The life of Jesujavus Magnus

It took me over a year - 31 hours if you trust MS Word - but here is Fiey's biography of Isho'yahb III sort-of teased right here.

These sixty pages took longer than I wished. Like, a lot longer.

Much of that was due to the OCR on the original PDF which was ... terrible, leaving landmines like "fan" for l'an (just caught today!), "lame" for l'âme, and other such nonsense. The footnotes being smaller-font and rife with various cross-references proved even worse; and through it all was Fiey's own florid prose (which he'd contracted from his ever-prolix subject). Also in the content were references to stuff that I had to go back through mine own blog February-March last "fan", to figure out the context. And sometimes I personally dispute Fiey so I had to ensure I was doing justice to his commentary. Like over Fiey's orthography which sometimes follows the Syriac and sometimes Frenchifies things.

Not helping in the least was this laptop, USB 3.1 so not fit for multiple screens; which laptop also just plain died twice, in July and then last winter. then came the bluescreens when the browser was up, although here I'm blaming more the GPU.

But anyway: it's at a point now where my Casanova was, at least not likely to make readers collapse in fits of hilarity. I'll accept that some smiles and even mild sneers might be coming my way tho'; I'll brace myself for those. My grade in French was B-class in GCSE and will likely stay there.

As for that French, I chose "Persia" for "Perse" and "Persis" for "Perside". "Cyriaqos" became "Cyriaque" for Fiey so "Cyriac" for me; "Nisibe" is "Nisibis". For Syriac I refuse "-yaw"; this should be "-yahb". Otherwise I kept the longvowels and the diacritics, and given the Nestorian topics I agreed to keep their vocalisation over the "canaanite" shifting we see in the west.

As for why I expended all this time, Isho'yahb had a front-row seat in the now-Kurdish highlands for the collapse of Sasanian authority and its replacement with, it seems, Church authority. This authority was divided, and incompetent to handle most saecular affairs, and even - over in Nisibin - kleptic. The Tayaye, as our author calls them, imposed an impartial law upon all the Christians and "heretics". This generally went well but under their cover, of course the Church couldn't control those heretics anymore.

So we need to sort out what happened where and when. You know, like in Africa. Fiey's project was to arrange Isho'yahb's letters into some order, as has been done for Maximus. I don't think Fiey was always right, as I noted, but we all must start somewhere, and "somewhere" - I think - starts with making Fiey more widely available, beyond Francophones and random reviewers selectively google-translating Duval's Latin.

The shurut of the 'Umarites

A lively trade has been ongoing about Islamic caste-law, experienced by nonMuslims as the dhimma. As so often, the "counter-jihad" lines up with the soi-disant "Islamic State": they agree the shurut 'Umar is authentic and a righteous-model for the true Muslim ruler over kitabi subjects. Non-Muslim apologists for Islam point instead to the Astinameh. Weirdos like me look to Ibn Jurayj, or the treaties.

A decade ago or so Milka Levy-Rubin published on the shurut claiming it for the 'Abbâsids, al-Mutawakkil specifically. This (doomed) caliph had promoted a comprehensive dhimmi law in Baghdad and Samarra. Some clauses parallel the shurut. Luke Yarbrough brings more evidence, perhaps all the evidence; his paper concludes otherwise.

Al-Mutawakkil's dynasty had long been at odds with the ahl al-Sunnat, reasoning that as caliphs the Banû 'Abbâs were God's shadow on Earth. In fairness to the caliphate, some legal-schools were truly toxic, starting with the violent Awza'iya. Where caliphs endorsed a Sunnite's usul, as with Shaybani, it was often to gather support against the likes of Awza'i. More-often the caliph in those days went so far as to judge the Quran itself as an emanation of Divine will, which God might choose to abrogate at any time.

Al-Mutawakkil had conceded - famously - this last point: God would never abrogate Quran. But that concession didn't mean the caliph had to like it.

Yarbrough argues that the shurut was available to this caliph - but that it was a Sunnite document. This explains, to Yarbrough, the wide divergences between the shurut and the caliph's law, at least as wide as their agreements. Al-Mutawakkil rather preferred Shi'a law (and as temporary-marriage proves, the Shi'ites had taken some 'Abbasi rules in turn). Levy-Rubin had already noticed agreements between the caliph's sumptuary provisions and the laws of the Sasanians (and Brahmins I'll add).

The shurut is, then, something of a manifesto by a political-party; one decidedly sidelined in the 'Iraq, although it may have enjoyed some popularity there and also in old Emesa out west. As such a document it owes more to the apocalyptic genre than to anything real. Even the more-arrogant later caliphs, like post-Buyid Muqtadi on the eve of the Crusade, preferred to cite al-Mutawakkil's law or, at most, specific 'Umari ahadith; they never cited this "pact" long-suspect. Only under the Mamluks did an Islamic state adopt it formally.

