Executive Director of CSNTM & Senior Research Professor of NT Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary
Reported by the New York Times, Professor Karen King of Harvard University has unveiled a fourth-century Sahidic Coptic fragment in which Jesus speaks of “my wife”: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/historian-says-piece-of-papyrus-refers-to-jesus-wife.html?_r=2. Let the debates begin!
I recently wrote an essay in partial defense of Erasmian pronunciation that will be published in a book (no title yet) which offers essays in defense of different phonological systems for Koine Greek. All the papers were originally read at the annual Society of Biblical Literature conference held in San Francisco in November 2011. In my paper I laid out four basic arguments: historical, pragmatic, philological, and aesthetic. Yes, aesthetic. But rather than offer an argument at SBL, I played a tune which I am making available here. More on that in a moment.
I noted in my presentation that whenever I travel to Greece (which I do every year to photograph New Testament manuscripts with CSNTM) I leave Erasmus behind. I drop him like a bad habit once I board the plane and don’t renew my acquaintance with the Dutch humanist until I return to the States.
Regarding the aesthetic argument, Erasmian pronunciation is often considered cumbersome, unnatural, stilted, and ugly. The implication sometimes is that it must not have been the way Greek ever sounded; it is too harsh on the ears for that. Perhaps images of Jim Caviezel torturing our auditory senses with unnatural Aramaic in The Passion of the Christ come to mind. Or any scholar’s attempt to read Coptic gracefully! This argument fails to recognize that even though, to some degree, beauty may be in the ear of the listener, some languages actually do sound harsh. In order to maintain political correctness, I will not mention any, and simply let your own unbridled imagination run where it wishes. I do not think, however, that Erasmian Greek is among them. To be sure, our execution of the language may falter, but that does not mean that the sound of the language is ugly.
Along these lines, Friedrich Blass long ago offered this insightful comment:
“I am perfectly convinced, that, if an ancient Athenian were to rise from his grave and hear one of us speak Greek, on the basis of the best scientific enquiry and with the most delicate and practiced organs, he would think the pronunciation horribly barbarous.”
Blass went on to say, “But if he heard a modern Greek, he would not indeed be so loud in his censure, simply because he [would have] failed to observe that this is supposed to be his own language.”
Blass’s modesty aside, not everyone who enunciates Erasmian Greek butchers the language. For a demonstration of this, consider the Chalcedonian Creed sung with Erasmian pronunciation. The music and lyrics were produced by one of my first-year Greek students, Kit Bogan, who sang all four parts a capella. One of the students in the class, Trace Bailey, who had spent years as a disc jockey, exclaimed, “This may be the most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever heard!”
It takes a few minutes to hear the whole thing. So, grab a cup of joe, plug in your 200-watt speakers to the computer, and enjoy the sound of pure worship.
Symbolon ten Chalkedonas, lyrics, music, and song by Kit Bogan.
Update: This is now on Youtube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dyZyYqESKk&feature=youtu.be
A graduate of Princeton University in the early nineteenth century, Robert Garrett, acquired a medieval copy of Paul’s letters, Hebrews, Acts, and the Catholic letters from Mt. Athos in 1830. His estate later donated this manuscript to Princeton University. The manuscript was produced in the twelfth or thirteenth century on parchment. It was meant as something of a pocket Bible, measuring only 13.9 x 10.3 centimeters. The leaves are very fine vellum, extraordinarily thin. Housed in the Special Collections room of the Princeton University’s Firestone Library with the shelf number Garrett 8, it had only briefly been mentioned in works dealing with New Testament manuscripts.
According to J. K. Elliott’s Bibliography of New Testament Manuscripts, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 2005), the latest published discussions of this manuscript was in Kenneth W. Clark’s Eight American Praxapostoloi in 1941.
Kurt Aland’s Kurzgefasste Liste des griechischen Handschriften der Neuen Testaments, 2nd edition (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), the standard tool that indicates the location, contents, date, and other pertinent information of all known Greek New Testament manuscripts, put the location in parentheses and said that the manuscript was “verbrannt” or burnt. The Internet update to the Kurzgefasste Liste claims that the manuscript is now “zerstört”—destroyed. But just as when Mark Twain presumably proclaimed, after reading his obituary in a newspaper, “Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated,” so too the demise of codex 1799 is exaggerated. (Twain actually wrote, “This report of my death was an exaggeration.”)
I examined the manuscript on Thursday, 16 August 2012 for about an hour. It is true that the manuscript has been burned. It is also true that many of the leaves stick together, most likely from the heat melting the ink. But it is still completely intact. It needs to be restored, but it is not gone forever—not by a long shot. In fact, it is mentioned in some detail in Greek Manuscripts at Princeton: Sixth to Nineteenth Century, by Sofia Kotzabassi and Nancy Patterson Ševčenko, with the collaboration of Don Skemer (Princeton University Press, 2010). Mr. Skemer in fact wrote to me and said he had no idea why anyone would ever think the manuscript had been destroyed.
