avi

Possibly an even worse situation, from the perspective of avoiding conflict associated with the "crusades", as this map shows.

In a period of civil strife, with house to house searches, wholesale book burnings, slaughter of "heretics", with both "christians" and muslims retaliating, what are the odds that Clement's manuscript was untouched by local events?

Would the Arethas Codex have been regarded as a very important, historical, (possibly even sacred) document? Probably.

So, would it have drawn the interest, and the ire, of the crusaders? quite likely. When they were finished, what would the muslims have done, upon re-entering the city....?

In Egypt, last week, riots erupted, and irreplacable antiquities were destroyed by unruly, probably uneducated, mobs, perhaps, or perhaps not, at the urging of the muslims, who have a notorious record of disrespecting ancient treasures. If it could happen here, under our very eyes, to cultural artifacts beloved by THE ENTIRE EGYPTIAN nation, what is the prognosis for "heretical" documents, several hundred years old, spouting jewish nonsense, handled by alien invaders, with little or no appreciation for ancient judaic practices, and great hostility to all things NOT EXPLICITLY CHRISTIAN?

Do you imagine the crusaders to be better educated than the unruly masses who poured into the Cairo museum last week? Do you suppose the crusaders would have felt a genuine christian sense of respect and admiration for Clement's writing? I don't. Most of them could not read Greek. Most of them would not have been able to differentiate a messiah from a mango.

The concept of messiah is ONLY important in judaism, not christianity. Christians pour money into the church's coffers, NOT because they think JC is the messiah, coming back to slaughter the infidels, and restore the jews to their rightful place as rulers of the entire planet, but rather because they hope to attain a place in heaven, and avoid a place in hell. Such an attitude, in their minds, if not jewish doctrine, has nothing to do with "messiah".

My supposition is that the Crusaders destroyed every document in Caesarea, before departing, and that those christians who returned to Caesarea, recopied Clement's docs from those borrowed from other sites, places untouched by the crusaders, for example, Aleppo. Assuming that the leaders would have been able to anticipate the riots and destruction associated with eleventh century warfare, one can easily imagine that this Codex would have been diverted to some other, Eastern city, out of harm's way, even before the Crusaders arrived. What would the folks in that city have done, upon encountering this strange document? Would they have corrected some "errors" in doctrine? Would they have "polished" the hastily written, incorrect document, enhancing its value by offering the reader interpretations more in line with contemporary thinking?

However, even before the Crusades, there would have been bloody skirmishes with the muslims over control of Caesarea, an important city on the route to Constantinople, which finally fell to the muslims only in the fifteenth century.

Maybe this particular document suffered no ill treatment during the 1000 years following its composition, some 800 years after Clement wrote it. But, the description of the condition of the codex, is not reassuring for that premise. It appears to be a copy of a copy of a copy of .....with all of the attendant scribal errors, even if no important official, in charge of ecclesiastical doctrine, ordered this or that offending phrase deleted, changed, or interpolated.....

avi