Layton’s Coptic Grammar – a comment

I just looked at this blog and discovered that I hadn’t posted since July. I was surprised. I then looked in my drafts folder and discovered this.

A couple of days ago, one of the other postgrads asked me a question about translation of a sentence in Lambdin that he couldn’t work out. I couldn’t immediately work it out either, so I decided to use my copy of Layton’s Coptic Grammar. I was not at all happy to discover that the numbers in the index did not correspond with the page numbers in the book.  It was a very expensive book and my immediate assumption was that the revised edition had not revised the indices.

I eventually worked out what was going on in the sentence, sent off an email to my colleague and went home, determined to contact the publishers and ask if they had a corrected version of the indices. The next day I was showing a chaplaincy colleague the deficiencies of the book when I noticed that there are numbers in the margins at the beginning of each new section. He commented that his Latin grammar used section numbers rather than page numbers and a quick check revealed that the numbers in the index are indeed section numbers, not page numbers!! Oh, oops.

Clearly Layton was trained in the Classics. I wasn’t and I find his layout counter-intuitive.  I suspect I will not be alone. It’s rather like people in the church assuming a knowledge of the Bible that the majority of younger people outside the church simply do not have. It makes their communication fairly incomprehensible to the people they would dearly love to have in the church.

 

A translation assumption in Layton’s Coptic grammar

I was somewhat gobsmacked (can you be “somewhat gobsmacked”, or is that akin to saying “almost a virgin”?) to read the following comment made by Layton in talking about how he chose his examples:

There is no reason to doubt that Biblical Sahidic Coptic is normal, idiomatic, and polished in character even thought its wording and rhetoric are also governed by the Greek original. (xii)

This brought me to a stop in my reading. As Layton says (albeit much less colloquially) in his opening chapter, there is much about how Coptic operated that we don’t know because it hasn’t been a spoken daily language for around a millennium. He also says that the Nag Hammadi texts “whose language resembles Sahidic display a non-Standard mix of isoglosses, sometimes fluctuating, from all over Egypt” (xii) so he has omitted them. I have no difficulty with the idea that the Biblical Sahidic in the oldest manuscripts is polished. I am less sure that it is necessarily either normal or idiomatic.

I think it is eminently sensible of him to chose the Sahidic Bible and the writings of Apa Shenoute (which he also uses) as the standard for Standard Sahidic because the corpora that we have available are those, Nag Hammadi and non-literary material such as personal, magical, legal and medical texts.  I think it making too sweeping an assumption to say that religious texts, especially those translated from another language are either normal or idiomatic, though. Certainly, most modern English bible translations  are neither particularly normal nor particularly idiomatic and there are loud cries of dismay when a version comes out that attempts more normal and idiomatic usage (and no, I don’t think I’m confusing this with colloquial usage, which is definitely not well accepted – I am thinking about how well the TEV/Good News is accepted in most church circles).

While we have no evidence that the Copts were like us in this, we have no evidence that they weren’t either.  I think it would be safer to assume that the Sahidic Coptic Bible and the writings of Apa Shenoute are good examples of polished, formal, religous Sahidic and since it’s what we’ve got to work with, to use it as the standard. Even in my limited reading of the Nag Hammadi Sahidic corpus, I  have come across examples where a word is clearly using the spelling of another dialect, so I would not doubt his expert judgement about the isoglosses in it.  I just don’t think we can assume that religious documents are necessarily good examples of normal idiomatic usage and I think that there have been times when too-broad assumptions that “everybody knows” have blinded people to important discoveries for too long in the past.

 

Layton’s Coptic Grammar – some comments

As I said in my previous post, I’ve just received my copy of Bentley Layton’s A Coptic Grammar.  This is the revised, 2004 edition, which he says has been kept affordable by a grant from they Yale Endowment for Egyptology. If that’s the case, I am very grateful to Yale, because it is not a cheap book. I can see why, though, because, unlike many paperback books, it is perfect bound, ie the pages are divided into a number of sections which are folded and stitched before being glued into the binding. Cheap paperbacks have their pages cut to size and are then glued to the binding, making it much more likely that they will fall to pieces in your hands with frequent use.

It’s a grammar, so I am not actually planning on reading it from cover to cover, but I am reading the introduction and first few of chapters and am finding them enlightening. As I commented here in 2007, Layton uses a different terminology for describing Coptic to the one used by Lambdin (who, incidentally, taught Layton Coptic). It is the same as the terminology used by Ariel Shisha-Halevy (Coptic Grammatical Chrestomathy – A Course for Academic and Private Study. Leuven: Peeters 1988.) which I had difficulty following, because although he says that the book can be used to teach yourself Coptic, the level of explanatory material provided in it is very limited and I was used to the Lambdin terms.

