Is Martha an Interpolation into John’s Gospel?

One of the readers of our blog, and a very promising PhD student at Duke University, Elizabeth Schrader, is currently working on examining the textual transmission of John 11:1–12:2, specifically the presence (or absence) of the two sisters, Martha and Mary in the story. I have invited Elisabeth to share her research in three consecutive posts. Based on her observations in the manuscripts, she proposes the bold thesis that Martha was interpolated into the Fourth Gospel in the second century. I know she looks forward to response and debate. Personally, I think her findings are very significant, although I disagree with her overall explanation of the data.

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A Problem around Martha: Introduction

In a 2017 article published in the Harvard Theological Review (Open Access version here), I argued that the character Martha is likely to be a second-century interpolation into John’s Gospel. In recent weeks, this research has received increased attention and discussion (Duke Today, Religion News Service, Religion for Breakfast). Tommy Wasserman has kindly invited me to introduce my work to this blog, and I was very happy to discuss it in more detail here.

In my research, I have demonstrated that Martha’s presence is consistently unstable throughout the textual transmission of John. Such instability is found in nearly every verse where Martha appears in John 11:1–12:2, in witnesses as early as Papyrus 66 and as late as the 1611 King James Bible. My conclusion is that approximately one in five Greek manuscripts and one in three Old Latin manuscripts has some problem around Martha. I define a “problem around Martha” according to the following five criteria:

1. the unexpected omission of Martha’s name
2. the initially transcribed name “Mary” altered to “Martha”
3. the name “Mary” appearing instead of an expected “Martha”
4. an unexpected singular noun, verb, or pronoun to describe the Bethany sisters
5. a different person named as the first of those Jesus loved in John 11:5

My most recent compilation of the relevant manuscript and patristic data is available here for those who are interested; I will happily approve a read-only view of the spreadsheet for anyone that asks.

Of course we must now ask, why is there such a remarkable textual problem around Martha in John’s Gospel? My position is that Martha was added to John’s Gospel in order to discourage readers from identifying Lazarus’ sister Mary as Mary Magdalene, an identification that was happening in patristic and extracanonical literature as early as the third century. Martha’s presence in the Lazarus story is important: she is now the woman who speaks the central Christological confession “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world” [John 11:27, NRSV]. This confession is often compared to Peter’s similar Christological confession in Matthew (“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” [Matt 16:16, NRSV]) to which Jesus replies that Peter is the rock upon which the church will be built [Matthew 16:18]. Since according to Matthew, the Christological confessor is designated as the foundation of the church, the identity of the Christological confessor in John’s Gospel is of paramount importance. It should give us pause to learn that Tertullian, writing in 206 AD, believed that Mary gave this confession – and that this Mary was understood by many early readers to also be Mary Magdalene, the first person to see the risen Jesus and to receive an apostolic commission in John’s Gospel. Indeed, if it was the Evangelist’s intent for Mary (Magdalene) to give the Christological confession in John 11:27, this would suggest that her leadership role in John was akin to Peter’s in the Gospel of Matthew.

One need not give authority to the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, or the Pistis Sophia today to notice that they offer evidence of early objections to Mary’s stature as “apostle to the apostles” (her status among Orthodox Christians even now). Composed by diverse Christian writers over the course of more than a century, these four documents each portray Jesus’ disciples—particularly Peter—objecting to Mary or to special status given to her by Jesus. Perhaps the changes we see from “Mary” to “Martha” are not so different from whatever process led to a textual variant at Luke 2:33, where Ἰωσὴφ is often copied instead of ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ. We know that there were early debates about the doctrine of Jesus’ virgin birth. So, when we see textual instability around the suggestion that Joseph was Jesus’ “father,” it is reasonable for textual critics to infer that this textual problem could be connected with the virgin birth debate. Similarly, we know that there was early controversy about Mary Magdalene’s authority, especially vis-à-vis Peter. So when we see that the presence of Martha, the Christological confessor, is unstable throughout John 11–12—and since we know that many early readers identified Lazarus’ sister Mary as Mary Magdalene—our scholarly antennae should go up.

