In a new book, Dr. AnneMarie Luijendijk of Princeton
University describes a newly
published manuscript, produced in the 400s-600s, titled The Gospel of the Lots of Mary. The manuscript is not an account of the
ministry of Jesus; nor is it a collection of sayings of Jesus. Instead, it is a small collection of oracles,
written on sheepskin parchment, designed to be used as a sort of horoscope. The manuscript was in the possession of Harvard
University ever since 1984, when it
was donated by Beatrice Kelekian, in memory of her deceased husband Charles, to
the Sackler Museum . (So in this case, 30 years elapsed between the
acquisition of the manuscript, and the publication of its text.) Its previous history is not known.
Despite occasional references to Jesus, Mary, Gabriel, and Michael, this text does
not really have much to do with the New Testament. It is a divination-book with some Christian
overtones. There is not a lot about Mary! Jesus is mentioned only three times: in the title of the book (“The Lots of Mary, the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ”), in
Oracle 30 (“The Lord Jesus fights on your behalf”), and Oracle 37 (“Christ
Jesus will give you a good fruit and a prosperous life”). [See Forbidden
Oracles, page 36.] Some of the
oracles contain statements that might be based on passages from the Gospel of
Matthew. One statement is similar to
James 1:13.
The Gospel of the Lots of Mary may have been produced in
the 500s near, or at, a shrine for Saint Colluthus (a physician who was
martyred during the Diocletian persecution) that was located in the Egyptian
city of Antinoƫ . One point in favor of this conclusion is that
the lettering in The Gospel of the Lots
of Mary resembles the handwriting in a fragment of Fourth Esdras from
Antinoƫ.
Nevertheless, bibliomancy and similar practices endured.
A rehabilitated form of the Sortes
Astrampsychi, known as the Sortes
Sanctorum, was in circulation in the early Middle Ages when some of
its interpretation-notes, or hermeneiai,
were added to the margins of chapters 1-10 of the Gospel of Mark in Codex Bezae
(an important manuscript of the Gospels, Acts, and Third John). In 1901, J. Rendel Harris conducted an
investigation of the Sortes Sanctorum
in Codex Bezae; it can be read as part of his book The Annotators of Codex Bezae.
Harris
also investigated the Sortes Sanctorum
in the margins of the Gospel of John in the Old Latin Codex Sangermanensis (g1),
which features a circular diagram which was designed, it seems, for
the purpose of oracle-number-selection. Harris concluded that similarities in the oracular materials suggest that both manuscripts were at one time housed in the same library.
Five
papyrus fragments of John show that the use of the Gospel of John for oracle-consultation persisted in Egypt :
Papyrus 55
(500s-600s) – John 1:31 -33 and 1:35 -38, with notes on one side.
Papyrus 59
(600s-700s) – snippets from John 1, 2, 11, 12, 17, and 18, with seven hermeneia.
Papyrus 63
(500s) – John 3:14 -18 and 4:9-20,
with the oracular notes in Greek and Coptic.
Papyrus 76
(500s) – John 4:9, 4:11 -12, with
two notes, both resembling notes in the hermeneia
in Codex Bezae’s margins, and
Papyrus 80 (200s-300s)
– John 3:34 .
![]() |
Papyrus 63 - The word "Hermeneia," indicated by red arrows, separates portions of the Gospel of John from oracle-notes. |
Each of
these manuscripts has at least one oracular note. (A sixth, P60, does not have hermeneiai, but it probably did when it
was in pristine condition.) This is also
true of two Greek uncials (0210 and 0302).
Not only does this raise the question of what these non-continuous
manuscripts are doing in the Gregory-Aland list of papyri with their own
identification-number, but it also raises the question of whether or not the
Biblical text in manuscripts with oracular notes embedded in their texts
(rather than added secondarily as in Codex Bezae) should be approached with
extra caution, due to the possibility that such manuscripts were copied, not
primarily as Scriptures used in the churches, but as oracular
consultation-books used privately as horoscopes.
David C. Parker investigated this
question of the reliability of the text of papyri manuscripts with oracular
notes, in 2006; his research is accessible as chapter 11, Manuscripts of John’s Gospel With Hermeneai,
on pages 121-138 of Manuscripts, Texts,Theology – Collected Papers, 1977-2007 (published in 2009 by Walter de
Gruyter). In this detailed study, Parker
concluded that when the reliability of the texts of John in these manuscripts is
tested, the texts “come out of the test very well,” and should not be assumed
to be inferior to the texts of continuous-text manuscripts. (For more information see Bruce Metzger’s “Greek Manuscripts of John’s Gospel with
“Hermeneiai,” in Text and
Testimony: Essays on New Testament and
Apocryphal Literature in Honor of A. F. J. Klijn, pages 162-169) and especially
Stanley Porter’s The Use of Hermeneia and
Johannine Papyrus Manuscripts, the gist of which can also be found on pages
60-63 of Christian Origins and
Greco-Roman Culture (Brill, 2012)).
Recently, Brice C. Jones discovered a Coptic manuscript (sa 402) with text from John 3:17-21 accompanied by hermeneiai. His report about this manuscript (assigned to the 400s-600s) includes pictures showing the oracular notes below the Scripture-text, similar to the format in P63.
Forbidden
Oracles? The Gospel of the Lots of Mary
by AnneMarie Luijendijk is published by Mohr Seibeck and is available at http://www.mohr.de/en/nc/theology/series/detail/buch/forbidden-oracles.html
(it is Volume 89 in the series Studien
und Texte zu Antike und Christentum).
A book review by Sarah Parkhouse is at http://rbecs.org/2015/02/01/foglm/
.
No comments:
Post a Comment