SAHIDIC COPTIC

NEW TESTAMENT IN ENGLISH

Translated by

GEORGE HORNER

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

MCMXI

PREFACE

There have been three extensive publications of the Sahidie version of the Gospels within the last hundred and twenty years. C. G. Woide, the Dutch scholar who became an assistant librarian of the British Museum, provided the materials for the publication which, after his death in 1790, Dr. Henry Ford, Principal of Magdalen Hall and Lord Almoner’s praelector of Arabic in the University of Oxford, appended to Woide’s edition of the Codex Alexandrinus. This Appendix published the Gospel text of the two Lectionaries and fragmentary MS. in the Bodleian Library, some text supplied by the Rev. J. G. C. Adler, a divine of the Danish Church, and copied by him from the Borgian Collection, the Venetian fragments published by Mingarelli, and also the fragments which Woide had bought of George Baldwin, the friend of Mahomet Ali, who after establishing a regular commerce between England and Egypt was appointed Consul General there in 1786. This great work appeared in 1799. It produced considerable portions of Matthew, but of Mark verses of only four chapters. Large omissions occurred in Luke, and John was far from complete.

M. E. Amélineau’s publication in French and German periodicals, relying chiefly on the MSS. of Lord Crawford and the Borgian fragments, was the second effort made, and thereby the text was much increased, so that when Padre Balestri of the Augustinian Order undertook to continue the work of Cardinal Ciasca, and published with great accuracy nearly the whole of the Borgian New Testament fragments, he was able to give more authorities throughout the Gospels, but did not succeed in supplying all the wide spaces which were still left vacant in the text. This was the third publication mentioned above, and the present editor having re-collated the fragments, now kept in the Vatican Library, has much pleasure in bearing full testimony to the excellence of such careful work. It remained for him to identify fragments in the libraries of Europe and Egypt, and to fill up all the text except thirteen verses in Matthew, thirty-five in Mark, and three in Luke; of these fragmentary verses only fourteen (Mark 1:20, 21, 24–29; 16:2–7) are entirely absent, the others being deficient in a few words and letters. He also obtained a large amount of additional authorities for the extant text, so that it very rarely depends on one fragment and seldom on less than three, while two verses of John 9 are supported by as many as seventeen.

This fortunate achievement is due to the discovery of an ancient library in the White Monastery, Dair al Abiad, supposed to have been founded by the Empress Helena, at the edge of the desert on the narrow strip of cultivated land of the Nile valley, west of Suhāj, and two hundred and fifty miles south of Cairo, between Assiüt and Thebes. From this convent had come to Cardinal Stephen Borgia at the end of the eighteenth century, ...