Roger Pearse

People,

Dutch art-dealer-turned-gamekeeper Michel van Rijn has posted on his website images of a type-written description of all four papyrus codices which were found with the ps.gospel of Judas.

The others are a Greek Exodus, which now seems to have been chopped up and scattered; a Sahidic letters of Paul (now revealed to also contain parts of Galatians), the whereabouts of which are almost completely unknown; and a Greek mathematical treatise cut up into at least chunks (and probably more: we now know of at least 5 pages unaccounted for).

Michel's pages (which are banned from google) are here:

http://www.michelvanrijn.nl/artnews/artnws.htm

I have transcribed the documents as HTML, and they are here:

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/ma...udas/index.htm

Thanks to Michel and Steven Goranson for emailing me about these. Given that the description is in typescript, it must predate the general availability of word-processors; it doesn't mention damp so must predate the long stay in a US bank vault, absorbing water.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

EthnAlln

Thank you enormously!! I'm very interested in the history of mathematics and wondering what the mathematical treatise could be. From the description:

I started to wonder which commentator it might be. The innovative period of Greek mathematics, especially geometry, ended centuries earlier and the most creative of the commentators, Pappus, was early fourth century. We are still missing the first chapter of his Collection, but it was undoubtedly on arithmetic rather than geometry, so this can't be it. It might be Theon of Alexandria (fourth century), which would be an interesting addition to what we already have of his. It would be even more exciting if it were the work of his daughter Hypatia (who died in 415), since nothing definitely attributable to her has survived. Some books of the work of Diophantus discovered about 30 years ago might possibly have been written by her, but that would be a long shot. After them I can think of only the fifth-century commentator Proclus, whose neo-Platonic commentary on the first book of Euclid was described by Otto Neugebauer as "gibberish," the sixth-century philosopher Simplicius, and a seventh/eighth-century commentator on Archimedes named Eutocius. (Eutocius did live in Palestine, however, so if the work comes from there, it might well have some connection to him.)

Roger Pearse

Me too. But the scholars who are supposed to be working on publishing the dozen pages that we have tell me "too busy", "not very interesting", "not a priority", which is very frustrating.

All the best,

Roger Pearse