Quick Post on Tselikas

Agamemnon Tselikas' report on the Mar Saba manuscript was posted to the BAR website last week.  I'm a little surprised it hasn't garnered more attention, but I thought I'd make a few comments about it.  Really I only want to focus here on his "Textological Observations", which is where he presents the real substance of his claims.  I'll comment on only a few of those observations, numbered below.

Peter Kirby resurfaces

http://peterkirby.com/

opening with a long missive directed towards James McGrath.  I have no dog in this particular fight and I've largely stayed out of it, but I hope to read more blogging from Peter as he gets the chance--I'd long wondered what he was up to these days.

Quick Post on Mar Saba

From Joseph Patrich's The Sabaite heritage in the Orthodox Church from the fifth century to the present, 2001, p. 10:

Up to 1887 there were 706 codices in the possession of the monastery, when they were removed for their safety to the patriarchate in Jerusalem.  Before 1887, fifty-five manuscripts had been taken from Mar Saba, finding their way to libraries and museums around the world.  The extant Sabaite collection thus amounted to 761 codices, 129 of which were written in the laura by thirty-six calligraphers or scribes over a period of eleven centuries, from the ninth to the nineteenth.  The major part of the collection thus consists of manuscripts that were written elsewhere.

So the presence of a written text in Mar Saba in a hand that was not by a resident of the monastery, is in no way unusual, and indeed is to be expected.  In terms of the physical evidence, it's only the Voss volume in general that's unusual (leaving aside the question of the character of the script, the text, and the context).


Coming soon, I hope (but not too soon...) will be commentary on Tselikas' report to BAR on his search for the manuscript.  In short, there will be much to criticize though I'll keep my comments to a minimum.  I also hope to put up a post I've been slowly building that tries to document the history of the text and efforts to study it in person.

Quick Links to Viklund-Hurtado Exchange

Roger Viklund and Larry Hurtado had a brief exchange online and I thought I'd link to it:

Hurtado 1
Viklund 1
Hurtado 2
Viklund 2

I don't have much to add, except to say that while my opinions about To Theodore are largely in sympathy with Viklund's, I have to say that Hurtado re-states some important issues about provenance/provenience with respect to the letter.  It's just that I think these issues are in no way insurmountable.

I do part with Viklund, however, regarding whether the letter is authentically Clementine.  It may be, but it may not be, and as I've stated before I currently lean towards attributing it to a student of either Clement or Origen writing most likely sometime in the early third century.


I haven't been blogging as often as I'd like; been busy with other projects and activities.  I've also been busy investigating some more potential parallels between GTh, GMk, and Q/GPet, especially Logion 55 and 101.   It's been truly fascinating, and I think I now have a more definite position on the compositional history of GTh, and on what its original layer contained (and what it didn't contain; specifically, it didn't contain the language of "hate").  Someday I'll blog on that, but I need to get back to linking original GMk with the Signs Gospel first.  That will require some significant time to finish putting together and I honestly haven't had it recently, nor am likely to until next month.  So what blogging I do will be fairly light for now.

Secret Mark in Toronto

I attended the Secret Mark Symposium in Toronto last Friday.  It was great fun.  For the benefit of those readers who couldn't attend, I thought I'd provide a brief illustrated review of the conference.