Friday, May 1, 2020

Codex 064: Transcriptions of the New Pages


            What is the text on the four newly identified pages of 064 at St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai?  That’s the question that this post was written to answer!  Without further introduction, here is the front-and-back transcription of the Greek lower writing on fol. 72 and fol. 71 of Syriac 7.  Red letters indicate a deviation from the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform.


On 72v., in the first column, in the 10th line, part of the text is obscured by the upper writing.  It looks like the copyist accidentally skipped a syllable and perhaps a correction was made in different ink which did not survive.



The last digit in the Section-number beside Mt. 27:37 is probably Δ but it is difficult to say for sure because it is obscured by the upper writing.

Page-views of Syriac 7 are online at the Sinai Palimpsests Project at sinai.library.ucla.edu, a publication of St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai in collaboration with EMEL and UCLA.  The pages with the text represented here can be viewed as the last two pages of the manuscript, upside down (relative to the Syriac text).


Readers are welcome to double-check the data in this post.


8 comments:

Peter M. Head said...

Thanks James, good job.

Tommy Wasserman said...

Congratulations to this achievement!

Alistair McPherson said...

This is an exciting find, James! Well done!

Timothy N. Mitchell said...

Great work!!!

Greg said...

I appreciate your hard work, James, and that you notified me as you were working through this. We've now added it to the NT.VMR: https://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/liste?docID=20064

Unknown said...

As the Scholarly Director of the Sinai Palimpsests Project, I note with great pleasure that the project website is put to good use and that the work of the project meets with the interest of so many people.
Indeed, if you look at the website that James Snapp acknowledges (www.sinaipalimpsests.org), and click on 'folios' and then scroll down to folios 71 and 72, you will see that the identification of the erased undertext was already made by Agamemnon Tselikas, one of the Participating Scholars in the Sinai Palimpsests Project. In other words, the information about the erased text of Matthew has been publicly available for a long time.
Even so, James Snapp deserves great credit for having identified that other folios of the same original manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew are found in manuscripts in Kiev and St. Petersburg.
This is an important finding that contributes to our understanding of the textual heritage of the Bible in the Byzantine Middle Ages. Let's hope there will be more such discoveries in the future!
Prof. Dr. Claudia Rapp, University of Vienna and Austrian Academy of Sciences/Scholarly Director, Sinai Palimpsests Project.

Wayne said...

Super job, James.

James Snapp Jr said...

Thank you, everyone.