Category Archive

Mike Grondin has added some new features to his Gospel of Thomas in Context website. You can now access the Gospel of Thomas saying by saying using a split screen format that gives you access to Mike’s interlinear Coptic/English version with notes in one part of the screen, together with the English translations by:

• Thomas O. Lambdin in Robinson, ed., 1988. The Nag Hammadi Library
• Beate Blatz, as in Schneemelcher, 1991. New Testament Aprocrypha
• Stephen Patterson & James Robinson, 1998, in The Fifth Gospel

in the other screen. Mike has added to his interlinear version the Jesus Seminar voting on the likely authenticity of the saying in question found in Robert Funk and Roy Hoover’s The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus: New Translation and Commentary. New York, Toronto: Macmillan, 1993 and April DeConick’s categorisation of the saying as Kernel or group one or group two accretion as found in her bookRecovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History of the Gospel and its Growth. London: T&T Clark, 2005.

Well worth a visit!!

PS - please excuse the funny formatting of the dates, above. If I put them in parentheses, it appears that browsers will read the html wrongly and produce emoticons!!

April DeConick on The Forbidden Gospels Blog provides a link to Thomas Paterson Brown’s hypertext Gospel of Thomas on the Ecumenical Coptic project. This is an interlinear Coptic-English version of the Gospel of Thomas based on Guillamont, Puech, Quispel and Till’s version of the Coptic text, together with Michael Grondin’s interlinear. Underneath each Coptic word there are also links to relevant sections in Plumley’s Coptic Grammar and Crumm’s Coptic Dictionary. It provides, therefore, some helpful tools for understanding the Coptic text and the thinking behind the translation. Not, of course, a substitute for learning Coptic if you’re wanting to make a scholarly analysis of the text, but helpful. :-)  The Metalogos site has some really cool tools for study of the three Nag Hammadi gospel.

At the moment, however, it displays somewhat strangely in Firefox, which I use as my default browser. There are strange artifacts in some of the text on some pages - rectangular boxes that serve no useful purpose. It displays just fine in Internet Explorer 7. I’ve emailed Paterson Brown about this.

As some will be aware, I was working at Rice University when April DeConick’s new book The Thirteenth Apostle was in the final stages of preparation. I proofread the main body of the text and one or two of the appendices that April was preparing. I was impressed enough to want my own copy of the final book, even though Gospel of Judas isn’t my particular area of specialty, because it contains a very good overview of Gnosticism and a number of other useful features as well as the commentary on the text of the Gospel.

I looked at the Coptic text of the relevant passages and read her arguments for her interpretation of the text through very carefully and they make sense to me. I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of my own copy - it’s due within the next few days - and plan to write a review once I’ve finished writing the conference paper that’s been hanging over my head for the last several weeks. In the meantime, you might like to look at the review on the Baptist Press website that also includes a report of an interview between April and Gregory Tomlin. My only criticism of it is that it lists the Gospel of Thomas as a Gnostic text and I don’t agree with this! You might also like to read what she has to say about her translation and about the problems that scholars are having in gaining access to the facsimiles of the text.

Update 9 Nov

My copy has arrived and I am very surprised.  I really thought I was going to get a paperback, but it’s hardcover.  I cannot believe that I paid $13.57 US for a hardcover new release book!  Of course, the postage and handling were almost as much as the book itself, but it’s still amazingly reasonably priced, especially given the very favourable exchange rate at the moment.  The last DeConick book I bought cost waaaaaaay more.

April DeConick (Forbidden Gospels blog) is teaching Coptic at Rice University this semester using Bentley Layton’s Coptic in 20 Lessons and is posting comments on how she and her students are finding it. She has so far dealt with chapters 1 - 3 and chapters 4 & 5 and I’m looking forward to her reflections on the rest of the book.

Update - 6 Nov

The latest update is now up on April’s site - it provides comments more comments on chapter 8 and then goes up to chapter 10. I notice that I haven’t linked to the comments on chapters 6-8, which can be found here.

Somehow or other, an early version of this was posted, rather than the version that contained a number of links and appropriate attributions to books mentioned and a more moderate comment on Layton’s approach to learning vocabulary. I am working on recreating the final version, but here is a better version in the meantime.

