Jung, Rendel Harris & the Sinaitic Palimpsest

 Sinaitic Palimpsest

I must thank Richard Pickvance (1 October) for knowledgeable correction regarding the relationship of the Sinaitic Palimpsest to possible older lost Latin or Aramaic texts. I came across the story of its discovery, and J Rendel Harris’ part in it, while researching the relationship between Rendel Harris and Irene Pickard, his personal secretary, as part of my Eva Koch scholarship at Woodbrooke. Rendel Harris was profoundly affected by the realisation that the gospel had extra verses added, telling of the resurrection and ascension, between the time the Palimpsest was written and the reign of Constantine, when the gospel reached its current, canonical, form.   

It serves as a reminder that Christianity evolved out of Judaism in the period following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE, with competing branches and rival gospels. One particular branch emerging victorious following the First Council of Nicaea in 325CE, as a result of Constantine’s insistence that, as the official religion of the Empire, it should have only one agreed and enforcible doctrine – hence the Nicene Creed.*

Irene Pickard, whose archive I was studying, was much affected by those discoveries about the Sinaitic Palimpsest and by her contact with Carl Jung, whose works suggest that during that process of the evolution of Christianity, the legendary figure of Jesus was woven out of the sayings and doings of one or more itinerant Jewish teachers and given mythological status as the one and only incarnation of the previously tribal, now to be universal, god of the Jews.

 Letters, The Friend, 15th October 2021

 

The gospels

Sorry, David Lockyer (10 September), but the ‘Aramaic originals’ of the gospels remain lost. The Sinaitic Palimpsest is a fourth-century manuscript of a text that can be dated, on linguistic grounds, to around 200 AD. It is an early version, a translation, of the gospels, but the first Latin versions are generally thought to be slightly older. Be that as it may, the gospels were written at least a century earlier, which makes it difficult for this Aramaic text to be a source.

The story of the Palimpsest has been well told by Janet Soskice in Sisters of Sinai, though Friends may quibble with her description of Woodbrooke as ‘a house of training for Quaker lay-ministry’.

Aramaic or Hebrew origins can often be detected in the gospels (see my book First Burn Your Bible). The existence of an Aramaic source, in the form of a collection of the sayings of Jesus, which stands behind the synoptic gospels, has been postulated, and it has been given the name Q (from German Quelle – source). No such document has been found, but that has not stopped scholars trying to recreate it.

Richard Pickvance

Letters, The Friend, 1st October 2021

Aramaic gospels

I was interested in David Lockyer’s reply (10 September) to James Gordon about Aramaic gospels in which he stated that the originals of the gospels are not lost. 

I fear this may be misleading and would like to point out the following.

We do not possess any originals – ‘autographs’ – of the New testament, only copies of a few complete, and very many partial or fragmentary copies, a fragment of a few verses of John’s Gospel, dated early second century AD, and written in Greek.

The Sinaitic palimpsest manuscript containing the four gospels discovered at Saint Catherine’s monastery dates from the late fourth/early fifth century and is written in ‘Old Syriac’. It probably does represent the oldest translation of the gospels into Syriac reaching back to the late second century, and its discovery by two remarkable English Victorian twin sisters is fascinating to read!
The scholarly consensus is that all Syriac manuscripts we possess are translations from the Greek and cannot therefore be ‘originals’, especially since Syriac is a dialect of Eastern Aramaic, different from Western Aramaic containing the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic dialect that Jesus would have spoken. The Sinaitic palimpsest does however have traces of Palestinian dialect.

According to one eminent scholar: ‘The most we can say is that some Palestinian idioms in the Old Syriac gospels may possibly go back to a living tradition of the original gospel story and in particular to the words of Jesus’. (FF Bruce, The Books and the Parchment, fifth edition, Marshall Pickering 1991).

For an acknowledged, authoritative and detailed academic work see also Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, third edition, Oxford University Press 1992.

Mike Pozner

Letters, The Friend, 8th October 2021

* In response to criticism I have re-writen the highlighted so that it does not read the same as the version published in the Friend. My attention was drawn to the fact that it was Theodosius I who made Christianity the official religion of Rome, Constantine, no matter how pivotal his roll, having only made it his preferred religion.  I had wrongly credited Constantine with making Christianity the official religion of the Empire.  

Sinaitic Palimpsest again

Oh dear. David Lockyer’s letter (15 October) contains an endlessly repeated factoid. Constantine I did not establish Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire. He simply stopped the persecution of Christians.

Christianity progressed (not without some setbacks) and several more emperors came and went before Theodosius I made Nicene Christianity the state religion. It is the difference between the Edict of Milan in 313 and the Edict of Thessalonica in 380.

Richard Pickvance: Letters - 29 October 2021

One particular branch emerging victorious following the First Council of Nicaea in 325CE, as a result of Constantine’s insistence that, if it was to be his preferred religion for the Empire, it should have only one agreed and enforcible doctrine – hence the Nicene Creed. Christianity finally becoming the official religion of Rome in 380 under Emperor Theodosius I.*

Lost in translation

from Lost in translation? James Gordon digs deep into Matthew’s Gospel:  James Gordon The Friend, 26th August:

I have checked over twenty different translations of these passages into English (easy to do these days with the internet), and in every case the words διὰ τοὺς ἐκλεκτοὺς (dia tous eklektous) are translated ‘for the sake of the [elect/chosen]’. Wycliffe has ‘for the chosen’, and the Latin Vulgate, which Catholics rely on to this day, has ‘propter electos’, where the preposition means ‘because of’. We need to be clear. Jerome (author of the Vulgate in the fourth century CE) was using the Greek that we have, which is the nearest we have to an original (scholars think Matthew and possibly Mark may go back to Aramaic originals but, if so, they are lost).

 

Letter to The Friend, 10th September, 2021  

Lost in translation?

In his article James Gordon (27 August) says that the Aramaic originals of the gospels are lost.

Not so lost! In fact found through the work of a Quaker scholar along with others, in ancient Syriac text; a text often used by Western Aramaic speakers.

J Rendel Harris, later to become the first director of studies at Woodbrooke, was in the habit of taking his vacations exploring for ancient documents in Egypt. He made several major discoveries at the Orthodox monastery on Mount Sinai. He advised the twin sisters, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, of the existence of many other ancient documents at the monastery and provided them with letters of introduction. During their stay at the monastery they discovered what is known as the Sinaitic Palimpsest of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, the oldest known version of the Gospels. The following year, Rendel Harris accompanied the sisters and others to Mount Sinai to painstakingly copy the retrieved texts.

Shockingly this earliest version of the Gospel of Mark – itself believed to be the oldest of the gospels – was shorter than the versions we have now, ending with the discovery of the empty grave, rather than with the resurrection and ascension.

As Rendel Harris himself put it: ‘There is no suggestion nor fragment of evidence that we might, by excavating a thousand years, unearth an ecclesiastical Christ. He, at all events, is the dream and creation of a later age.’

David Lockyer