One result of my dawning realization of the complexity of Coptic is that I can attribute little or no credibility to comments about Coptic documents, such as the recently published Gospel of Judas, by people who do not have a sound knowledge of Coptic and of Greek as it was used in the early centuries of the Christian era, as well as the relevant scholarly literature. Even some people who do have such knowledge can sometimes go astray, as clearly happened with the books on the Gospel of Judas published by the National Geographic Society.
Few if any serious Coptic scholars outside the National Geographic team (which did include some well-prepared scholars, in spite of the results) find credible the idea that this "gospel" presents Judas in a positive light. Some scholars of religion who do not specialize in Coptic have gotten on the "good Judas" bandwagon, but the mounting evidence strongly suggests that they are out of their depth.
This semester (Spring 2008) I have been part of a graduate class in which we have read the gospel of Judas in Coptic and prepared translations of it. We have also read and discussed some of the serious scholarly literature that started coming out very soon after NG made its transcription of the text available online in April 2006. It is plain that the NG team leapt to rather far-fetched conclusions on the basis of very shaky evidence. It is too soon to say that the scholarly world has yet come to a consensus about how to interpret this intriguing document; such a consensus will take years to emerge. But scholars with a sound knowledge of the relevant subjects seem to have little doubt that the NG interpretation is deeply flawed. It is fairly clear that Judas is portrayed in a negative light--some say the most negative light possible. The main purpose of this gospel may have been for Sethian Gnostics to mock the "orthodox" Church (the one that has evolved into the modern Catholic Church with its Protestant offshoots). These are just hypotheses at this point, not firmly established theories. The main point of this little blurb, though, is not to offer a definitive analysis of this "gospel," but to advise you not to put much stock in the Judas-praising popular literature by non-experts that is pouring off presses for the general public. The main purpose of these books seems to be to make money for the publishers and authors, not to offer serious analyses of the text or the issues it raises.
By the way, one of the facts about the Gospel of Judas that became clear as we studied it is that it was rather poorly translated from the Greek original (which, alas, seems not to have survived). There is some rather bad grammar and some words are used in strange ways. Yes, hack translation jobs have been around for a long time!
Showing posts with label Coptic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coptic. Show all posts
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Friday, March 7, 2008
Coptic: Starting from Zero
I will continue this blog by going on to the next language I am studying at CUA: Coptic. Back in early 2006, as I was contemplating my course of studies at the university I was about to enroll in, I decided to do something with Coptic that I had not done for a long time: start cold. My desire to overachieve in language studies has usually led me to study a lot on my own before beginning a course. I considered following this "standard procedure" with Coptic, but then I thought, hey, why not test myself and see if my language acquisition ability is still as sharp as it was 30 years ago? I did study the extra letters that Coptic added to the Greek alphabet, and somehow I picked up on the fact that "p" had something to do with masculine gender and "t" with feminine gender, but that was all. I had no idea how verbs, nouns or syntax worked. It was gratifying to see that, even though my learning was not perfectly smooth, it was quick and fairly solid.
Coptic reminds me of a statement I found in the old edition of Teach Yourself Malay, the edition pubished in the 1950's or 60's, one of the many Teach Yourself books that I bought as a kid. The author said that Malay was a language about which after ten weeks of study you think you know everything, but after ten years, you know you never will. To be sure, Coptic has a rather complicated set of tense systems, but the word order is extremely regular: Subject-Verb-Object. Sometimes, for stylistic reasons or in imitation of Greek word order, the subject is placed after the verb, but in this case it is preceded by a short word, nkyi, which simply serves to say, "This is the subject and it follows the verb." What could be easier?
