James Snapp discovers two more folios of 064!

St. Catherine’s Monastery,
where these new folios of 064 are.

In case you missed it a few days ago, James Snapp has discovered two previously unidentified folios of 064 at the Sinai Palimpsests Project website.

If you go over to see the images of 064 at the VMR, you’ll notice there are gaps from Matt. 26:70–27:13 and from Matt. 27:30 to 27:44. These two gaps correspond exactly to the text on two folios Snapp identified from Sinai, Syriac 7.

Also incredibly helpful is the pseudo-facsimile transcription James made, which even mark differences from the Robinson-Pierpont text.

Well done, James, and congrats on the find! See the whole post here, and the initial announcement here.

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Final note: this discovery follows Head’s Rule.

A Previously Unidentified Folio of 093?

Earlier this week, I was working on Acts in the forthcoming textual commentary for the Tyndale House Greek New Testament, and I believe there is another page of 093 that the INTF does not currently recognise. Oddly enough, this is not the first time someone at Tyndale House working on Acts has stumbled across a previously-unknown page of a Greek New Testament manuscript.

According to the online Liste at the INTF, 093 is housed at the Cambridge University Library in the Cairo Genizah collection as “Taylor-Schechter Coll. 12.208”. That is slightly imprecise, but the print edition of the Liste (at least the first edition, which is the one I checked) correctly notes that 093 is two folios, each with its own shelfmark. The LDAB entry rightly gives them as Taylor-Schechter 12.208 and Taylor-Schechter 12.189. The manuscript itself is rather interesting. It is a palimpsest in which 6th-century Greek text (of Acts 24–25 and 1 Peter 2–3) was overwritten with Hebrew.

If you’ll hold that thought, we’ll hop over momentarily to the other side of the Atlantic.

As it turns out, the University of Pennsylvania also has a collection of manuscripts that came from the Cairo Genizah in their Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Library. Their online catalogue describes one manuscript, Halper 114, as an “Early midrash on Genesis 40:18-41:3; 46:28-47:1”. Note the following, however:

The hand may be identical to that of the ancient palimpsest copy of compendium of Midrash Rabbah Genesis, Cambridge T-S 12.208 and 189....

Another online catalogue at UPenn has a slightly longer set of notes (and I note that they do give a description for the undertext: “Palimpsest of Book of Acts(?) (Sixth century?)”) and includes the following:

Fragmented Greek characters, disposed vertically in 3 lines within center margins, along joint on hair side; no other Greek characters visible to naked eye, none visible on flesh side; some additional characters seem to appear with digital enhancement, but currently impossible to make out text; the identification with the Cambridge TS 12.208 and 189 bifolia is tentative, given ruling differences (Halper 30-32 lines; Cambridge 28-29 lines), and paucity of identifiable text, notwithstanding kinship between Hebrew texts.

I would suggest that it is not impossible to make out the Greek undertext, only very difficult. Still, I did some playing around, and I think I have found bits of Acts 21:13–14 in one of the more legible sections. As far as I know (and with my sincerest apologies to the INTF if this is not the case), the INTF does not currently recognise Halper 114 as part of 093 or as part of any other Greek New Testament manuscript.

[These images and the content of Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Library, Halper 114: Early midrash on Genesis 40:18-41:3; 46:28-47:1 are free of known copyright restrictions and in the public domain. See the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark page for usage details, http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/.]

Section of Halper 114, without my edits.

Section of Halper 114, with my very rough drawing on enough undertext for a preliminary identification

I can also see ε[ι]πο[ντες] after I stopped drawing in red there as well, but I admit I didn’t spend as much time on it as I could have.

My proposals:

1. It would be great if Halper 114 could be digitised with MSI so that the undertext can be read and edited (and I hear CSNTM has MSI capabilities now!).
2. It would be great if someone at the INTF could verify if Halper 114 is indeed a previously-unidentified (or at least previously-unrecognised in the Liste) folio of 093.

Finally, here we have another application of Head’s Rule, that “the best place to look for ancient manuscripts is in a library”.

Reading Hidden Text with X-Rays

12th c. binding material in a
16th c. manuscript (photo credit).

The Guardian reported this weekend on a relatively new technique for reading metallic inks in book bindings macro x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (MA-XRF). Here’s a clip from the article:

Bindings made between the 15th and 18th centuries often contain hidden manuscript fragments that can be much older. Bookbinders used to cut up and recycle handwritten books from the middle ages, which had become old-fashioned following the invention of printing. These fragments, described by Kwakkel as “stowaways from a distant past”, are within as many as one in five early modern age printed books.

Kwakkel added: “Much of what we’re finding is 15th or 14th century, but it would be really nice to have Carolingian material, so from the ninth century or even older. It would be great to find a fragment of a very old copy of a Bible, the most important text in the middle ages. Every library has thousands of these bindings, especially the larger collections. If you go to the British Library or the Bodleian [in Oxford], they will have thousands of these bindings. So you can see how that adds up to a huge potential.”

Apparently, the process is currently very slow, taking as long as 24 hours for one shot.

As a development of Head’s Rule, the best place to find unknown manuscripts is inside known ones.

CSNTM Expedition in the Greek Press

As noted earlier on the blog, CSNTM is currently on a major expedition in Greece digitizing the entire Greek NT collection of the National Library—over 300 manuscripts. It’s a huge undertaking and the results should be well worth it. If you read modern Greek (or know how to use Google translate), there are two articles in the Greek press on the expedition. There are some nice pictures included. Godspeed to the team, especially in what look like very tight working conditions!

Update:

In further confirmation of Head’s Rule, Dan reports on his blog of discovering an uncatalogued manuscript of the apostolos in the binding of a 12th century lectionary.

Where to find ancient manuscripts?

Some recent examples confirm Head’s rule - that the best place to look for ancient manuscripts is in a library (previous examples include P52, Luther’s lectures on Romans, the Archimedes Palimpsest):

• The discovery of an ancient Torah scroll in an Italian university library (mis-catalogued)
• The discovery of a letter by Robert the Bruce in the British Library
• Up-date: Ben Witherington III finds Lightfoot’s notes on Acts (in a library!)