A New Papyrus of the Gospel of John

Today I will attend the Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds session at the SBL in Atlanta. The first paper by Geoff S. Smith, University of Texas at Austin, is of particular interest:

Preliminary Report on the “Willoughby Papyrus” of the Gospel of John and an Unidentified Christian Text
Formerly in the possession of Harold Willoughby of the University of Chicago, this unpublished fragment of the Gospel of John in Greek created a stir when it appeared briefly on a well-known auction site in January of 2015. Having obtained permission from the owner to edit and publish the manuscript, I will offer in this presentation the initial results of my analysis of the so-called “Willoughby Papyrus.” I will demonstrate that this fragment complies with the 1970 UNESCO convention on cultural property and discuss the circumstances of its discovery and rediscovery. On the basis of new images of the fragment, I will also provide a transcription of the text, discuss its apparent bookroll format, and assess its text-critical value. Finally, I will present the secondary text on the verso and entertain the possibility that it belongs to an otherwise unknown Christian apocryphal text.

The papyrus made it to the news in New York Times yesterday with an image of the verso with the secondary text (apparently up-side-down compared with the recto).









The first time I heard about the fragment of John was actually from Brice J. Jones blog in April this year, when he blogged about A Greek Papyrus of the Gospel of John for Sale on eBay. Jones posted an image of the papyrus and an accompanying note of Willoughby's inventory and the seller's description:

“Very rare ancient papyrus fragment in Greek, John I 50-51 in it’s original display glass and sleeve. This is part of the MS collection of Harold R. Willoughby, who did extensive research with Edgar Goodspeed. Mr. Willoughby was a world traveler, and well-known professor of Theology at the University of Chicago. At the time of his death, he had a library of over 3500 rare bibles. This case with fragment, literally fell out of a stack of letters. I'm sure it was tucked away for security. Mr. Willoughby was a relative, and I attest this info to be true. Good luck bidding on a very rare piece with no reserve.”

According to the description, the seller is a relative of Mr. Willoughby. We will see if Geoff Smith has more to say today. Brice Jones also mentioned the accompanying note which listed several other items in Willoughby's collection. According to the list, the papyrus was one of three Greek New Testament manuscripts which seemed to be unregistered and without Gregory-Aland numbers.

Here is Brice Jones' description of the recto (John 1:50-51) based on the image then provided on eBay: 

The fragmentary papyrus contains 6 partial lines of text written with the fibers (-->). There are several strips of adhesive (front and back) that are presumably keeping the fragment in place. The image also shows two smaller, isolated fragments bearing ink but their placement is uncertain. The fragments are framed in between glass along with a card of identification that reads “John I, 50-51.” Presumably, there is writing only on one side, since there is no image of the other side and the card identifies text only on the front. If it is indeed written only on on side, then this would be very odd for a Greek New Testament papyrus. Normally, literary texts that are written on one side of a sheet of papyrus means that it is probably from a roll and not a codex. But in fact, none of the extant Greek New Testament papyri come from a roll (P22 is a question mark here). Thus, while the papyrus does bear witness to the text of the New Testament, we cannot rule out the possibility that it may be a fragment of an amulet—again, assuming that there is no text on the other side. In fact, two amulets cite passages from the immediate context. P.Berl. inv. 11710 cites John 1:49 and P.Vindob. G 2312 cites John 2:1-2. But we must suspend judgment about this matter until we can confirm that the other side is indeed blank. [Update: The seller has uploaded (rather shoddy) images of the other side confirming that there is writing; nomen sacrum is visible.]

The image is sufficient enough to attempt an analysis of the handwriting. The letters slope slightly to the right, are separated, undecorated, and roughly bilinear. The middle element of ψ descends well below the line, the oblique of ν connects high up on the second hasta, ο is small, the saddle of μ low. There is little contrast between thick and thin strokes, and punctuation and tremata are absent. This is a good example of what C.H. Roberts described as a “reformed documentary” hand and it exhibits many features typical of papyri that have been dated palaeographically to the 3rd-4th centuries. P.Oxy. 1079 (P18, 3rd-4th century) is a good example of this type of hand (cf., in particular, ν, ο, ε). While all palaeographical dating is inevitably tentative, the general impression of the handwriting suggests a date of 3rd-4th century.

The text is from John 1:50-51. I have provided a provisional transcript below in both diplomatic and full forms. 

3: It is not clear whether the papyrus reads μείζω (NA28) or μείζων (P75 037 579 1424 l 2211).