After outlining the history of twentieth-century Coptic linguistics, Layton says:

Finally, a word about traditional terminology.  Readers accustomed to the traditional terms of Coptic grammar in English, French or German will find many of these included, as cross-references, in the subject index at the end of this book.  But as might be expected in a new full-scale grammar some old terms had to be abandoned or replaced, and some new ones created, when the overall structure of the language more precisely came into view.  For these innovations I ask the readers’ indulgence, hoping they will look beyond the new names and consider, instead, the enduring structural entities that they merely serve to label. (xiii-xiv)

So, happy, happy, joy, joy, I need to get my head around some of this and be able to use both sets of terminology so that anything I say will make sense to those who are used to the older terminology (probably the majority of Coptic scholars at the moment) and those who are used to the new. I expect them to increase in numbers now that Layton’s Coptic in Twenty Lessons is available as a teaching tool and of course I don’t want to be thought out-of-date when I publish.   Note that Coptic in Twenty Lessons is also a perfect bound paperback.

 

The joys of buying books on line

I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a copy of Bentley Layton’s A Coptic Grammar with Cherstomathy and Glossary- Sahidic Dialect. I have been resisting this for a long time because I am not keen on spending in the vicinity of AUD150 plus postage on a paperback book, but it never seems to be available second hand and I needed it, so in late April I ordered a copy from the place that had the best price at the time, bücher-galerie-ac, a bookseller in Aachen, Germany, for 78 Euro. Cost me around AUD 178 posted. It took an incredibly long time to get here – they posted it on 11 May and it arrived on 17 July.  This surprised me because I have bought items from Germany before and had them arrive much faster – 3-4 weeks. It surprised the bookseller, too, and it arrived 10 days after the bookshop and I both filled in Deutsche Post lost mail forms.  I needed to consult LEO several times in order to do this – my German vocab doesn’t contain many words related to mail.

Today, just out of interest, I looked at Amazon to see what price they were charging. I was fascinated to find that they have the same (revised second edition) listed twice.  If you buy a copy of the item that doesn’t have an image on the website, it’s USD 105. If you buy a copy of the item that does have an image on the website (same description and it’s the book I bought), it costs USD 117.  Or you could buy it from another seller in the US listed on Amazon and pay USD 229 for it. Since USD 105 is the cheapest I’ve seen this book listed in a couple of years of sporadic looking, if you’ve been looking for one too, now might be the time to buy it.

 

Fast-tracked off the gym reading list

I have just officially removed Luise Schottroff’s The Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006) from my gym reading list for two reasons:

1. it requires a higher level of concentration than I am able to give it in the gym where music is playing and people are talking
2. I actually want to find out what she says faster than I can in my half-hour exercise bike riding sessions.

Schottroff details her problems with traditional interpretations of parables that are anti-Jewish and/or portray God as some sort of monster and develops a methodology for looking at parables that explicitly works to avoid both these problems.  The book begins with a section entitled “Learning to See” and ends with one called “Jesus the Parable-Teller: the parables in the literary context of the gospels”.  These both demonstrate her methodology.  Sandwiched between them is the section in which I am most interested: “In Search of a Non-Dualistic Parable Theory”. In it, she looks at four hermeneutical assumptions that have resulted in what she (and I) see as problematic interpretations of the parables and develops a methodology that endeavours to avoid them.  The assumptions are:

1. the ideology of Christian superiority over other religions, especially Judaism
2. dualisms in various areas of theology
3. assumptions that underlie Chrisaain notions of guilt and sin and human suffering through violence
4. orientation toward a “Christian” duty to maintain the social status quo and its structures of power (p 81)

I am part way through this section, which I am finding exciting, but requiring careful consideration.

Her appendix summarises her approach:

How Should I Read a Gospel Parable?

