A Greek Witness to the Lord’s Prayer, Written in Latin Letters, without the Doxology

Yesterday, I wrote that I would devote a full post to what was one of my favourite items in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition at the British Library.

The catalogue entry gives it the title “The earliest Durham gospel-book”, not to be confused with the Durham Gospels (also on display, by the way).

The manuscript, of which only thirteen folios survive, contains bits of Matthew and Mark in Latin written in the mid-seventh century. Folios are spread across three volumes in the Durham Cathedral Library, but the one on display is MS A.II.10. The text is mostly Vulgate, but Mark 2:12–6:5 are Old Latin (VL 19A). Hugh Houghton writes that its text there corresponds “to the text of the Gallo-Irish subgroup seen in VL 14” (Latin New Testament, p. 221).

Source: Wikipedia

What makes this manuscript so interesting to me, however, is that it contains the Lord’s Prayer written in Greek but in Latin characters. It is difficult to see, but it’s there in the two lower D-shaped panels.

Now this raises the question to me: should the INTF give it a GA number?

It’s clearly not an amulet or an ostracon, and it’s not written on wood, wax or anything like that. Although it is not strictly a continuous-text manuscript, it does occur between Matthew and Mark in a continuous-text manuscript. It isn’t really analogous to a liturgical manuscript because this bit of text is not located within the context of its place in the liturgy; it’s just there.

If P42 can be P42 though it is a Greek-Coptic book of the Odes, then why can’t this manuscript have its own GA number? It is a Greek-Latin continuous-text manuscript of the Gospels, even if the Greek bit lacks an accompanying Latin parallel, is limited to this one selection and is written in Latin characters rather than in Greek.

Perhaps of greater interest to readers is that, unless I’m mistaken (the text is admittedly difficult to see and my complete inexperience reading Greek in 7th-century Latin transliteration), it appears to lack the doxology of Matt. 6:13. In the second-to-last line, I see puniro (πονηροῦ) followed by what look like a couple of nomina sacra. I also see curion (κύριον) in that last line. Thus, not only is there not room for the doxology, the text that is there seems to be a different kind of ending to the prayer than the traditional doxology (I will happily let any readers spend more time than I did trying to decipher the full text).

What can we make of this? It is a Greek witness to the Lord’s Prayer without the doxology from either Iona or Northumbria in the mid-seventh century. Should it have a GA number? Should it be considered among textual witnesses for that variant?