I am grateful to Mr. Skemer, the Curator of Manuscripts at the Firestone Library, and his assistant, Charles Greene, for granting us access to this and other manuscripts in the Special Collection. And I am thrilled that a presumably dead manuscript has come back to life!
Meteora is one of the most stunningly beautiful and other-worldly places on earth. Nearly a millennium ago, monks traveled throughout Greece in search of a place where they could get close to God and spend their days praying in undiluted solitude. Ultimately, six monasteries were established there, all but one perched atop stone pillars rising hundreds of feet above the plain below.
“Metéora (Greek: Μετέωρα, ‘suspended rocks,’ ‘suspended in the air’ or ‘in the heavens above’) is one of the largest and most important complexes of Eastern Orthodox monasteries in Greece, second only to Mount Athos. The six monasteries are built on natural sandstone rock pillars, at the northwestern edge of the Plain of Thessaly near the Pineios River and Pindus Mountains, in central Greece. The nearest town is Kalambaka. The Metéora is included on the UNESCO World Heritage List.”
OK, I confess. The previous paragraph is lifted verbatim out of Wikipedia. But it’s a decent geographical description of the place. But nothing quite prepares you for Meteora’s rock formations that tower over the town below, the monasteries that melt into the sandstone pillars effortlessly, flush with the edges of the majestic columns, the eerie view of the ever-changing scenery as you drive on the perilous mountain switchbacks.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s just a few hours to get to this unique place from Athens. You get on National Highway 1 and travel up the eastern coastline, stopping to see where King Leonidas and 300 Spartans held off the original Million-Man March at Thermopylae. Then, the road begins to wind inland until you arrive at Kalambaka, where you must find lodging if you are to visit the monasteries that tower above the town. Kalambaka strikes me as a town that grew up around the convents, bringing visitors to the brick and stone cloisters that were built and inhabited for seclusion. For centuries, the only way to the top was via a basket attached to a line that must have been cranked for hours before unloading its cargo of personnel and necessities. When asked how one would know when to change the cables, the priests drolly replied, “God lets us know.” Beginning in the early twentieth century, pathways from adjacent mountains were built for the many visitors. One too many ropes had snapped, leaving those in the baskets barely enough time to collect their thoughts and offer a final prayer to God.
In this place are scores of biblical manuscripts. As the only nunnery among the abbeys, St. Stephen (or Μονὴ Ἁγίου Στεφάνου) has a small collection of fascinating handwritten scriptures. But one in particular caught my attention—lectionary 2258.
The manuscript is a 230-leaf paper codex with parchment covers glued to cardboard. The parchment jackets have minuscule handwriting, with a majuscule text previously glued on top of them, both for the front and back covers. It is these covers that are of interest to us, since just the majuscule writing is the lectionary.
At first glance, the manuscript appeared to be a palimpsest—a text that was scraped over and reused in later centuries for writing. By the middle ages, the practice of reusing vellum was so ubiquitous that Charlemagne had ordered an empire-wide order to cease and desist. This codex looked to be one such palimpsest, produced by some recalcitrant scribe who scoffed at the Carolingian edict. By definition, the under-text of a palimpsest is older than the upper-text. And majuscule handwriting was exclusively used for the first eight hundred years AD in biblical manuscripts, with minuscule codices coming into play beginning in the ninth century. The minuscule text was obviously later than eleventh century, the date that scholars had determined for the majuscule lectionary. But the majuscule text looked to be on top of the minuscule text. How could this be? It was impossible, of course, but there it was, staring us in the face, mocking us with its mysteries.
We looked closer at the text, hoping against hope that it would somehow reveal its secrets to us by some mystical union between man and manuscript. We tried to read the text, and this proved impossible as well. Although it had Greek letters, they did not form Greek words.
Typing out each letter, there was nothing unusual about the Α, Δ, Η, Θ, Ι, Λ, Μ, Ν, Ο, Π, Τ, Υ, Φ, Χ, or Ω. But the other letters were different: they actually were written backwards. Because in majuscule script most of the letters look the same whether forward or backward, it took us some time to unlock the secret of this document. How did such a reverse image happen? That took some noodling, but the mirror image provided a sufficient clue. A majuscule text was apparently pressed against the minuscule text cover, got damp, and left a residue of letters. The majuscule leaf then vanished, but a shadow of its letters as a mirror image remained. For part of the majuscule handwriting, the outer layer of skin had completely peeled off, adhering to the paper below. We were reading the backside of the top layer of parchment, as though we were the parchment looking out as the scribe penned his words.
