Roger Pearse

Can I ask you not to harass Peter Kirby with these sort of things? He's doing something useful to us all, you know, and you may be putting him off!

Now I can only speak for myself but there are several reasons why a translation made online is a good idea.

1. It allows us to get an idea of how reliable the 'official' translation is. Every translation is a compromise between a 'crib' and a paraphrase. Where does the translation stand on that continuum?

2. The original text is fragmentary. It may well be that the translators had to take liberties simply in order to produce anything at all. If so, do we agree with the bits they imagined?

3. That translation is in copyright. A new one would be freely available.

4. In the age of political correctness, it can no longer be taken for granted that translations of controversial material will not suffer a slant. Since National Geographic are selling this text by sensationalising it as if it were a first century text (which is a calculated commercial lie on their part, to be blunt), we are reasonably entitled to ask whether they have 'directed' the translators in any way. (I myself don't believe they would do so much, if only for tactical reasons; but then I would prefer to know).

I hope this helps. Please now, get your Coptic dictionary out!

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Chris Weimer

We've tried this before with Greek, remember? I don't think IIDB is the appropriate place for learning Coptic. I'd toss out my forum, since Ebla has, erm, deteriorated here recently, since there's already a forum for Egyptian languages. That and you, Julian, Roger, and others are already members there.

Peter Kirby

I thought we had tried Ebla instead of trying IIDB.

regards,
Peter Kirby

Roger Pearse

I have now heard more details about the various finds from James M. Robinson, with a long and detailed story which he originally presented to the SBL and has augmented since, plus various attachments. Robinson has clearly been chasing this story in a lot of detail for years, and all credit to him.

The highlight: it seems that there were originally four codices, two in Greek, two in Coptic, being offered by the Cairo jewelery dealer Hannah in 1983.

I will ask his permission to place his 13 page narrative online: other attachments I have not yet looked at.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Chris Weimer

It wasn't going to work in IIDB, so we opted for Ebla instead.

Phlox Pyros

*sigh* Anything for money... It is incredibly sad that these appear to have been intentionally broken up into pieces to sell.

I'll be interested to read the account.

Phlox Pyros

I think a thread here at IIDB will work. Especially since everyone who may be interested is already here anyway. Perhaps I'll post a thread to get things started when I get my book in a few days. We can still continue attempting a translation here. If I can find a chunk of time big enough, I'll try a little bit more of the GoJu.

Here's another something handy...
Coptic Unicode Converter

Magdlyn

Gospel is an English word stemming from god's spell. Spell meaning roughly, speech. The German word for "play" is "spiel."

(I think it's kind of funny with all the fundies hating witchcraft so much, they have the word "spell" in the word gospel.)

The original Greek is "euangelion." Eu meaning good and angelion meaning message. Hence the word evangelist.

And angel merely means messenger.

Roger Pearse

Jolly nice! I like these javascript converters. Anyone got one for ancient Greek?

Toto

There was a request to set up a separate subforum for the Greek study, but the admins balked at this for unrelated reasons.

If it doesn't involve a formal subforum, there's no problem.