The nonpolitical schism of Africa

Tuesday we did springtime AD 639 / AG 950 in Egypt. Today we'll discuss the ensuing decade around the Med. Vivien Prigent has floated "L’usurpation du patrice «Flavius Grégoire»" to the latest Traveaux et Mémoires Mélanges. This argues that Flavius Gregorius did not, actually, secede from Constans II.

Having started this post Tuesday, as of today I have still not found Prigent's article in full. I must reread the primaries which I have on hand. Mainly I am running on the tumultuous career of Maximus. (Who used Diocletianic and argued for Creation dating-systems, for his own part; but let us pay no mind to that here.) I can report - independently perforce - that Prigent's abstract seems solid.

Gregorius' supposed title "exarch" never applied to Africa. Heraclius' title for his governor George was "eparch" with π, as Maximus shows us. George of Resh'Ayna will concur that "Gyorgy" remained eparch well into the 640s / 950s and is unaware of a non-Arab successor. Also this George nowhere reports a secession from the Imperium - at least, not in politics. The manuscript cuts out around Siffîn a decade after that, so should be aware of Western developments in this earlier decade. Back then Ravenna had the exarch-with-ξ, one Olympius. Watch out for him.

Before Siffîn over in Rome, our Syrian George reports Pope Martin's synod AD 649 October which, for Syrians, is the AG 961 new-year. Its minutes (from the Greek) were published by Richard Price 2014 decidedly from the Booth/Jankowiak school; this document is now available on archive.org in full for free. Price's introduction looks like it will need an overhaul. If a second-edition is coming, that might explain why we plebs're being allowed into it. Anyway - grab it quick.

Olympius will be marching from Ravenna against Sicily a few years afterward. This is what a secessionist looks like! - but as I have noted, we don't currently know if Resh'Ayna had caught note of Olympius, more concerned with Siffîn at home in Syria. Syrian George simply has more interest in theology than in politics. And I must report than the very Latin taught in Tor-Mardin was mala: George - the Semite - literally doesn't know "new" from "nine". (Why even bother with Latin? Barbarians all!)

Back to Africa: who even was "Gregory", after eparch George? There's little room for "Gregory"; Prigent finds in Carthage coinage only in the name of "Constantine IV" (as he was then-titled). For one, these ex/eparchs might not have been Heraclid. I'll add to the evidence, for whatever side: Heraclius the Elder had come out of Africa and we'll be seeing Constans/tine return to Syracuse. This family could never allow their western base to be taken by one they didn't trust. So: family. Right?

- you broke my heart, Fredo . . .

Relevant to the AD 640s / AG 950s Heraclius Jr. had faced a coup by his own son. Then came its aftershock, that Martina / Constantine III episode. It may be that Heraclius himself had already cleared the provinces of Heraclids; I don't think George was in this family. Certainly Constans II and (more so) his court preferred minions over Heraclids.

Moving on to the main sources, the 640s/950s decade commences that infamous gap in Nicephorus removing that help from us. Instead we got Theophanes... and Agapius, and Michael the Syrian plus the 1234 Chronicle. This synopsis is generally considered as Theophilus of Edessa. Theophanes' only real plus is that the Romans and Gregory had to cough up a tribute, like Cyrus in Egypt before them. Leaving aside Michael's bias, grist for another of these Mélanges, the Michael / 1234 subsynopsis is supposed from Dionysius of Tel-Mahre and is what details "patrician Gregory" (not "e*arch") and his rebellion "against Constans". Fun part: "against Constans" is a plus, against Agapius and Theophanes! In Agapius particularly the account provokes an Arab attack so reads like patrician Gregory rebelling against their tribute (pace Hoyland). Theophanes can perhaps be read either-way whose misreading might have backwashed into the later Syrian mémoires. Also the account is absent from the 819 chronicle so, if EW Brooks is right, was unavailable to Syria up to AD 730.

All this said: George of Resh'Ayna has proven himself a poor scholar of Latin and a nonwitness to Italian politics. He might not be our best source for African politics, either.

Inasmuch as among the Christians, Agapius offers the most-detailed record; the main source may indeed be Arabic, with Theophilus translating and truncating it. Agapius then restored the source thereto.

3 Reigns 2:35+, 46+

Going through Jan Joosten's body of work: let's read Miscellanies in 3 Reigns 2:35, 46. Like the "Odes", or - more so - like the additions to Esther and Daniel; these are insertions into Greek Bibles. All understood them as insertions in antiquity, so no Jew included them into Hebrew manuscripts. Nor did anyone include them in the Vulgate. Nor even Old Latin, nor Syriac. Good luck finding this stuff in Coptic.

