The Wanderings and Homes of ManuscriptsJames, M. R. (Montague Rhodes)
History
The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts
James, M. R. (Montague Rhodes)
Book collecting; Books -- History -- 400-1450; Books -- History -- To 400; Manuscripts
And now for an example which shows the odd wanderings of _texts_. There
is a volume at Vienna, from Bobbio, made up of palimpsest leaves from
many MSS., Biblical and classical. Two of these, apparently from one
book, stand next to each other. They have only recently been deciphered;
they are in Latin uncials of the fifth century. One of them is from the
Apocalypse of Thomas, a book named in an old list of Apocryphal
writings, but thought until a few years ago to be hopelessly lost. We
now know complete MSS. of it at Munich and a fragment at Verona, as well
as an Anglo-Saxon version in the Vercelli MS. The other Vienna leaf is
from an equally apocryphal "epistle of the Apostles," never mentioned by
old writers, but seemingly of the second century. It gives a dialogue
between our Lord and the Apostles after the Resurrection. About 1897 Dr.
Carl Schmidt, a leading Coptic scholar, published an account of a Coptic
MS. of the greater part of the book (the MS. is at Berlin, and some time
will be edited); and about 1913 a French scholar, Abbé Guerrier,
published a complete version of it from Ethiopic MSS. which had been in
Europe for half a century. It is about the last book I should have
expected to find in a Latin version, and current in Italy in the fifth
century. The combination of Egypt and Abyssinia is common enough; but
that Bobbio should be added to that, and Asia Minor and Greece omitted,
is indeed a strange thing. Perhaps Africa was the parent of the Latin
version.
THE MORAL
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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