1. I understand a parable narrative as a stylized and fictional combination of experiences from daily life. I attempt to recognize the connection to social structures. The parable narratives frequently contain depictions of violence and injustice in society.
2. I look within the literary context for the explicit or implicit statement about God’s action that belongs to the parable narrative. It can appear in the form of a “saying” as application, or in many other forms.
3. God’s story is connected to the narrative by only a few bridges. The narrative often contains an antithesis to God’s story. “So” (houtös) or “like” (homoios) are to be read as a challenge to critical comparison, not as an invitation to equation (e.g., not: God is like a king, who … ). I ask: Where is the God of the Torah, and the Torah itself, to be seen – alongside, behind, and/or in the parable?
4. The parable narrative and the Story of God connected to it are part of a dialogue. This dialogue took place in oral form – in Jesus’ time and thereafter. Its written traditions in the Gospels presume oral responses that often are not written down. These are to be sought in Jewish traditions of address to God or praise of God. I attempt to flesh out this dialogue for myself.
5. I try to unlearn the triumphalistic ecclesiology of the Christian tradition of interpretation, which works by contrasting us against them, good against evil, Gentile church against Judaism. This kind of interpretation rests on the identification of groups and their association with or opposition to “us,” the church, which is always on the right side.
6. I attempt to think eschatologically, to pray, and to speak with and about God. That means: (1) leaving it up to God to judge good and evil and (2) understanding the present as the hour when God’s justice begins in the world, which makes it my responsibility to do good – that is, to keep the Torah. (p 225)

Obviously, I think the book is well worth reading.  More posts about it anon.  Well, at least one.

 

Review: How Did Christianity Begin?

Finally finished Michael Bird and James Crossley’s How Did Christianity Begin? A believer and non-believer examine the evidence. Last week I hardly got to the gym at all, which limited my reading time – it was, as I anticipated, a good read.

Mike, who is a lecturer in New Testament at the Highland Theological College in Dingwall, Scotland, but a fellow Aussie, is the believer and an evangelical Christian.  James is lecturer in New Testament at the University of Sheffield (UK) and the non-believer.  After the introduction where Mike provides  “the Christian view on the birth of Christianity” and James provides “the secular view on the birth of Christianity”, the chapters take the same format:  one of them writes the first section, the other then writes the second, in which he both comments on the first and provides his own perspective, then the writer of the first section comments on what the writer of the second has written.  They take turns to be the author of the first section.

Clear as mud?  OK, this is how it works:

• Chapter 1: The historical Jesus – James, then Mike, then James
• Chapter 2: The resurrection – Mike, then James, then Mike
• Chapter 3: The apostle Paul – James, then Mike, then James
• Chapter 4: The Gospels – Mike, then James, then Mike
• Chapter 5: Earliest Christianity – James, then Mike, then James.
• Chapter 6 contains a response to James by Scot McKnight, another believer of evangelical persuasion; and a response to Mike by Maurice Casey, who I assume is another non-believer although I don’t know enough about him to be sure of this.
• There is a brief section entitled “final reflections” which is written by both.

The first five chapters have suggested further reading at the end.

I bought the book because I have other writing by all four of the contributors and while I rarely agree totally with what they say, I am always impressed by their scholarship and they always give me enough information to enable me to come to my own conclusions. This book is no exception.  I found myself sometimes agreeing with Mike, sometimes with James and sometimes coming to a third conclusion on the issues they discussed.

I found it easy to read.  I liked the fact that while both Mike and James presented their positions strongly, neither of them was attempting to do a “hard sell” attempt at converting me.

As someone who has been a Christian minister for over twenty years, I am obviously inclined to take a faith perspective on the Bible. OTOH, as someone who has spent most of her ministry working in secular institutions, I am also very aware that an awful lot of what Christians believe comes across as seriously weird to the non-believer. However, most of the anti-Christian rhetoric that I meet is very ill-informed.  People typically tell me that they could never be a Christian because Christians believe X and cite one or more of the worst excesses of fundamentalist Christianity which I also find totally untenable. I found reading Crossley and Casey’s well-informed arguments and reasonable alternatives fascinating and enlightening, if ultimately unconvincing. Bird and McKnight’s offerings were also refreshing in that they present evangelical Christianity without the emotive, guilt-inducing overtones against which I react so strongly.

I am not sure how the average “person in the pew” or “person on the street” would cope with the level of technicality of some of the argument, but it’s certainly something I’d recommend to anyone asking thoughtful questions about how to understand the origins of Christianity, and to those Christian professionals to whom they bring their questions.  One very minor quibble – you may have noticed that I put some words from the introduction in quotation marks.  I am not sure that there is anything that can be described as the Christian view or the secular view of the birth of Christianity.  I would have said a Christian or secular view.

Full publication details: Bird, Michael F. and James G. Crossley and Scot McKnight and Maurice Casey, How did Christianity begin? : a believer and non-believer examine the evidence. London; Peabody, Mass.: SPCK ; Hendrickson Publishers, 2008.