4: ὑμῖν ὄψεσθε follows the text of NA28 along with P66 P75 01 03 020 032s over against the reading ἀπ' ἄρτι found in many manuscripts whose scribes harmonized to Matt. 26:64 (including 02 017 036 037 038 Maj et al.).

5: Oddly, the scribe wrote the nomen sacrum θεοῦ in scriptio plena; cf. l. 6.

6: There is a faint trace of a supralinear stroke above the ν of υἱόν. ἀνθρώπου is also abbreviated.

–: The text appears to read καί τῇ τρίτῃ [ἡμέρᾳ], which is attested in some manuscripts (03 038 f13) over against the wider tradition.

I will post a brief report on Geoff Smith's presentation today, here in Atlanta.  Six years ago, at another SBL meeting in New Orleans, Geoff Smith presented a paper on a “New Oxyrhyncus Papyrus of Mark 1:1–2," which I reported about here and here (an except from my larger article on Mark 1:1). The question is whether this might be another amulet.

The forgery of the Lycopolitan gospel of John

Introduction

A second fragment containing the gospel of John traveled with the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife fragment (GJW), and this Gospel of John fragment (GJohn) is clearly a forgery.  Because both fragments share the same writing, the GJW must also be a forgery.  I am grateful for the input that Alin Suciu, Mark Goodacre and many others have offered concerning the newly available Gospel of John fragment.  I will use the present page to post photographs, a comparative transcription and relevant links. Please note, this will be a dynamic page, and I will no doubt update the transcriptions and main points.  Over the course of the next week, I will write an article for the June 2014 Tyndale Bulletin discussing the paleography and text of this fragment.

Photographs

Mark Goodacre has identified clearer photographs which I share, here (Jn 5:26-30 and 6:11-14, respectively).  The dimensions are ca. 11 × 8 cm (versus ca. 7.5 × 4 cm for GJW.)

Qau compared

The following transcription represents in green the extant text of the forgery.  Mark Goodacre offers an eloquent discussion of how this inauthenticates both this fragment and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife fragment which were created through the same scribal event (font).

1. Notably, seventeen of seventeen line breaks are the same.  This defies coincidence.  
2. Alin Suciu first announced the relevance of Sahidic ⲉⲃⲟⲗ for Lycopolitan ⲁⲃⲁⲗ.  The Sahidic spelling is not possible given the extant dialectal orthography which, for example, otherwise consistently has the Lycopolitan Alpha in lieu of the distinctly Sahidic Omicron.
3. I note here that the omitted ⲕⲣⲓⲛⲉ results in total nonsense. 
4. Likewise, the one instance where the forger has not copied every second line (verso, ll. 7–8), is an instance in which the intermediary text is a secure stock phrase “they were saying that”.  The presence of additional text here is impossible.  The forger erred when he turned from page eight of Thompson’s PDF to page nine, having also passed plate 25/26.
5. Naturally, the fact that we are seeing Lycopolitan in a fragment radiometrically dated to the seventh to ninth centuries is a huge problem.  The minor dialects (Achmimic, Lycopolitan and Middle Egyptian) are not present in the extensive documentary tradition from the sixth to eighth centuries.

Radiometric dating

The fragment under discussion was carbon-dated twice by labs in Arizona and Massachusetts.  The resultant rounded, callibrated two sigma dates are, respectively, 680–880 and 640–800 CE (fract.mod. results: 0.85680±0.0033 and 0.85030±0.00410).  Along with the results for the GJW wife fragment, I have graphed the results using OxCal, here:

Codex Qau

Codex Qau, Jn 16:33–17:19

The most recent discussion of codex Qau may be found in a recent award-winning contribution to the subject of the Coptic versions of John’s gospel (esp. pp. 141–143, also 94–105, 195–208).  Therein, one learns that the jar and linen cloth which protected this manuscript of John’s gospel have recently been rediscovered in Cambridge.  The manuscript was apparently buried in a cemetery used “in Predynastic, early Dynastic and Roman times”  (Thompson, 1924, ix).