Bentley Layton’s new book Coptic in 20 Lessons arrived yesterday and I’ve enjoyed leafing through it. As I had guessed from the table of contents, he uses a very different method to Lambdin (Introduction to Sahidic Coptic) and obviously I haven’t worked right through it. In addition to the comments from April DeConick, some things that have struck me as I look through:

• it’s a much smaller book than Lambdin’s. This is largely because it doesn’t have the extensive glossary at the back. This means that students will either have to learn all the vocabulary as they go (which he recommends) or get a dictionary - Smith’s A Concise Coptic-English Lexicon would probably be adequate. During the course of the book, he introduces all words that appear 50 or more times in the Sahidic Coptic New Testament and (as April has already pointed out) he uses real examples rather than made-up sentences.
• It seems, however, also to have less explanatory text. Without trying to work through it, I’m not sure if he has simply found more concise ways of explaining things or whether it will be necessary to consult his (very expensive even in paperback) Coptic Grammar if you are working without a teacher.
• Layton intends the student to read, write and speak (or at least read out loud) Coptic. Unlike Lambdin’s book, the exercises in Layton include “translate into Coptic” as well as “translate into English” sections. He includes a handwritten version of the Coptic alphabet and one of the exercises in the first chapter is a list of transliterations which the student is expected to re-write in Coptic script. Pedagogically, this is a better approach.
• He groups the vocabulary in categories eg in lesson 3, he presents nouns of authority and power (continuing from ch2), nouns about daily life, and nouns about religion and ethics. In chapter 13, there are verbs about communication and mental activity, together with some conjunctions and “other expressions”. I think that Lambdin actually does this to a certain extent, he just doesn’t point it out.
• The vocabularies are set out in three columns - Coptic, English and Greek (where applicable). this is potentially quite useful, especially for those who know Greek.
• I wonder if he introduces too many new concepts at once in the first few chapters. I suspect some students might end up feeling rather bemused by the amount of new material at the beginning. I am used to taking a whole year to work through Lambdin, so perhaps I am expecting a slower pace than others might be used to.
• I was first, rather stunned by the fact that I had managed to post the wrong version of this point and secondly rather stunned by the reading that “You should purchase a copy of WE Crum, A Coptic Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939 and various reprints) and start learning its contents once you’ve finished this grammar or even before.” (emphasis mine). I’ve always worked on the principle that I will learn the words that I use frequently simply by using them and once I’ve bought the dictionary, I can look up the words I don’t know. I have a very broad English vocabulary and I’ve never tried to learn the Oxford or the Macquarie (the standard Australian English dictionary) by heart, not even the concise version. Of course, I have been in trouble with various teachers/professors over this attitude since I was in primary school, so I’m well aware that the whole world does not agree with me, but my basic premise is that I buy reference books so I can refer to them as necessary, not learn them by heart.

Note for Australians:  Because the Co-op Bookshop has a branch at Macquarie University, it stocks a range of Coptic resources including Lambdin.  If you happen to be a member, you might find that it is cheaper to order through them than to buy from an overseas bookshop.

April DeConick and Mark Goodacre both advocate that students of Christian origins should learn Coptic. I don’t pretend to be an expert in this area, but common sense suggests that not being able to access a signficant proportion of the source documents in their original languages puts you at a distinct disadvantage. So how to you go about learning Coptic?

For quite some time, most English speakers have used Thomas Lambdin’s Introduction to Sahidic Coptic. It’s thorough, but has several drawbacks. One is that the glossary/vocabulary at the back of the book uses English rather than Coptic conventions for its ordering. This makes it easier for English speakers to find words in it, but makes it difficult to then find your way around Crum’s A Coptic Dictionary or Smith’s A Concise Coptic-English Lexicon and (I am fairly sure) the indices in the Coptic edition of the Nag Hammadi library. Another is that some of the sentences in the exercises are designed to illustrate Coptic constructions rather than to make a great deal of sense in English, so students will sometimes find themselves wondering if they have really translated them correctly. A third is that it assumes a grasp of English grammatical terms that most contemporary students simply don’t have. It is also quite expensive because it’s published in hard cover.

Bentley Layton’s new book Coptic in 20 Lessons - Introduction to Sahidic Coptic With Exercises & Vocabularies (27 Euro) may change the teaching of Coptic. It can also be bought at Amazon for $34, so it’s significantly cheaper than Lambdin which Amazon offers for $65. This is because Layton is a paperback, so it will be interesting to see how it holds up to frequent use.

I can’t comment on the other issues that I see as problems with Lambdin, because I don’t expect my copy to arrive for several weeks yet. Neither Mark nor April have yet received of their copies of it, either, although there’s an enthusiastic recommendation for it in the comments on Mark’s site. Looking at the table of contents, however, it appears that Layton follows the approach he uses in his in his Coptic Grammar which is significantly different to Lambdin’s.

Lambdin uses an approach which is familiar to those who have learned other languages - he addresses verbal conjugations one at a time. You learn the First Perfect, then its relative forms, then the Temporal, then the Second Perfect, imperatives, the First Present and so on. Layton’s table of contents doesn’t mention any of these conjugations - instead it talks about durative sentences, non-durative conjunctions, cleft sentences etc. This is, I think, a very different way of conceptualising Coptic to Lambin’s approach. I am very interested to see whether I will find it easier, harder or just different.