Well, now that I'm in my fourth semester instead of my first, I see that a great many things could be easier. Coptic syntax has a lot of subtleties, especially Coptic composed by native speakers (particularly Shenoute) rather than just translated from Greek, as so much Coptic literature is. Coptic has a number of homophonous words and morphemes, and often there are uncertainties as to how a certain string of letters should be divided up (like Greek, whose alphabet it borrowed, Coptic was not written with nice, neat spaces between words). Spelling variations can represent either scribal idiosyncrasies or actually morphological differences. Borrowed Greek words may have meanings that appear way down the list in a standard lexicon, or that are not even in these lists, but only attached by some thin strand of meaning.
An Esthetic Appreciation of Coptic
Coptic is quite a fascinating, versatile language. It is not actually a Semitic language, but a member of the Egyptian branch of the broader Afro-Asiatic language group, of which Semitic and other families form part. Coptic is taught in CUA's Semitics department because of the powerful role of the Egyptian Church in the early centuries of Christianity, and its close association with the Syriac Church.
As I was studying Coptic, I was struck by the interesting mix of features in it. About half of its grammatical characteristics are similar to Semitic, and the other half is in part unique in my experience, and in part reminds me of numerous other languages that I have studied, such as Farsi, Russian and Mayan.
The effort required to gain a good knowledge of Coptic is worth it if you want to understand a major swath of early development of the Church. A lot of the theological arguments crucial to the definition of "orthodoxy" and "heresy" were carried out Coptic speakers. The Greek New Testament manuscripts that represent what is generally considered the oldest version of the text were copied in Alexandria, Egypt, by scribes who, in many cases, had Coptic as their first language. Major forms of monasticism had their origin among Coptic-speaking Egyptians, and a good deal of their writing still survives. Hurray for Coptic!
Coptic reminds me of a statement I found in the old edition of Teach Yourself Malay, the edition pubished in the 1950's or 60's, one of the many Teach Yourself books that I bought as a kid. The author said that Malay was a language about which after ten weeks of study you think you know everything, but after ten years, you know you never will. To be sure, Coptic has a rather complicated set of tense systems, but the word order is extremely regular: Subject-Verb-Object. Sometimes, for stylistic reasons or in imitation of Greek word order, the subject is placed after the verb, but in this case it is preceded by a short word, nkyi, which simply serves to say, "This is the subject and it follows the verb." What could be easier?
Well, now that I'm in my fourth semester instead of my first, I see that a great many things could be easier. Coptic syntax has a lot of subtleties, especially Coptic composed by native speakers (particularly Shenoute) rather than just translated from Greek, as so much Coptic literature is. Coptic has a number of homophonous words and morphemes, and often there are uncertainties as to how a certain string of letters should be divided up (like Greek, whose alphabet it borrowed, Coptic was not written with nice, neat spaces between words). Spelling variations can represent either scribal idiosyncrasies or actually morphological differences. Borrowed Greek words may have meanings that appear way down the list in a standard lexicon, or that are not even in these lists, but only attached by some thin strand of meaning.
An Esthetic Appreciation of Coptic
Coptic is quite a fascinating, versatile language. It is not actually a Semitic language, but a member of the Egyptian branch of the broader Afro-Asiatic language group, of which Semitic and other families form part. Coptic is taught in CUA's Semitics department because of the powerful role of the Egyptian Church in the early centuries of Christianity, and its close association with the Syriac Church.
As I was studying Coptic, I was struck by the interesting mix of features in it. About half of its grammatical characteristics are similar to Semitic, and the other half is in part unique in my experience, and in part reminds me of numerous other languages that I have studied, such as Farsi, Russian and Mayan.
The effort required to gain a good knowledge of Coptic is worth it if you want to understand a major swath of early development of the Church. A lot of the theological arguments crucial to the definition of "orthodoxy" and "heresy" were carried out Coptic speakers. The Greek New Testament manuscripts that represent what is generally considered the oldest version of the text were copied in Alexandria, Egypt, by scribes who, in many cases, had Coptic as their first language. Major forms of monasticism had their origin among Coptic-speaking Egyptians, and a good deal of their writing still survives. Hurray for Coptic!
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