Brunton, Qau, vol.3, xlii

According to the archeological publication, a group of coins was also found buried in a pot nearby, “No. 33 contained the papyrus of St. John’s gospel (late fourth century), and 28, 29, contained the hoard of gold coins” (Brunton, Qau and Badari III, 26; cf. also 31).  The coin hoard contains mint condition dated coins up to the year 361 CE (ibid., 29–30).  The idea that an ancient scribe copied our current fragment from Qau is problematic, given the provenance.  Whereas Qau had 33–37 lines per page, GJW-GJohn apparently would have had about 60 lines per page.  Stephen Emmel has demonstrated the absurdity of the forgery by reconstructing it hypothetical original and by comparing the reconstruction to known codices, here.

Peter Munro’s typed note

In her primary GJW article (p. 154, fn. 107), Karen King has provided the following information:

The second document is a photocopy of a typed and signed letter addressed to H. U. Laukamp dated July 15, 1982, from Prof. Dr. Peter Munro (Freie Universität, Ägyptologisches Seminar, Berlin), stating that a colleague, Professor Fecht, has identified one of Mr. Laukamp’s papyri as having nine lines of writing, measuring approximately 110 by 80 mm, and containing text from the Gospel of John. Fecht is said to have suggested a probable date from the 2nd to 5th cents. c.e. Munro declines to give Laukamp an appraisal of its value but advises that this fragment be preserved between glass plates in order to protect it from further damage. The letter makes no mention of the GJW fragment. The collection of the GJW’s owner does contain a fragment of the Gospel of John fitting this description, which was subsequently received on loan by Harvard University for examination and publication (November 13, 2012).

Conclusion

Unless compelling counter-arguments arise, both this fragment and the Gospel of Jesus Wife fragment should now be considered forgeries beyond any doubt.  Furthermore, the inauthenticity of the present fragment draws into question the broader group of documentation surrounding the Gospel of Jesus Wife which the owner provided to Karen King (contract of sale, typed note from Munro, handwritten note).  This was already problematic, as the bill of sale is dated to 1999, three years before Grondin’s GThomas PDF was available online.

Links (suggestions by email welcome)

• Codex Qau online PDF
• Harvard spectroscopy results with images
• Goodacre’s summary
• Suciu’s final summary
• Depuydt’s summary
• Conan O’Brian’s evidence
• Summary by Carrie Schroeder
• May 5 Smithsonian documentary
• Livescience article
• Wall Street Journal opinion article
• Hagen on scribal habits
• Goranson’s Chronology
• New York Times article
• PBS NewsHour video clip
• Washington Post article
• Mashable article
• ABC News article (Spanish)
• Slate article
• CNN video clip
• Harvard Crimson article

Jesus Had a Sister-in-Law

[For updated information, cf. The forgery of the Lycopolitan Gospel of John]

recto, Jn 5:26-30

Through Gregg Schwendner and Malcom Choat, I have just become aware of something that I should have seen much earlier.  I read all of the Harvard Theological Review articles about the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, and assumed that the links on the Harvard dedicated GJW webpage essentially linked to the same.  However, the website contains a longer version of the Ink Results which offers the pictures of the associated gospel of John fragment here.

verso, Jn 6:11-14

The shocker here is this.  The fragment contains exactly the same hand, exactly the same ink and has been written with the same writing instrument.  One would assume that it were part of the same writing event, be it modern or ancient.  In some sense, this is not a surprise, as the Ink Results indicated that the ink was very similar.  (The ink on both sides of GJohn was identical or similar to one another; the GJW had slightly different ink on both sides.  All of the inks were highly similar.)

Actually, if you are a Coptic nerd, there apparently is a bigger shocker...  The text is in Lycopolitan and apparently is a(n exact?) reproduction from the famous Cambridge Qau codex, edited by Herbert Thompson.  What is so shocking about that?  Essentially all specialists believe that Lycopolitan and the other minor dialects died out during or before the sixth century.  Indeed, the forger tried to offer two manuscripts both in Lycopolitan, but made two crucial mistakes.  First, the NHC gospel of Thomas is not a pure Lycopolitan text, but the Qau codex is.  That is we have two clearly different subdialects of Lycopolitan, which agree exactly with published texts.  Second, this GJohn fragment has been 14C dated to the seventh to ninth centuries, a period from which Lycopolitan is totally unknown.

These are my initial thoughts, and I will update this blog within the next hours.  My first assessment is that this a major blow to those arguing for the authenticity of GJW.

