Saturday, February 25, 2012

A real ancient Aramaic Bible manuscript

TIMOTHY MICHAEL LAW has noted and posted (The Apostle Paul in Cairo!) a photo of a palimpsest manuscript from the Cairo Geniza whose upper layer is Mishnah Berakhot, but whose lower layer is, of all things, the New Testament Pastoral Epistles in Christian Palestinian Aramaic.

He put up the post several days ago and I have been meaning to get to it. But now go and have a look to clear your palate of yesterday's ridiculously over-hyped, at best early-modern, and possibly very recent Syriac manuscript supposedly containing The Gospel of Barnabas. (To be fair, as I said on Facebook, if it really is an apocryphal gospel, at least it still gets to count as an apocryphon whatever its date. That's the nice thing about apocrypha.)

If you need more, go look again at Codex Ambrosianus B.21, another genuine Aramaic Bible manuscript. It too even has some cool colored ink.

UPDATE: Okay, the Cairo Geniza manuscript is presumably medieval rather than ancient, but it contains two genuinely ancient texts and no one is trying to kid us about its date or content.

Also, if you can bear it, the Daily Mail has more—presumably priceless—photos of the Turkish manuscript, along with some new article content and even a passing note of skepticism: Secret £14million Bible in which 'Jesus predicts coming of Prophet Muhammad' unearthed in Turkey.