The Red Gospels of Ganjassar - A Member of Family 1

Ganjasar Monastery

The Red Gospels of Ganjassar, an Armenian Gospels manuscript from the late 1100s that has resided in Chicago in the Goodspeed Manuscript Collection since 1941, used to be at the Ganjasar Monastery (and possibly at Ani before that).  Its name is due not to the color of the ink in which it is written but to the red frames of its miniatures.  (The term “miniature” in this context itself does not have anything to do with the size of the illustrations but rather with the red lead (minium) used as pigment to frame them.)

Considering its unusual name, and recognizing that today is International Ginger Day, I am pleased to present the remarkably gifted Phoebe McArthur, a.k.a. PhoebeIsGinger, the influencer, Commander of the Ginger Defense League, to accompany a couple of its more interesting features.  Here she is posing with fol. 213r, which features text from Luke 19. 

Thanks to Alin Suciu for help  identifying the text.

The text of the Red Gospels is primarily Byzantine but there is heavy Caesarean mixture – the most obvious Caesarean feature being the placement of the story of the adulteress (usually found after John 7:52 in Greek manuscripts) at the end of John, as in family-1.  It has been classified as a member of Group Z (as in Zohrabian).  Although the text is normally formatted in two columns per page, the second page containing the pericope adultera is written in a single column filling the page.

The miniature of the Annunciation is similar to the same miniature found in Matenadaran 2374 – in which the pericope adultera appears in a highly unusual form.

The Canon-tables are very nice, though bound in the wrong order.  Several pages of the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew are missing; the extant text begins in 8:34. 

Alice Taylor has suggested (in Treasures in Heaven:   ArmenianIlluminated Manuscripts) that the illustration of Christ’s crucifixion favors the idea that the artist Abas was connected to churches in Georgia or Greece, inasmuch as the chalice is shown catching both blood and water.

Page-views of the entire codex can be accessed at the Goodspeed Manuscript Collection website.

PhoebeIsGinger with the pages of the Red Gospels containing the story about
Jesus and the adulteress following the end of the Gospel of John.