Update

Alin Suciu has created a reconstruction, demonstrating that the verso follows the line breaks of Herbert Thompson’s edition precisely.  Leo Depuydt came to the same conclusion on his own.  All three of us would conclude that this almost certainly marks this GJW-John fragment as a modern fake.  Alin noted also that the transcription only deviates in altering Lycopolitan ⲁⲃⲁⲗ to Sahidic ⲉⲃⲟⲗ.  Given the surrounding dialectal realities, here, this is nonsense, and further evidence of forgery.  Mark Goodacre’s reconstruction is the best illustration of the forgery.

For the reader who has not closely followed the story so far, I would underscore the importance of this discovery.  The inauthenticity claims against the Gospel of Jesus Wife fragment have been primarily based upon the fact that the GJW is clearly reconstructed from Grondin’s 2002 PDF of the Sahidic (with Lycopolitan influence) Gospel of Thomas, and secondarily based upon the bizarre appearance of the manuscript.  All of us assumed that the Coptic John anchored the GJW with a real group of fragments with a known history, although this history was based upon photocopies of older documents possessed by a mysterious anonymous figure.  These arguments find a perfect parallel with this second fragment.

My prior theory that the GJW was a forgery inserted into an otherwise authentic group of papyri has been shattered.  We must now question whether the anonymous owner is nothing more than a prankster.  I would not be surprised, if said owner vanishes into the aether.  If the owner is not a prankster, he should come forward with the information necessary to reveal the forger (or vindicate the GJW).  I am tempted to think that the forgery has roots in Germany, still, since there is an apparently idiomatically-composed handwritten note in German describing the Gospel of Jesus Wife.  I hope that this will be released by Karen King or the owner.

Mark Goodacre’s synopsis post with better images
Mark Goodacre visually illustrates GJW-GJohn forgery
Leo Depuydt responds

Postscript (07 May 2014)

Several individuals have expressed concerns about the use of the term “ugly” in my title’s metaphor.  The word choice was not intended to be offensive to any particular individual or to perpetuate an established “ugly women/sister” trope.  The term no longer appears in the title, but is still visible in the URL.

Dr. Jac Perrin on Family 13

Jac Perrin has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Family 13 in Saint John’s Gospel,” submitted to the University of Birmingham, and written under the supervision of Prof. D. C. Parker and examined by Profs. Ulrich Schmid and Paul Foster.

Abstract
To date, the single criterion of Family 13 constituency has been the relocation of the Pericope Adulterae from its traditional location in John 7:53. This dissertation demonstrates why this criterion is inadequate and proposes a new criteria.

After an overview of the history of research, potential Family 13 witnesses are classified by means of a methodology originated by Dr. David Parker’s use of Text und Textwert. This process identifies 8 witnesses inappropriately nominated as Family 13 members, thus establishing GA 13, 69, 124, 346, 543, 788, 826, 828, 983, and 1689 as valid members. Each of these 10 witnesses is then described palaeographically as a discrete artefact.

Phylogrammatic software, originally designed for DNA analysis, is then adapted to exhaustively study these Johannine Greek texts. The by-product of this novel process complements and validates the earlier Text und Textwert process. Also available as a result of this study are original witness transcriptions (available at http://www.iohannes.com/family13/), a Critical Apparatus of Family 13 in St. John’s Gospel, an exhaustive description of the contents of 18 potential witnesses, and a description of the computer analysis process used in the study.

As Perrin points out in his thesis, all the 10 valid members of Family 13 are of Calabrian provenance as Abbé Martin has asserted, despite the fact that his specific attempts to localise them are problematic.

Further, Perrin concludes that one of the family members has the Pericope Adulterae in its traditional location in John 7:53 (1689), and not in Luke as other family members, so this cannot be the single criterion for filiality.

Perrin traces three different subgroups of F13 (in concord with Lake’s study of F13 in Mark).  The image below (fig. 63), reproduced with permission, is one way to depict the final stemma (“splits tree cladogram”).

Congratulations to Dr. Jac Perrin!

Update: I have removed reference to a point Perrin makes which seems to be erroneous that “the PA of several other witnesses was in Luke, but their textual content was much closer to the TR than to any F13 member” (p. 277); I cannot find the data to back this up. Perrin’s main point, however, is valid, that the relocation of the PA to Luke (after 21:38) cannot be the single criterion of F13 membership.

