Classical Greek literature (and a tiny amount of Classical Latin), personal letters, official government documents and more. Most of the ancient texts being re-discovered these days are in Greek.

Next, after Oxyrhynchus, I suppose, would be the numerous pieces of papyrus and parchment which turn up here and there at random in the Middle East, both at archaeological digs and at antiquities markets. Some of the texts which appear at these markets are modern forgeries, unfortunately, but many are genuine.

Then there are palimpsests. A palimpsest occurs when a piece of writing is scraped off of a parchment and something else is written on it. The palimpsest is the identations left by the earlier writing. And scholars have found ways to read those texts, even thought the ink is now gone.

Then there is cartonnage: papyrus which was made into a material sort of like cardboard and made into the coverings of mummies or book covers. Some very clever scholars have found ways to take this material back apart into the original papyrus and read what is written on it.

There is a large amount of Medieval Latin writing contained in archives in Europe. Medieval scholars are going through these archives, preserving as much as they can. Some have expressed the concerned that they may not be able preserve everything before the parchments rot away.

And every now and then -- say, every few years or so -- a lost ancient Latin text is re-discovered by some means which doesn't fit into any of the above categories.

That sums up what I know, but, again, the people to ask would be professors of Classsical Greek and Latin, biblical scholars, archaeologists and so forth.

Coptic Icons

As with my earlier post on Ethiopic icons, I'm having trouble finding information about the pictures. I mentioned in that post that I don't really know anything about Ethiopian icons, and I don't really know anything about Coptic icons either.

Except that I do know one very simple and basic thing which many people in the West don't seem to know, or seem constantly to forget when they talk about Christianity, even many highly-educated people in the West: the Catholic Church was not the entirety of Christendom before the Protestants split off from it. The Catholic Church itself split off from the Orthodox Church, officially in 1054, although signs of the split had appeared much earlier, and although there reasons, long after 1054, for people to hope that the split might be mended.

But even that bigger church which split into Catholicism and Orthodoxy was not the whole of Christendom: outside of that church, in the very first centuries AD, other churches arose: the Armenian Church, the Syriac Church, the Ethiopic or Ethiopian Church, and the Coptic Church in Egypt, which all developed independently from the Catholic-Orthodox Church, rather than beginning within it and splitting off later.

Here's an icon of -- sure looks like St George to me, although the web image is labeled St Victor the Martyr:

St Michael the Archangel:

The Flight into Egypt:

Madonna and Child:

Another Flight into Egypt, in the center of this triptych; unfortunately, I can't tell you who the guys to the left and right are.

People Who Doubt The Authenticity Of The Gospel Of Jesus' Wife Seem To Be Grasping At Straws

(Before I begin here, let me try to be as clear as possible: "authenticity" means that the famous postcard-sized piece of papyrus containing the so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife is ancient, that is: more than 1000 years old, and perhaps over 1600 years old, and not a 19th-or 20th-century forgery. No serious academics are saying that this text records the actual words of Jesus, talking about his wife. None of them are saying this proves that Jesus was married. What Prof King has said all along, consistently, is that this document may perhaps show that one group of early Christians thought of Jesus as having been married. It's a real shame that so many people are somehow managing not to hear her.)

Professor Karen L King, who came under heavy criticism in 2012 when she presented the so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife to the public in 2012, when critics said it was a modern forgery, and not a 4th-century Coptic translation of a 2nd-century Greek text, seems to have been at least partially vindicated.

But some experts are still skeptical:

"Brown University Egyptology professor Leo Depuydt [...] points to grammatical mistakes that he says a native Coptic writer would not make"

If Depuydt is right about that: so what? King says this is a 4th-century translation of a 2nd-century Greek text. There's no reason why a native speaker of Greek in the 4th century couldn't have translated something into Coptic, making mistakes no native Coptic speaker would have made. Ideally translations are made by native speakers of the language being translated into. Ideally, but certainly not always, as countless people of many different natives languages have discovered when they've had great difficulty trying to decipher texts in their own native languages in owner's manuals for appliances.

Depuydt says, "the text … is a patchwork of words and phrases from the [...] Coptic Gospel of Thomas."

And again I say: if Depuydt is right, so what? A 4th-century translator could've been familiar with the Gospel of Thomas, which was not officially condemned by the Orthodox authorities until the 4th century. If his or her native language was Greek, it would be only natural for him or her to depend on words and phrases which he or she knew from a Coptic text, such as, for example, the Gospel of Thomas.

Depuydt is not convincing me at all that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a modern forgery. If this is the best that the skeptics have, then I say, forget 'em, and consider the artifact to be authentic. (And forgive me for being a broken record, but please be sure you understand what is meant here by "authentic," as explained in italics and bold print at the beginning of this blog post.)