spin

The arguing style is a well tried method: lead with your jaw and while your opponent is so busy pummeling your face, you sneakily tie his shoe laces together in order to make him fall.


spin

avi

Thank you Toto, for the links, I will study them, all. Much appreciated.

LOAN WORDS:
If you have ever visited Japan, you will know that MANY words in common parlance there, today, have their origin in the fact that USA invaded Japan, in 1945, occupied it, and imposed a government upon it.

That does not mean that words like "rajio" (radio), or "hoteru" (hotel) are JAPANESE. They are simply loan words. Encountering those words, does not refute the notion of enormous linguistic distance between Japanese and English, hence my assertion of the enormous distance between Coptic (an African language) and Greek (an IndoEuropean language).

Yes, the Chinese and Japanese borrowed Roman letters, to represent their pronunciation, just as the Coptic speakers adopted Greek symbols, themselves derived from Phoenician, which had also been influenced, I believe, by Egyptian Hieroglyphs. No, that fact does not shorten the linguistic distance between them and their Latin counterpart. Latin and Chinese, while both employing Roman letters, are linguistically thousands of kilometers apart, just as are Coptic and Greek.

Well, perhaps that is a wise concept.

Here is a different notion: The original document, for which today, there remain only fragments, was translated into Coptic, not from an "original" written in Syriac, but rather, from one written in Greek. The scribe or his supervisor, may well have thought it better to retain (not adopt) the original Greek word. According to this notion, someone else, not Mani, translated Mani's Syriac, with its unique script, into Greek, and then, that document, served as source for the Coptic translations, scraps of which, are now being painstakingly reassembled by Professor Gardner's team.

avi

mountainman

Good thinking Stephan, what I think avi means when he says that Coptic is far removed from Greek is that when the Nag Hammadi Codices were discovered, Coptic experts, not Greek experts, were consulted, for the obvious reason that the Nag Hammadi codices were produced in Coptic and not in Greek or in Latin or in Nepalese.


Have a look at Gardiner's article Leaves from a Manichaean Codex (Pl.s VIII-X) - I. Gardner and Klaas A. Worp.


Various dates are provided in the article for this fragmentary codex, the summary being early to mid fourth century.

avi

"common knowledge"?

But, in my ignorance, I plead that this is precisely the topic of this thread, i.e. whether or not the claim ("common knowledge") that Mani was a Christian, represents a post-Nicean' addition to his texts.

I do not accept, "common knowledge", as a valid explanation for the hypothesis that Mani claimed to be either "THE Paraclete", or an "Apostle" of JC.

I challenge forum participants to explain the aforementioned discrepancy, (post #418), which thus far has conveniently escaped attention from anyone. Here it is again:


Do those same two words (which someone felt obliged to preserve in Greek, rather than converting to Coptic, from the Syriac original,) convey special meaning to followers of Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, and Buddhism, all three of which certainly influenced Mani's thought? Is that meaning so unique for those three religious philosophies, that these two words must be translated from Syriac into Greek, in order to accurately convey their significance?

I am eager to learn, Toto, how you explain that a Coptic ("pagan") language translation of "love" and "wisdom" would insult Mani's original Syriac, but writing the Greek counterpart, instead, (agape, sofia), accurately conveys Mani's philosophy, expressed in these epistles. This very notion (of Greek linguistic superiority) repudiates Buddhist thought, which seeks to emphasize harmony and equality among different cultures, unlike the jews, christians and muslims, all of whom imagine that they alone represent the truth, and everyone else is "pagan" or "heathen", or "subhuman" (and therefore must be slaughtered at the first opportunity.)

It is inconceivable to me that Mani would write a letter (epistle) devoted to topics such as "love" and "wisdom", and concurrently condemn the Coptic language and culture as "pagan" or "heathen". Such thinking is part and parcel of judaism, and therefore, I find that this argument (for retaining Greek, to express lofty ideas (love, wisdom), rather than descending into a banal, "pagan" language, like Coptic,) represents an unreasonable antithesis of Mani's thought. It is far simpler, in my opinion, to comprehend that Greek was employed, rather than coptic, because of the former's intimate association with christianity. Discovery, then, of these two Greek words in coptic fragments representing Mani's epistles, (unless the same two Greek words exist as well in a Syriac document, identified as representing Mani's unique script,) should be considered evidence, not "personal incredulity".

avi

mountainman

I agree. It was the preferred language of the Roman Empire at the time, and had undergone what has been termed "The Second Sophistic". Constantine took this to a new level ..... The fifty Constantine Bibles in Greek represented a new wave of centralised state religious technology.

