MİSYONERSAVAR YAZILAR

Estimated Range of Dating: 120-180 A.D.

A couple of American scholars found some fragments of a Coptic manuscript in a museum in Berlin some years ago. The story hit the news media early in 1997, and some vague and rather tendentious reports made. Here is what I have:

A report from the University of Kansas - the same information is floating around the 'net in more or less abbreviated forms. Here is one from the Nando Times, and another from usenet news somewhere. More to be found in Berlin? - 13 Mar 1997.

Researchers say Coptic fragments reveal lost gospel - March 7, 1997. This from the University of Kansas pages, which should be authoritative. I don't know if the image of an MS is of the MS in question.

How much faith can we place in these reports? Well, a certain amount. The facts of the story appear to be this:

In 1991, Paul Mirecki, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas, located a Coptic manuscript in the Egyptian museum in Berlin. At some subsequent period the manuscript was also noticed by Charles Hedrick, a religious studies professor at Southwest Missouri State University in the United States, and after a chance meeting at a professional convention in 1995 in Philadelphia the two decided to collaborate. A book was projected for summer 1997 from Brill Publishers in the Netherlands, and Mirecki said he will present a paper on his findings at an academic symposium in November (1997) in San Francisco.

The manuscript is on parchment ('calfskin'), and consists of 15 pages, evidently from a codex, which have suffered fire damage at some point in their history. William Brashear, the museum director, said the museum had acquired the manuscript in 1967, probably from a private antiquities dealer. The MS is apparently 'crumpled', and some of the pieces are the size of postage stamps. The pages are conserved between glass.

The paleography suggests the MS was written in the fourth or fifth century (but see below). Apparently Mirecki has also claimed a first or second century date for composition.

Mirecki and Hedrick have produced an English translation, and a theory of how the fragments go together.

The MS contains a number of sayings placed by the author in the mouth of Jesus - rather like the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. According to Mirecki:

'It's a non-orthodox text ... Salvation comes to these people through knowledge rather than faith... They see orthodox Jews and Christians as being duped by the evil creator of the material universe.... For example, one passage unique to the gospel reads, "I have overcome the Cosmos, so don't let the Cosmos overcome you."'

So what can we say about all this?

The document would appear to be an example of the texts produced by groups classified under the name of 'Gnostics' (from gnosis, knowledge) by the early church. Eusebius after listing the books of the new testament mentions a number of forgeries by the heretics in the names of various apostles1. Irenaeus 2 is familiar with the process, and documents the church's response - to demand some kind of evidence that it was known to the apostles, or any of the churches founded by them, and some evidence that the text squares with the known teaching of those apostles. The Gnostic response was to acknowledge that the books did not meet this test, but to claim that the works had been delivered by the apostle in question secretly to trusted associates. These works invariably say that salvation is available only through secret knowledge. The exact teachings of the various groups varied wildly. Tertullian suggested that the real origin of most of these teachings was from contemporary philosophical speculation, which would appear to be correct.3

These documents all appear to date from the second century, the heyday of Gnosticism.4 There is no literary evidence of Gnostic gospel-production any earlier than this (and the archaeology is unconvincing), and the references in Eusebius and Irenaeus all suggest a second century date. However if we see in the references to Gnosticism a tendancy to import elements from contemporary thought into Christianity, the process may have begun quite early, as Paul refers to people apostasising in his letters, which usually means the watering-down of Christian beliefs by the admixture of external ideas. Eusebius again tells us that John had to deal with a heretic called Cerinthus, often regarded as the first Gnostic5, so a late first century date would not be entirely impossible for such a document. However it might be questioned whether the church was sufficiently far from the apostles in the first century for a forged document to have any chance of convincing church members. We really do not know, we have no evidence, and as such speculation is worthless.

A couple of caveats need to be made against some of the statements attributed to Mirecki, for the benefit of the lay reader:

For most of the last 150 years, there has been a persistent tendency among New Testament scholars attempt to date the New Testament as late as possible, and all heretical works as early as possible6. This has occasionally had risible results - the standard dating of John to 160+AD was accidentally demolished by the discovery of a fragment dating to around 125AD7. But the trend is still in force, as may be seen from the articles cited above, and so the dates given by Mirecki (if he really said this: see my quote from Hedrick) should be treated with caution. Dating of manuscripts is a subjective business, even without an axe to grind. Dating the (non-existent) original of a n-times removed copy might be described best as speculation, without any other evidence.

Another unfortunate trend is to attempt to undermine any ancient statement which would tend to support the statements of the early church, and accept fairly uncritically every statement which contradicts it, or rubbishes the church. The articles given demonstrate the same tendency still at work, and if genuine the statements made are rather curious. For instance, we can have no actual idea how the MS came to be fire damaged, since the provenance of the fragments is stated as unknown, but the article does not hesitate to give one anyway. Any student of paleography would know that accidental fires are the primary cause for this sort of damage, in the pre-lightbulb era, and we have far more copious documentation of destruction of libraries by accidental fires than by official action. This is the sort of statement that (if genuine) leads the layman to question the objectivity of some of this scholarship.