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.

 

Dynamic equivalence and inclusive language

In response to my previous post on dynamic equivalence, Mike Grondin asked some questions about my approach to inclusive language on the Gospel of Thomas email list. In particular he asked

1. why I think that “kingdom” excludes women since women can be both subjects and rulers?
2. why worry about the word “kingdom” when Coptic Thomas talks about the “kingdom of the Father”?

Seeing I am sure that not all readers of this blog also belong to the email list and I thought these were very good questions that made me think further about the issue, here are my responses in a somewhat more considered form than my response on-list:

Re Question 1:

I don’t think that the notion of  kingdom actually excludes women.  It simply makes them into second class citizens. Growing up as a woman in a British Commonwealth country, I have known ever since I was quite small that a kingdom is a place where men are privileged above women in the leadership stakes. We’ve had a queen for as long as I have been alive, but only because Elizabeth had no brothers. Although Princess Anne was her second child, as soon as her younger brothers were born, she was moved down the list of those in line to the throne to third and then fourth. While the wife of a king is a queen, the husband of a queen who is ruling in her own right is only a prince. A king or queen can have twenty daughters and their succession to the throne is in birth order, but as soon as a son is born, he gets shunted straight to the top of the line. This is why England has only had six queens in modern history – two Elizabeths, two Marys, an Ann and a Victoria. To give you some sense of how few this is, Elizabeth II’s father was George VI and his father was Edward VIII, then there were at least 8 Henrys, 4 Williams and quite a few James and Charles.

Because Commonwealth countries are constitutional monarchies, we all learn this stuff at school. It is quite clear to us that a kingdom is a place where a male is in charge unless there is no male available.  A woman in charge is always the last resort and the choice is based on chromosomes, not ability. Of course, it doesn’t work like this in all countries and in the US, I suspect that this kind of gendered hierarchy is not so deeply engrained and obvious.

In addition, if Crum is to be believed, Coptic speakers didn’t have the option of an alternative to MeNTERO to talk about the concept that we name “kingdom”, so the writer of Gos Thom didn’t deliberately choose a term which has masculine overtones – that was the only option available to express the desired concept.

Re Question 2

The term “Father” is the title, or  one of the titles,  of the current ruler. It doesn’t say anything about who’s allowed to be ruler, just who is currently in charge. The fact that the author of  Gos Thom has chosen to use  “Father” rather than “God” is at least as likely to be because the term “Father” emphasises the relational aspect of the divine as that the divine is conceptualised in masculine terms. I think the use of Father lines up with the notion that we are reading the secret sayings of Jesus that only those “in the know” get to hear.  Surely the readers of this kind of thing would be encouraged to think about the divine in the closer “Father” terms rather than the more distant “God” terms?

Comments, anyone?

 

gospels.net relaunch

Andrew Bernhard relaunched his gospels.net site this week.  It has a new look and in his words:

It is now “an online resource dedicated to the Gospel of Thomas and other early Christian gospels” … The design is straightforward. It includes a blog, which will focus on providing the latest news relevant to the study of early Christian gospels not included in the New Testament.

It also includes three web pages, which I have labeled “resource centers.”

Each resource center provides extensive lists of helpful online and offline resources. These lists aren’t intended to be exhaustive. Instead, I want to focus on highlighting top-quality websites, blogs, books, and articles that deal with the pertinent gospels and related subjects. I will ultimately be providing a summary of the nature of each offline resource, effectively creating a select annotated bibliography for each of the different gospels (but this will take some time since I’ve already got nearly 100 bibliographic entries posted).

The Thomas material is already linked in the blogroll from this blog, but I expect that some readers are also interested in the other non-canonical gospels. Andrew currently has material on the Gospels of Judas, Mary, Peter, Ebionites, Nazarean, Hebrews, Secret Mark, Infancy Gospels of Thomas and James, The Unknown Gospel: Egerton Papyrus 2 and Oxyrhynchus Parchment 840.

 

Dynamic equivalence in translation

I finally found time to have a look at Jim Getz’s Biblical Studies Carnival XLII, which contains links to some interesting posts and also has a Hitchhiker’s theme, so is doubly awesome. On it, I found links to AKMA’s series on exegesis.  The first post made me to think  about the whole issue of translation, how biblical scholars approach it, and why we approach it that way.

