Editor's Response

I wish to cordially thank Dr. Samuel Cook and Dr. Jacob Lollar for their reflections on and critique of the Parabiblica Coptica volume. They both have raised several important points, but in what follows, I would like to limit myself to two issues.

First, I believe that Cook is spot on in noting that the Coptic scholars of today are still struggling to overcome the colonialist prejudice of our predecessors (which, of course, does not mean that we should not explore and learn from past scholarship—only that we should not do it uncritically). Indeed, the assumption that a Coptic literary work, be it an apocryphon, a martyrdom, or a sermon, is inadvertently a translation from the Greek original still permeates the field—even if there is no evidence whatsoever that this work was ever available in the Greek language.

Today we are even ready to take a step further and to appreciate the fact that some texts in antiquity were undoubtedly translated from Coptic into Greek. For instance, Alin Suciu has recently convincingly demonstrated that the early ascetic authors Paul of Tamma and Stephen of Thebes wrote in Coptic—even though their works also exist in Greek. As for the Coptic apocrypha, the same most certainly holds true for the Investiture of Michael. We should, therefore, be open to the possibility that some other apocryphal texts, extant in both Greek and Coptic, were in fact original Coptic compositions. For example, all the extant Greek manuscripts of the Acts of Andrew and Bartholomew (Martelli 2015: 78–97) preserve an abbreviated version of the text, while the Coptic fragments (Guidi 1887) bear witness to the original, unabridged version. We should thus seriously consider the possibility that not only was this apocryphon written in Coptic, but that it may have never existed in Greek in its complete form.

With this in mind, perhaps we should also be more conscious about our presuppositions regarding the inner-Coptic literary transmission. The Sahidic dialect was undoubtedly the dominant one in the first millennium, and the vast majority of literary texts that came down to us from this period are written in Sahidic. But do we always need to assume that a text extant in a non-Sahidic dialect is necessarily a translation from Sahidic? Personally, I find it quite likely that, in the north of Egypt, various texts were originally composed in the Bohairic dialect.

In this respect, quite remarkable is the apocryphal Acts of Matthew in the City of the Priests, which was part of the “official” dossier of the apostle Matthew and until recently was known only in Arabic and Gəʿəz. In 2018, however, Suciu published a Bohairic fragment of this text, which was discovered in the “Dome of the Treasury” (qubbat al-khaznah) of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. With this discovery, we can now be certain that the Acts of Matthew in the City of the Priests was initially written in Coptic. I strongly suspect, however, that it is not an accident of preservation that no fragment of this text survives in Sahidic. In codex MONB.QY, which contains exclusively the apostolic “preachings,” the place of the “preaching” of Matthew is occupied by the Martyrdom of Matthew, augmented with an episode about the apostles casting lots and dividing up their mission-districts. In codex MONB.MS, the heading that reads “This is the preaching and the passing-away of saint [Matthew], the apostle [and] evangelist” is similarly followed by the Martyrdom of Matthew. In both cases, the compilers needed the “preaching” of Matthew and, in both cases, they filled the slot with the Martyrdom of Matthew. The Acts of Matthew in the City of the Priests would seem to be a more fitting candidate, and a likely explanation as to why neither of the two compilers used it is that it never existed in Sahidic. In other words, it seems reasonable to surmise that the Acts of Matthew in the City of the Priests is an original Bohairic composition.

My second point pertains to Lollar’s apt remark on the Coptic and Syriac apocrypha as “distinct constellations” in the parabiblical universe. I believe that it is indeed advisable to abstain from trying to explain shared features between the two traditions by postulating direct influence or dependence. In many instances, the similarities emerge in the process of parallel development. This is why it is so exciting to observe those instances where the two traditions actually meet—as is the case of the famous Monastery of the Syrians in Wādī al-Naṭrūn. The mural painting referenced by Lollar is indeed remarkable. In my view, it represents a felicitous marriage of the Coptic and Syriac traditions. On the one hand, Andrew is depicted with bristling grey hair, its locks resembling tongues of flame. This depiction is typical for the Coptic iconography of the apostle, as evidenced, for example, by the famous fresco of the Virgin Enthroned from the Monastery of Apa Apollo at Bāwīṭ. Moreover, as I pointed out in an earlier publication (Miroshnikov 2018: 15–17) many Coptic apocrypha testify to the intimate link between Andrew and fire. For instance, the so-called Historia Sacra, a collection of legends of various biblical figures, reads:

Andrew, the brother of Peter, was a flame of fire more than all the apostles; and if he went into the city to preach, and they did not listen and receive his preaching, he would be wroth, so as to cause a fire to come forth from the heaven and burn them. For this reason one of the apostles was set to walk with him, so that, if his anger blazed against them (i.e., the unbelievers), he might say to him straightway: “Remember the commandment of our Savior which He gave us, saying: ‘Go and preach to all the nations, and baptize them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost’ (Matt 28:19).” And so his spirit would rest and be established straightaway aright.

On the other hand, Andrew in the mural is depicted as preaching to cynocephalic (dog-headed) people. While Innemée in the publication referenced by Lollar correctly identifies this scene as that from the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals, it is worth noting that nowhere in the Coptic tradition do the cannibals of this story seem to be portrayed as cynocephali. The Syriac version of this text, on the other hand, explicitly calls the city of the cannibals “the City of Dogs” (Wright 1871: 102, 115). This notion perhaps developed from a reading of the Acts of Andrew and Bartholomew, which features a cynocephalic individual (called Christianos in Coptic and Christomaios in Greek) hailing from the city of the cannibals. Be that as it may, the image of cynocephalic cannibals seems to be Syriac rather than Coptic, and thus the Andrew mural, I believe, is a beautiful love child of the Coptic and Syriac traditions.

Works Cited

Guidi, I. 1887. “Frammenti copti. Nota IVa.” Atti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei: Rendiconti 3.2,1 ser. iv: 177–90.

Martelli, L. 2015. “Acta Andreae et Bartholomaei (I 2056, CANT 238). Edizione critica e commento della versione greca.” PhD diss., Università di Bologna.

Miroshnikov, I. 2018. “The Coptic Martyrdom of Andrew.” Apocrypha 29: 9–28.

Suciu, A. 2018. “A Bohairic Fragment of the Acts of Matthew in the City of the Priests and Other Coptic Fragments from the Genizah of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.” Le Muséon: revue d’études orientales 131: 251–77.

Wright, W. 1871. Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles Edited from Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum and Other Libraries. London: Williams and Norgate.

Ivan Miroshnikov is a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Researcher at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University, Docent in Early Christian and Coptic Studies at the University of Helsinki, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Egyptological Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of The Gospel of Thomas and Plato: A Study of the Impact of Platonism on the “Fifth Gospel”, the co-author of Coptica Fennica: Catalog of the Coptic Manuscripts from the Ilves Collection Exhibited at the National Archives of Finland (16 June–14 August 2020) , the editor of Parabiblica Coptica, and the co-editor of Women and Knowledge in Early Christianity. He is currently working on publishing various hitherto unedited manuscripts in Coptic, both documentary and literary.