As far as teaching yourself Coptic is concerned, someone commented on April’s blog that they had worked through Lambdin in about a month and found that they could read The Apocryphon of John reasonably easily, if slowly, with the aid of a dictionary. This is, IMHO, an impressive achievement. Lambdin has 30 chapters and while you can whizz through the early ones fairly quickly, the later ones require a considerable amount more time. Lambdin in a month would require quite a number of hours each day. I also think that it would be quite challenging to teach yourself Coptic if you had no prior experience of learning a language other than English and even if you know another language that uses the Latin alphabet, I think learning a language that requires a new alphabet without some sort of face-to-face help would be quite challenging. If Coptic is your third, fourth, fifth language, especially if you already have some form of Greek, it would be much easier.

[Update] My preferred method, though, would be to learn from someone who already knows the language, but in Australia that’s not all that easy. Obviously, it’s taught here at the University of New England, but not every year and usually as a special unit rather than a regular offering. Macquarie University in Sydney offers it formally, as does Yarra Theological Union in Melbourne (in semester 2 they are even looking at some of the Gospel of Judas). Another option that I just found out about is the possibility to obtain an Master of Arts in Coptic Studies entirely on-line through Macquarie. I have no idea what it’s like, but it sounds like a good compromise between face to face teaching and teach yourself.

[Update - 9 August] April DeConick has posted on her blog about the new Bentley Layton book. It sounds really promising and I’m looking forward to the end of the month when my copy is due to arrive.

It occurs to me that there are two other useful on-line Coptic resources that I didn’t mention in my last posting. Both are now linked from my blogroll - Crum’s A Coptic Dictionary and Bill Arnal’s key to the exerices in Lambdin’s Introduction to Sahidic Coptic.

I find the electronic form of Crum useful because it means you can access it when you are away from your study/office but have internet access. It has a number of limitations, however, which make it a less than ideal source for the serious Coptic scholar. The first is that in the scanning, the bottom line or two of some pages were not scanned properly. The second is that it is very cumbersome to navigate around. The clickable index has all the pages except the ones on which a letter of the alphabet first appears numbered as they are in the paper version. Thus, you have a page labelled RHO followed by pages 288-312. You therefore have to guess on which page the word you want might appear, click on it and wait for it to load, then click again to magnify the image to a size that you can actually read. If you then discover that you guessed wrong, you have to close the page and start again. The pages are also scanned as .gif images, so although it’s an electronic version, you can’t do a keyword search. I would suggest that anyone who is doing any serious work in Coptic would still need to buy a paper copy, which you can do at a reasonable price (for such a big, specialist book) at Wipf and Stock. I haven’t seen this myself, but apparently the pages are just as they are in the hardcover version - it hasn’t been re-typeset. I got my hardcover copy secondhand from a delightful Dutch bookseller at a reasonable price through AbeBooks, but secondhand copies of the hardcover are not all that easy to find and last time I looked, the ones offered at Amazon were astronomically priced.

Bill Arnal, of University of Regina in Canada, has generously put up on the web a copy of his key to the exercises in Lambdin. This saved me some time and hair-tearing at the end of last semester when I got to some of the sentences in the later exercises whilst tutoring one of our undergrads. It certainly did, as Bill suggests in his introduction, reduce my workload as I tried for the first time to help someone else work through those later chapters. It would also be useful for anyone wishing to teach themselves Coptic as long as they could resist the temptation to look at the key before really wrestling with the sentences themselves.

The hypertext version of Plumley’s Coptic Grammar has been updated and a downloadable version in MS Word added. Both can be found from the link above. Thanks to Mark Goodacre at New Testament Gateway for alerting me to this.

Like Mark, I prefer to use Lambin as my basic Coptic text, but I find that Plumley is sometimes useful for providing another way of looking at the meaning of particular grammatical structures and the electronic version has the advantage of being accessibly when the paper version is in my other office. I also find Ariel Shisha-Halevy’s Coptic Grammatical Chrestomathy useful from time to time because it has a number of tables in the appendices that summarise Coptic grammatical forms. I am not as optimistic as the author about the possibility of teaching oneself Coptic using this book, though, and it is often very expensive. At the time of posting the link above, Eisenbraun’s was offering it for USD 52.25, but it is often well over USD 100.

Eisenbraun’s also offer Richard Smith’s A Concise Coptic-English Lexicon at a very reasonable price (USD 17.96). I find this little book very useful for quick reference, both because it does not use the ornate font that is used in Crum’s and also because he doesn’t give examples, so it is easier to find vocabulary items than it is in Crum. For distinguishing fine shades of meaning, there is no substitute for Crum, of course.

Another useful set of Coptic resources can be found on Lance Eccles’ Macquarie University-based site. He includes outlines of both Sahidic and Bohairic morphology and a short classified Sahidic vocabularly with examples. The latter is very useful when you find yourself asking “Now, what is the Coptic for ‘forearm’, again?” and don’t feel like wading through the English index in the back of Crum.

Update 3 May:

I have just discovered that the links to Eisenbraun’s catalogue don’t work properly, so I’ve simply linked to their website and you will have to put some keywords into the search box to find the books.