Baker Academic

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

New Coptic Fragment of the Gospel of John Discovered - Le Donne

This morning I was emailed this by Brice Jones (PhD candidate at Concordia). Jones writes:
Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I am happy to report that I have recently identified an unpublished Sahidic parchment codex fragment in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. In addition to being a copy of portions of John chapter 3, this manuscript, under the inventory number P.CtYBR inv. 4641, contains hermeneiai on both the hair and flesh sides. Thus, it is the first known example of a hermeneia manuscript of John where both the Johannine citation and hermeneiai are written solely in Coptic. The Yale fragment is significant, not least because only a handful of these enigmatic Johannine fragments are known to exist (see Metzger 1988; Porter 2007; Parker 2006). My edition of P.CtYBR. inv. 4641 is forthcoming in New Testament 
Studies 60.2, and in that article I also discuss hermeneiamanuscripts more broadly. I shall upload the article to my website once it is published, but in the meantime, please feel free to read a short post about the manuscript fragment here:
http://bricecjones.weebly.com/1/post/2013/10/a-newly-discovered-coptic-gospel-fragment-at-yale.html 
On 4 October 2013, I made Professor Karlheinz Schüssler aware of this fragment, and he registered it in his Biblia Coptica with the call number "sa 972." Sadly, just days after our correspondence, Professor Schüssler died in a tragic car accident. Professor Siegfried Richter of Muenster has also been contacted about assigning this fragment a SMR number. If any of you should desire to see full images of the fragment, please let me know and I would be happy to send them along.

I trust you are well.
Best,
Brice Jones

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