IMO it seems entirely natural to suspect that all the cults and religions in the Roman empire at that time, including the Manichaeans, tried their best to emulate and adapt to certain "Christian technological standards". This included the preservation of their works in Greek. How (if at all) did Mani relate to Jesus in his own language before Nicaea, and in Greek after Nicaea? This is the real question.

See the above post for Gardiner's article on Manichaean religious fragments from Kellis written in Greek. To work towards a completion of the picture, Sheshbazzar may be interested to learn that on page 150 of that article, a mention is made of the (at least one) use of a [Greek] "nomina sacra" in these Manichaean religious writings.

I think it is quite possible that these Greek nomina sacra were quickly regarded by everyone who was not a christian as "lawful" symbols related to the official lawful religion, specifically because of their use in the Greek New Testament published by Constantine. According to this article, it appears that even the Manichaeans were using them sometime after Nicaea.

avi

Thank you Pete, for this comment. No, I am sorry to acknowledge that I know so very little, that I did not understand that the Nag Hammadi codices were written exclusively in Coptic. I had thought that they were mainly Greek documents, with some Coptic and some Syriac texts as well...

No, what I meant to express was the importance of distinguishing between "loan words", and linguistic evolutionary distance. Coptic is VERY far removed from Greek, just as Latin and Mandarin are very far apart, despite the fact that Mandarin employs Roman letters in one of its written forms (pinyin). Syriac, Mani's original language, is much closer, linguistically, to Coptic, than either of them are to Greek. Some forum participants seem not to recognize that possession of many, many loan words, does not make the language closer, linguistically.

A very good illustration of this can be seen with both Korean and Vietnamese, and Japanese, all three of which borrow many words from kejiahua, or, what we call Hakka, in English. Hakka was the dominant Chinese language two thousand years ago, when large scale emigrations took place to VietNam, Korea, and Japan.

Very many Chinese loan words ended up in all three languages. Nevertheless, the four languages are very remote from one another, by linguistic evolution. So, if agape and sofia are currently considered "Coptic" words, then, so too are "ichi", "ni", "san" (1,2,3) considered Japanese, even though, these are in fact, Chinese loan words, --> real Japanese words corresponding to 1,2,3 (hitotsu, futatsu, mitsu) do exist. The appearance of ichi, ni, san, in Japanese, in no way, suggests that Japanese is not VERY far away, in terms of linguistic evolution, from any of the many, many members of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, i.e. the origin of ichi, ni, san.

I doubt that agape and sofia were used because Coptic lacks the corresponding words, and I doubt that they were used because Coptic represents a "pagan" or "heathen" culture. I think they were retained from the original Greek document, simply because all of the people reading the Coptic version of Mani's Syriac original, were Christians, who knew rather well, both Greek, and the new testament.

avi

Toto

I think that a better analogy is the invasion of Britain by the Norman French.

This is just bizarre. There are Greek loan words in all Coptic documents, because there are Greek loan words in Coptic, not because all Coptic documents have been half translated from Greek.

Toto

Common knowledge that Coptic contains Greek loan words.

Gardner's text may not have spellled everything out here, but if you look at footnote 12 (as I asked you to) it appears that these loan words were written in Coptic script.

Your error: the words are Coptic.

The words are Coptic.

You are confused. The words are in Coptic; Coptic uses Greek loan words. A Coptic word with Egyptian demotic roots and a similar name might have had pagan implications and therefore be avoided by later Coptic speakers. Or it just might have been fashionable to use Greek loan words for philosophic concepts. Americans use lots of Greek derived words (philosophy, e.g.)

I have to ask you to avoid broad insulting stereotypes like this.

The language choice has nothing to do with Mani and everything to do with the Coptic translator. You cannot assume that the reason for Greek loan words is that Coptic was rejected as banal.

Greek was also intimately associated with the Roman Empire.

The words are not Greek. They are Coptic based on Greek loan words, sometimes referred to as Coptic-Greek. If I use the word "philosophy" I am not speaking Greek, or rejecting Anglo-Saxon paganism. It is just a useful word in my syncretic culture.

You have spun this entire fantasy around a simple mistake. Just like this thread.

Toto

This is not what avi was talking about.

Toto

Mani was dead by the time of Nicaea, but his followers and missionaries would have used local languages even before Nicaea.

Coptic also used nomina sacra.

Or it could be a simple scribal convention. Why invent complications?