jeffevnz

...pertaining to the Bible or Xtianity?

I'm curious to hear some very rough guesstimates as to how many potentially important, forgotten documents are out there waiting to be discovered. I'm thinking of stuff like an early version of Mark or Genesis, 1st century Roman letters concerning the Christians, Egyptian comments on the Hebrews, etc. Something that would tell us something new.

Obviously this question doesn't lend itself to anything resembling a precise answer. I'm looking for something like Drake's equation (for guessing the number of technological civilizations in the universe). Do you think we've found most of such surviving documents? Have we just scratched the surface? Or is it something in between?

I'm also curious about factors that influence what survives and gets discovered, if anyone has expertise about that.

Amaleq13

You might want to check out this earlier thread for a wishlist of such texts:

Top 10 desired archaeological finds

Toto

I heard a brief talk by Paul Mirecki on another topic - but in response to a question, he speculated that there are troves of papyrus in the Egyptian desert waiting to be found, and that there are also scraps of papyri in univeristy and museum collections that are waiting to be analyzed. (He's famous for a controversy over intelligent design described here.

Most of these are probably gnostic or heretical works that the orthodox churches did not want to preserve.

Roger Pearse

I think that Mirecki is right, odd person as he is. But then no systematic exploration for mss is taking place.

James M. Robinson says:

"Coptic manuscript discoveries are taking place in Egypt on an almost regular basis" (The Secrets of Judas p.102) and n.15: "Listed in my foreword to the reprint of W. E. Crum, "A coptic dictionary". Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005. It is on seven unnumbered pages prior to Crum's preface. The foreword is being reprinted in Coptica, Journal of the Saint Mark Foundation and Saint Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society, Los Angeles, 2006, forthcoming."

Does anyone have access to this edition of Crum? I don't, and I'd like a copy of those pages.

I learned from the same book that Charles Hedrick has a numbering system for finds; the ps.Gospel of Judas was E34.

Most of them are probably fragments of bibles and prayer-books, or else bits of non-literary papyri. But there is a very respectable chance of material that is unknown -- the Toura papyri contained lost works by Origen and Didymus the blind. The Medinet Madu and Kellis texts were Manichaean, as was the Tebessa codex found in Algeria in 1906. I have some notes online about whatever I know about, and would like to expand them.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

My guess is that there are a couple of hundred lost literary texts of more than a dozen pages out there in the Egyptian desert, and more in Libya and Algeria where conditions are similar. (Since these countries do not have the developed illegal antiquities trade, any finds probably go straight on the cooking fire; but that doesn't mean they don't exist).

Most of these will belong to the 3rd-6th centuries, I would guess. After all, it is only once Christianity gets seriously established in the Egyptian main population that there will be a lot, and that would have to be in Coptic. The heyday of that language and organisation is from the late 3rd century onwards.

Others may wish to correct my impressions, of course.

What gets discovered? Pure accident. All the discoveries are by Egyptian peasants, who sell them to dealers in Cairo.

What influences what survives? (I presume you mean of papyrus books found recently). Whatever influences people to bury books in sand, as books in use don't get that treatment. That can be changes of ideology; the clampdown under Justinian in the 550's should be a factor.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

cognac

A few years ago I had a conversation with Kyle McCarter about Gnostic mss and he intimated that there are probably a lot of these sorts of fragments currently in the ME, some held by sheiks in private collections that we'll never ever know about.

jeffevnz

Thanks guys. Good responses, as always.