As I type, the SheepWorld glasses case that my daughter brought back for me from her student exchange to Germany is sitting on my desk. It says “ohne Mama is alles doof” and it has cartoon pictures of a range of things that are “doof” without Mama.  Now LEO, my favourite on-line German dictionary, tells me that doof can mean: daft; ditzy(Amer.); dopey; dumb; foolish; gormless (Brit.); or silly. The two big paper dictionaries we own say similar things and my daughter’s school German text-book translates it as “dumb”, so she is hesistant about adopting my contemporary Australian translation: “Without Mum, everything’s lame”, despite the facts that this is so much closer to the way she normally speaks than “everything’s dumb” and she only ever calls me Mama when she’s speaking German. I would argue that my translation gives your average Aussie a better feel for the intent of the words, even though the dictionary doesn’t give “lame” as an option for “doof” – clearly an example of dynamic equivalence. Dare I suggest that it also  displays a more sophisticated grasp of the relationship between the two languages?

Recently, I read a blog post where  someone was lamenting the fact that Bible translations are often wooden and unpleasant to read, unlike a good translation of some of the classic authors of antiquity. My response was “well, yes, but it doesn’t matter if they lose something in the translation – no-one is going to start a war over the way Pliny is interpreted.” All this has set me wondering about my own approach to translating Scripture and to translating Thomas and whether they’re different.

I know that when I translate both the Christian canon and Gospel of Thomas, I lean much further towards formal equivalence than I do when translating the words on glasses cases, mugs and T-shirts. The genres are, of course, entirely different and my translation goals are different, too. The text on glasses cases, mugs and T-shirts is generally only trying to convey one idea, although sometimes you simply can’t get it across in translation. Even my monolingual husband can hear that “Ich habe zehn Zehen, aber du kannst sie nicht sehen” loses something in the English  “I have ten toes but you can’t see them.” And I’m sure this is not nearly as amusing if you haven’t been part of the community of my daughter’s year at school where “I have toes” is the standard response when someone doesn’t want to answer a question.  As in: “Have you started that assignment yet?” “Um…I have toes?” Or a random comment to break an awkward silence. Or… but I guess you just had to be there.

It wasn’t until I started studying theology that I had any real sense that the writers of the Bible deliberately used various sorts of word play, including double and triple meanings, to convey ideas that we simply can’t get across in English translation without clumsy circumlocutions or footnotes.  It’s quite possible that they also used “in jokes” that we’re simply not aware of because we’re not part of the community out of which the text arose. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be funny bits in the Bible, which, after all is “inspired by God” and therefore “holy”, whatever you might understand by those terms.

So, what I am trying to do when I translate the texts I work with? When I work with the Canon for teaching and preaching purposes, I want a gender-inclusive text because I believe that we have sufficient evidence to believe that Jesus/God intended us to have a gender-inclusive community. I get cross when people insist on translating anthropos as “men”, thus taking an inclusive Greek word and making it into an exclusive English one. OTOH, I tend to lean towards “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did no master it” for John 1: 5 because, despite its masculine overtones,  “master” is the only English word I know that picks up the sense of the Greek katelaben – both understood and overcome are possible translations and I think this is intentional.  (I need to add that this is not an original thought – Prof Nigel Watson suggested it when he was teaching John’s gospel at the United Faculty of Theology – my theological alma mater). My other solution is to say “the darkness neither understood nor overcame it.” Here, I am using dynamic equivalence to get the idea behind the word across, whilst maintaining the inclusivity of the text. And, of course, I am making a judgement call in saying that I think that the author of John’s gospel was deliberately using a word that conveyed both those meanings.

When I started work on my PhD, I had as a working title “The parables of the Realm in the Gospel of Thomas and their parallels in the canonical Synoptic Gospels”. This arose out of my commitment to inclusive language translations and one of the academics who attended my preliminary presentation seminar suggested that this wasn’t a good enough reason to drop the word “kingdom”. I now talk about the “parables of the Reign in the Gospel of Thomas” because in Thomas it is quite clear that although the term MeNTERO (from eReRO – king) is used, the emphasis is clearly on the act of reigning rather than on the sphere in which the reigning is taking place. The fact that it also satisfies my desire for inclusivity is a definite bonus. It does mean, however, that I often have to say reign/kingdom because people tend not to make the link between reign and kingdom as readily as they do between realm and kingdom.

The problem, of course, with dynamic equivalence is that it sometimes makes it more difficult to get behind the translation to the original text, so if I am wrong in my assumptions about what the author was trying to convey, my reader has less chance of working out for her- or himself what the author (or God?) really intended. I am leading him or her up my personal theological garden path, which may get them into trouble. But then, unless my reader has a fairly good facility in the original language of the text, s/he is quite capable of making wrong assumptions anyway. I can’t remember any specific example off the top of my head, but I have a number of times listened to a preacher interpreting a piece of Scripture based on English synonyms, syntax or idiom and thought “but you can’t do that in Greek”.

