Where's My Blog

I've just discovered that this 'blog doesn't show up at all on Google. Given that I'm so busy actually trying to finish the Philip book, it doesn't seem worth posting at the moment if no one is going to see it. I'll add a link from my Celtic 'blog http://bardic-press.blogspot.com but it seems that the best idea will be to publish the 'blog from the Bardic Press website. I'll also be putting together a Gospel of Philip page, which should be the most comprehensive Philip page on the web.

Until then: deadlines.

Coptic Find at Luxor

This is the primary account of the find, which was used in various syndicated accounts:

Al Ahram weekly
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/730/he1.htm
This contains a description of the books:
"Archaeology has stumbled on a major Coptic trove buried under the remains of a sixth-century monastery located in front of a Middle Kingdom tomb.

Excavators unearthed two papyri books with Coptic text along with a set of parchments placed between two wooden labels as well as Coptic ostraca, pottery fragments and textiles.

The head of the team, Tomaz Gorecki, said the books were well preserved except for the papyri papers which were exceptionally dry.

The first book has a hard plain cover embellished with Roman text from the inside while the second includes no less than 50 papers coated with a partly deteriorated leather cover bearing geometrical drawings. In the middle, a squared cross 32cm long and 26cm wide is found.

As for the set of parchments, Gorecki said it included 60 papers with a damaged leather cover and an embellished wooden locker."

Translating the Gospel of Philip: Knee Deep in Lacunae

I'm moving into an intensive phase of work on The Gospel of Philip: Annotated and Explained. I have a draft introduction, draft translation and sheaves of notes for the commentary. Now I have to turn them into something readable. The translation has been quite tricky, and much more difficult than the Gospel of Thomas translation I did a couple of years ago. My Copic isn't good enough to do a straight translation, so I've had to rely on Paterson Brown's interlinear translation of Philip more than I would have wished to. You can see his pages on Philip here: http://www.metalog.org/files/philip.html
But there are a number of problems with his renderings, and also he uses Walter Till's Coptic text of Philip, which has been superceded by Bentley Layton's. Still, it's a valuable resource, and he has dynamic links to Crum's dictionary and Plumley's grammar. He also covers the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Truth.

It's raining lacunae here. A lacuna is a gap in the text of a manuscript. These are generally caused by physical damage to the manuscript, though a lacuna may be passed on in the copying process, by inadvertently missing out text, or by copying from a manuscript that is itself damaged, for instance. There are a couple of examples of this in the Gospel of Thomas--saying 101 comes to mind, but nothing on the scale of the lacunae in Philip. Several of Philip's "sayings" (which aren't sayings in the way that Thomas' are, but it's a convenient term) are riddled with lacunae. Of course, they have to be translated, but it's a tedious process when I know that I will just have gobbledegook in the end for about 10% of Philip. Still, there are worse examples in the Nag Hammadi texts. The Dialogue of the Saviour seems to have pages of ellipses in its translation, and the (non-Nag Hammadi) Gospel of Mary is in a pretty poor state. Oh well, I should be looking at the donut and not the hole.

Coptic Manuscript Find

Here's a link to one of the news articles that mentions the discovery of some Coptic manuscripts: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200502/s1306696.htm
No clue yet as to the contents of the manuscripts. Let's hope that they are akin to the Nag Hammadi finds. They could, of course, just be Coptic translations of the Bible.

Coptic manuscripts unearthed in Egyptian tomb

Polish experts excavating in the southern Egyptian city of Luxor have discovered three ancient Coptic manuscripts in a pharaonic tomb.

Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said the find was the single most important Coptic discovery since 1945, when a pair of Bedouins stumbled onto the Coptic codices in Nag Hammadi in Egypt's western desert.

The council said the manuscripts date to the sixth century and were concealed in a Middle Kingdom (2000-1800 BC) tomb in Luxor, about 710 kilometres (440 miles) south of Cairo.

The texts may have been hidden there by Christians who were being persecuted at the time by the Romans.

The council's head Zahi Hawas said one of the manuscripts was 22.5 centimetres by 17 centimetres and three centimetres thick.

He said the second had 50 pages and a cover made of skin adorned with ornaments, while the third also had 50 pages and a cover, but was in a poorer state.

Mr Hawas said experts would restore the manuscripts and try to read them in the hope that it would shed more light on early Christianity.

The Gospel of Philip

My name is Andrew Phillip Smith and I'm working on The Gospel of Philip: Annotated and Explained for Skylight Paths. The Annotated and Explained seres presents a variety of spiritual texts with introductions and section by section commentaries for the intelligent, spiritually interested reader. My interest in the Gospel of Philip is twofold: I'm an independent scholar, and I can deal with the scholarship surrounding Philip on its own terms, but I'm also, and primarily, interested in it as a text that expresses something about the reality of man and the world, though using the language of its time.

I'm approaching the final weeks of writing, and the book should be in its final form by the beginning of April. This blog will serve to pass on bits and pieces of material that I come across, and should provide some insight into the writing process. I also wrote a book on the Gospel of Thomas, published by Ulysses Books. I try to keep up with developments in Thomas scholarship, and I should be able to pass on the odd insight there too.

I have another blog at http://bardic-press.blogspot.com
which mainly covers my interest in Celtic mythology and literature. Based on my experience in keeping up that blog I would expect my posting to be erratic, but I aim for at least two posts a month. While I'm working on Philip I might be able to post more often, because I'll have more to say on it. Then, on the other hand, I should actually be writing the book instead of blogging...