As we followed this hunch, a text emerged. On the recto, we could make out the following letters:
λεια (in the first column, about four lines down)
κνα και παντα οσα (second column, about half way down)
εν και αποδοθη (the underscoring = underdots, the traditional way to indicate uncertain letters)
The only text that fit this was Matthew 18.23, 25. The reconstructed lines thus read:
βασιλεια
τεκνα και παντα οσα
ειχεν και αποδοθη
The verso had the following (with brackets indicating our educated guess as to what was in the gaps):
ν]ηανι
σκος το]ν λο[γον
απη]λθεν λυπου
μενος ην γ]αρ εχ[ων
κτ]ηματα πολλα
This was Matthew 19.22, with the variant spelling νηανισκος for νεανισκος. This confirmed that we were dealing with a lectionary. Before the lines that contained βασιλεια on the recto, there must have been the previous lection as well. The lections thus detected were:
Unconfirmed since no letters could be detected
Lection κυριακη ια (12th week) for Sunday: Matt 18.23–35
Lection κυριακη ιβ (13th week), Sunday: Matt 19.16–26.
So, here was a manuscript that technically has no material on which it is written (except for the thin layer of skin for a small portion), because the material has vanished. All that is left is the shadow of letters, in mirror image, on another manuscript. I hesitate to call this unique; there may be other manuscripts that went through a similar process. But of the hundreds of biblical codices I have examined, this was a first for me.
I go to Greece every year, with several others from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (www.csntm.org), to photograph biblical manuscripts. And every year, we ‘discover’ manuscripts too—that is, we inform the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster about New Testament manuscripts that they were unaware of, and give them the details so that they can give these manuscripts a new Gregory-Aland number.
We always spend some time in Athens, but also try to get to other places as well. In the process of canvassing the countryside, I have come to realize that Greece is five different countries, all connected by the same language, government, and the ubiquitous old men sipping their Greek καφές in outdoor cafés.
There is Athens, a typical big city with more graffiti per square kilometer than any other city in western Europe. Typical—except for the Parthenon, Areopagus, other archeological sites, and magnificent museums and libraries.
Then there is the Peloponnese—the lower half of Greece, which boasts Corinth, Olympia, Sparta, and many other historic and beautiful sites. The Mediterranean Sea outside of Corinth is as clear and blue as the Caribbean. I’ve been told that the Peloponnesians are not as friendly as the rest of the Greeks, but this tidbit came from someone far north of Athens. I’ve not experienced it for myself.
The small islands—including Patmos, Samos, Icaria, Andros, and nearly 3000 other islands—make up the third country. These are always enjoyable sites and usually out of the way places. Cruise ships port at Skala harbor in Patmos every day, with the eager travelers scurrying off the vessels to board big buses and go up the mountain to see the Monastery of St. John the Theologian and the Cave of the Apocalypse. These folks only stay for two or three hours before they are whisked away to another island, checking off their bucket list this island famous for its connection to the Bible; we usually stay for two or three weeks.
We don’t take a cruise ship to get there, but an overnight ferry. There are only 3000 residents on Patmos during the summer months; we know almost all of them. Only four are not friendly, two of whom are not Greeks (I’d tell you their nationality but they would find me out!). We’ve eaten at nearly every restaurant and traversed every dirt road. This is the “Holy Island of the Aegean” because this is where John penned the Apocalypse and therefore it is the only island in all of Greece that does not allow nude sunbathing. It may well be my favorite place in all of Greece–and certainly the one my wife approves me visiting!
The fourth country consists of big islands and famous islands—like Rhodes, Cos, Lesbos, Santorini, and Mikonos. Amazing sites, but very expensive. They know what they’ve got. I’ve never been to Santorini or Mikonos for the simple reason that they are not known to have biblical manuscripts.
Finally, there is the Greek countryside. Villages that have no names. Access lanes still not paved that lead to major highways. Mountain roads that are dotted with crosses where people have driven over the edge and lost their lives because guardrails are often non-existent in this country that is 80% mountainous. Pathways that drive the GPS crazy. And people so friendly they turn the American value-system on its head.
At first, I was taken aback by their friendliness. It seemed to be a used-car-salesman kind of friendliness. That was ten years ago. People that friendly in the States are likely to take you to the cleaners. But in Greece, money is not the driving principle, and genuine friendships are prized like fat bank accounts are in the U.S. Most rural Greeks are poor—dirt poor. Yet they share what they have with strangers and live to show hospitality to visitors. Some of the best lamb and pork chops anywhere on the planet. And a gaggle of friends we’ve made along the way. I truly love Greece and the Greek people. And I pray that this country with its rich heritage in politics, conquest, art, sports, medicine, and, of course, biblical manuscripts, will survive its current financial crisis.
In my next post I will tell about driving up to Meteora from Athens, and of a particularly interesting manuscript we examined in one of the monasteries of Meteora in 2011 and 2012. For now, I’ll simply close with this: If you ever get the opportunity to visit Greece, check out all five countries. Athens and Santorini are not the whole experience! And get to know the people. It just might change your value system.
Daniel B. Wallace 