Lost and Found Items in Manuscripts of the Life of Mary

November 10, 2016 by Tony

I have spent much of the past ten years working on a project that has been mentioned on this blog several times (start HERE): a critical edition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in Syriac. The project is now virtually complete; right now it is in the hands of readers and I look forward to getting their feedback in the next few months. In the meantime I thought I would use some of the downtime to get back to blogging with more regularity. And what better to write about than, once again, the Syriac Infancy Gospel of Thomas?

In the course of my manuscript hunting and gathering, I came across some manuscripts that should be of interest to a wider audience of scholars than the few of us who work on Infancy Thomas. This is one of the joys of text-critical research: the serendipitous discovery of texts or versions of texts obscured, in many cases, by sloppy cataloguing—because the cataloger either missed or misidentified the material. Several of the West Syriac Life of Mary manuscripts included in my project contain additional texts on the Virgin Mary—e.g., Jacob of Serug’s memra On the Death and Burial of the Virgin, or the Miracle of the Theotokos in the City of Apamea. In a few cases, one of these texts—a memra On the Malice of the Jews against Mary and Joseph, sometimes attributed to Ephrem—is inserted between books one and two of the Life of Mary (book 1 …

The Childhood of Jesus for SBL 2012

November 13, 2017 by Tony

I have just been informed that my paper has been accepted for the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. The session focuses on childhood stories of Jesus. I decided to present on my ongoing efforts to compile critical editions of childhood stories in Syriac. Here is the abstract:

"The Childhood of Jesus in the East Syriac Life of Mary"

The East Syriac Life of Mary, published for the first and only time by E. A. Wallis Budge in 1899, is a combination of a variety of non-canonical texts, including the Protoevangelium of James, the Dormition/Transitus of Mary, sections from the Abgar Legend and the Acts of Pilate, and, in some manuscripts, much of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Also included in the text, but not often discussed, is a series of stories of the holy family during their time in Egypt. The source of these tales is unknown. The same stories occur in the more widely published Arabic Infancy Gospel, long believed to be a translation of the Life of Mary, perhaps from an earlier stage in its development. Scholars interested in the childhood of Jesus and the life of Mary would be better served reading the stories in the Syriac Life of Mary than in its Arabic translation. To that end, this paper provides a new edition and translation of the Egyptian childhood tales based on a pool of over fifteen manuscripts. It represents a considerable advance on …