Quentin Quesnell Was the Last to See the Mar Saba Manuscript

This fact has only become known publicly since 2007.  (ETA: see Stephan Huller's interesting comment below.  It hints that we may have information about a sighting of the manuscript since Quesnell saw it.)


In my report on the first York Christian Apocrypha Symposium, I suggested that not only was Archimandrite Kallistos Dourvas the last person to see the endpaper manuscript of To Theodore, but that it only went missing in 2000, and that he left his appointment at the library of the Jerusalem Patriarch in 1999.

I may well have been wrong on all three counts.



Kallistos left the library of the Jerusalem Patriarch in 1990, not 1999.  (We learned this from Charles Hedrick and Nikolaos Olympiou in 2000).  Furthermore, the last recorded sighting of the manuscript was not by Kallistos, nor was Guy Stroumsa the last "western scholar" to see the manuscript in 1976 (as he mistakenly stated in 2003).

Instead, the last western scholar--and the last person in general--currently known to have seen the manuscript was none other than Quentin Quesnell, in 1983.  And technically, it has been missing since then.

Again, this fact was made public only in 2007 by Adela Yarbro Collins in her Hermeneia volume on the Gospel of Mark.  (Her excursus in that volume on Secret Mark also contains an excellently concise historical summary of the scholarship on the Mar Saba manuscript, though she ends up favoring Carlson and Jeffery as the last word on the issue so far, which I think is a mistake.  Timo Panaanen also wrote a brief summary of his own on the study of the manuscript, and I am working on a more detailed timeline myself.)  Indeed, based on the public record, Quesnell seems to have only told two scholars about this visit: Collins, and Peter M. Head (who mentioned his own 1987 communication with Quesnell on the subject on his blog in 2008).

News of this visit seems to have spread slowly even after it was publicized by Collins and Head.  Hedrick seems unaware of it in his BAR article in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue, though Herschel Shanks in that same issue does seem to have read Collins' excursus on Secret Mark in her 2007 Hermeneia volume, at least, and so presumably was aware of Quesnell's visit by 2009.  Timo Paananen also mentioned it in the historical summary I linked to above, on 10/20/09.

In fact, Quesnell seems to have actually removed it from the library at the time--and all we know subsequently is, it's gone missing.  Now I am in no way even suggesting that Quentin Quesnell was in any way irresponsible with the manuscript--I have no doubt he returned it to the library personally.  It's just that I've realized that he may very well be the last person with testimony as to its physical whereabouts at this time.  Therefore, he should be the very first person to contact by those interested in examining and/or testing the manuscript. 

Timo Paananen has in fact spoken with Quesnell within the last two years, and reported that Quesnell seems very interested in helping with tracking the manuscript down.  Unfortunately nothing seems to have come of this, or at least Paananen hasn't made any results public yet.  We do know that Paananen had a series of questions he wanted to ask Quesnell.


So, in light of all the above, I would add the following questions of my own to Paananen's excellent list:

--Why specifically wasn't the manuscript examined microscopically when he had it in his possession?

--To whom exactly did he return the manuscript, and on what date?  Did he see where it was placed at that time?

--Why did he choose not to publish the results of this visit?  Did he find them insufficiently informative?

We do know that Kallistos was still librarian between 1983 and 1990.  But what we don't know is whether he handled or saw the manuscript during that time.  We also know he told Hedrick and Olympiou that he would be returning to the library in September 2000 and would search for the manuscript then, but we don't know what the results of that search were.  (ETA: however, see Stephan Huller's interesting comment below.)

So it seems that in addition to speaking to Quesnell, someone should make another effort to reach Kallistos.