John's gospel in Coptic

Over at Alin Suciu's blog, you can read my official announcement of the launch of the Coptic portion of the IGNTP John database. I am grateful for the collaboration of Brice Jones (McGill University ), Elina Perttilä (University of Helsinki) and Alin Suciu (University of Laval) who assisted with the transcriptions, as well as Hugh Houghton and Catherine Smith (ITSEE, Birmingham) who are responsible for the technical aspects of the project. In the coming months, the display should be improved, hopefully allowing for the Coptic translations to be viewed in parallel. Hopefully, the Sahidic will appear within a year or two.

Online Facsmiles of Sahidic Coptic MSS

Today there are over 180 extant Coptic MSS of the Gospel of John in the Sahidic Coptic dialect, as reported by Karlheinz Schüssler in his overview, “Some Pecularities of the Coptic (Sahidic) Translations of the Gospel of John,” Journal of Coptic Studies 10 (2008): 41-62.

Most of these MSS are fragmentary, but there are five complete MSS of John (i.e., sa 505, 506, 508, 561, 600), thirty-eight lectionaries, and three other liturgical MSS. Schüssler has published facsmile editions and transcriptions of sa 505 and sa 506 online on his website Biblica Coptica.

Both MSS are from the Monastery of Apa Jeremias (Saqqara) dated to around 600 C.E. These editions contain images facing transcriptions presented in a convenient e-book format.

Karlheinz Schüssler is editor of Journal of Coptic Studies, and Biblia Coptica, a series which lists all the Coptic biblical mss. He is currently working on a text of John in Sahidic for the International Greek New Testament Project.

More on Schüssler's personal webpage.

For Coptic resources on-line, see here (Coptica) and here (compiled by co-blogger Askeland).

Reviews of Houghton's Augustine’s Text of John and Author's Response

Recently the RBECS (Reviews of Biblical and Early Christian Studies) blog published two reviews of H. A. G. Houghton Augustine’s Text of John. Patristic Citations and Latin Gospel Manuscripts (Oxford: OUP, 2008) written by Dan Batovici, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge (here), and J. Cornelia Linde, Department of History, University College London (here). RBECS has also published Houghton's response (here).



The reviews and the author's response were first presented in a review-session dedicated to Houghton’s monograph at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 2010,(session 1630).

Update: Hugh Houghton's monograph is also featured on the new Biblindex blog, which also refers to the bookreview by Craig R. Koester in Review of Biblical Literature.

New Funding to Birmingham to Complete ECM of John

This week the annual get-together of the INTF and ITSEE has taken place in Birmingham, which has also included an IGNTP Committee Meeting. The great thing to celebrate has been that the The Arts and Humanities Research Council [AHRC] has decided to grant funding for another five years for the ITSEE, under the auspices of the International Greek New Testament Project, to complete the edition of the Gospel of John (Editio Critica Maior) by working on the minuscules!

The announcement was made today on the ITSEE newspage.

Read more about the critical edition of John here.

Unfortunately, I could't come to Birmingham as I had originally planned because of a heavy workload, so I didn't get the chance to join the celebration. But:

Congratulations to ITSEE and to us all!

Ethiopic Gospel of John

For those of us who like to read Ge'ez, the Ethiopic Gospel of John is now available:

Wechsler, Michael G., Evangelium Iohannis Aethiopicum, CSCO 617, Leuven: Peeters, 2005.

with an introduction, mentioning the kind of text Eth John reflects (mixed, as you might have guessed). The main corpus is a critical edited text of Eth John, based on the earliest Ethiopic MSS. Besides, an additional chapter lists minor variants, and another one has suggestions for the NA27 text, in Greek (for that, you do not need Ge'ez!).

It seems to be a thoroughly edited work, which will be very helpful in the future editions of the IGNTP / ECM Gospel of John volumes. In the foreword, he acknowledges, besides others, the help of R. Zuurmond (who edited Eth Mark & Matthew) and of God (who, according to him, seems to have been somehow involved in the production of the Greek Vorlage ...).

Anyone who wants to know more about the Ethiopic Bible: Take a look at the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, Vol. I and II are now out (Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden). Look for the article "Bible" in Vol. 1. Very helpful.