I am far less worried about the possibility of making wrong assumptions about the mind of God in my research than in my preaching. I think this is partly because, as I said above, people are not going to start a war or make life-changing judgements about themselves or others on the basis of what I say in my thesis/dissertation. I don’t have that kind of authority in the sphere of academia. They are probably not going to start a war on the basis of my preaching, either, but could easily make wrong judgement calls. The fact that I am ordained means that people will often pay more attention to me than they do to lay people. It is also partly because just about everyone who is going to read the results of my research has a sufficiently high level of biblical and linguistic sophistication to understand the limitations of what I am saying whereas most of those who listen to my preaching don’t.

AKMA expresses dissatisfaction that his students tend to express their exegetical views as questions of the “could it be this?” type, rather than as assertions, and I understand both why he wants this and why the students don’t feel confident to do it. The more I work in the field, however, the more I am inclined to make assertions such as “on the balance of probability, it seems that X is true because Y” rather than “as you can see, X is clearly true.” And I guess that part of this is trying to steer the middle road between dynamic and formal equivalence in my translation.

 

Oh, oops!!

It has just been pointed out to me that my blogroll does not contain Michael Grondin’s website The Coptic Gospel of Thomas in Context. This site contains a number of very useful resources for the study of the Coptic text, including a Coptic-English interlinear version of the Gospel of Thomas and a transliteration scheme for Coptic.

Definitely worth a visit.

 

Is it just me…

…or is it somewhat odd that Review of Biblical Literature would publish a review in German of the English translation of a German commentary on the Gospel of Thomas (or any other book)?

The book in question is Uwe-Karsten Plisch’s The Gospel of Thomas: Original Text with Commentary translated by Gesine Schenke Robinson. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2008 and the review is written by Tobias Nicklas from Regensburg University.

The description from the RBL website (I assume this is the publisher’s blurb) says:

This edition presents the texts in the classical languages and provides an English translation and a readily readable commentary. It includes: an introduction to the Gospel of Thomas; the complete Coptic text; the text of the Greek fragments and a Greek retranslation of all logia with parallel texts from the canonic gospels; an English translation; an extensive commentary; illustrations of the Coptic manuscript; an appendix with an index and bibliography. The introduction and commentary do not assume knowledge of the classical languages, making The Gospel of Thomas accessible to a broad audience.

Nicklas’ review is positive and it contains several passages from the English text which give a feel for Plisch’s writing style.  His concluding paragraph says (in my English translation):

The result is clear: U-K Plisch has produced an extremely interesting, important volume, which not only offers the necessary tools for beginners who are engaged in [studying] the fascinating text of  Gos Thom, but will also be consulted with some profit by the expert.

This is clearly a book that I need to own and I’ve already placed an order.  Unfortunately, it’s not a particularly cheap book (given that it’s paperback) and although the Australian dollar is looking significantly better on the world exchange market than it was a couple of weeks ago, it’s going to cost me AUD91.53 by the time I have it shipped to me.   Readers in the US will be able to buy it much more cheaply through Amazon.com, where it qualifies for their free shipping deal.

And is this a potential gym reading project? Well,  making an informed analysis of the translation of the Coptic text won’t be possible – although the sight of my trying to juggle the commentary and my hardcover copy of Crum on the very small platform on the exercise bike might amuse other gym users. It may well be possible to get an overview of the line of argument though, seeing I won’t need to have a separate copy of the text, and  I should have finished Schottroff by the time this book arrives.

Update

I am impressed! I ordered this book on 30 March from Amazon, using the standard international shipping rate which predicts 18-32 days to delivery.  It arrived on 15 April ie less than the predicted minimum time.  Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to take more than a cursory glance at it.   It also turns out that the book is hardcover, which makes the price much more reasonable.

 

More on-line Coptic resources

In the last few days I have found two more useful on-line Coptic resources.

The first is courtesy of April DeConick who was told about it by one of her grad students, Mike Heyes. It is the text of Horner’s Sahidic New Testament – a “critical” edition, difficult to access except in a few libraries. Unfortunately, the first two volumes of the seven volume set are not available, so no synoptic gospels, which is disappointing for me. Also unfortunately, it was published in 1910, so does not take into consideration some more recently discovered manuscripts. If you go back to the host page, there are also a number of other Coptic resources, both for  Sahidic and Bohairic.

The second is Penn State University’s Coptic Computing page which contains links to Coptic Unicode fonts and keyboards as well as advice about how to code Coptic for the web, what browsers to use and information about using Unicode fonts.  Extremely useful if you want to type more than a few Coptic characters into your work.