Also alike to the Esther / Daniel additions, and unlike the sundry Christian-translator alteration to Isaiah, these extra paragraphs are Jewish. Specifically they look like Chronicler lore. Here is a two-paragraph summary of Solomon's reign, or "Reign" if you like, from a proSolomon perspective. This is not the perspective of the Reigns / Kings compiler in Hebrew, who viewed Solomon as a mixed blessing if even a blessing, given how his polytheism and polygamy set the united Israel for a fall.

Joosten teased Text-critical analysis of the Miscellanies and comparison with the parallel verses in 1 Kgs 3–9 but I don't know where we've gotten that from Joosten. I for one would like to read it; the Miscellanies read like official stelae such as Mesha's in Moab. In this paper, Joosten owns more interest in: why at 3 Reigns 2:35, 46. Also: which pericopae of 3 Reigns are summarised.

Joosten reads the Miscellenies as like 2 Reigns/Samuel 21-4. 2 Samuel should otherwise skip from ch. 20 to 2 Kings 1-2:11; ending there. Our 2 Samuel 21-4 is that Miscellany, since drifting further back. But a rival scroll ended at 2 Kings 2:46, with or (more-likely) without 2 Samuel 21-4. Joosten's Miscellany was the suffix here. Jewish copyists mostly went with the former. But one copyist figured on adding both, and his copy got translated to Greek.

The persecuting society

I've noticed lately a lot of "queer" news and reviews, this time in the classical circuit (for Islam, vide Bauer). To this end Jeremy Swist has reviewed Quentin Coldwater Broughall's book on Gore Vidal. Jason Colavito was hoping to publish what looks like the same book except about James Dean. In a holdover Jessica Wright has reviewed Sandra Boehringer's 2007 thesis about the female side of the phenomenon. Peter Sarris over in the Travaux-et-Mémoires "Mélanges" t. 26 expounds upon "sexual minorities" in Justinian's time, whose "persecuting society" didn't much hold with 'em.

Wright is certainly no bigot like Justinian, persecuting heresies - hey, just ask her. Wright complains Boehringer in 2007 wasn't queer enough. Silly Sandra, we don't accept lesbians anymore; it's all about transgenderism! Even mothers might not exist! Take the L, amirite? Maybe Boehringer's book could be salvaged by some sensitive revisions.

Off-topic, maybe, Thomas E. Strunk had some Very Important Lessons about the fall of republics which leaned hard into Trump and JANUARY SIX NEVER FORGET. I suppose Strunk and I fall on the same side of this one. Still: is Strunk even allowed to bring up @nt1f@ or BLM? Wright suggests not. Plenty delatores roam those ivied halls, and that's just in the "hard" sciences (cosmology admittedly, to the extent it counts).

Against the very idea that the academy might be hounding dissenters literally to death, @provisionalidea Rosen-Birch has contributed his own anthropology about "the Right" with the standard conclusion that they're not thinkers. This conclusion Rosen-Birch must know deep-down sounds like a self-satisfied assumption, so he delivers a textwall aiming to prove that hypothesis. Dutton and MacDonald might disagree but hey.

We may see some glimmers of can-we-at-least-talk-about-this through the enforced Narrative. Coyle Neal thought at least Strunk had gone a bit far. This may betray a Baptist perspective; but Bryn Mawr seems to allow it inasmuch as they published his review. Meanwhile Colavito hasn't got his own book through the publishers. This implies that supply for this stuff is outstripping demand, at least outsite academia. I admit the possibility Colavito simply hasn't made a lot of friends.

I further wonder how intellectually-curious any of these open-minded scholars are about contagion-theory.

The liquifaction of Mars' core

The Martian core, the Insight expedition tells us, is wholly liquid with no solid centre. Earth’s core is solid, and spins, inside a liquid “outer core” shell. Earth’s core delivers a magnetic field which prevents our ionosphere from escaping - thus allowing a stable atmosphere. Mars' liquid core is "compressible" but the planet hasn't outer mass sufficient to compress any of it into solid. Mars' atmosphere is now almost all ionosphere and too thin for life.

This came to us from Tuesday, widely shared yesterday across several university sites, thence to the science blogs.

Before then I'd always been told that Mars used to own a magnetic field, wayyy back in its Noachian. This study assumes that the magnetism was present up in the upper mantle and crust, not the core.

Maybe. Could Mars' core once had a solid ball of iron within it? We'd then have to ask how a solid core liquifies over time rather than growing more solid, as here. Do the sulfur, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen anneal themselves into the iron ball in high pressures, and lower its melting-point? I'd thought that iron-rust melts at a higher temperature than pure iron (with siderophiles like nickel) and that, further, it would be stiffer. Also I'd thought carbon oxides tend to pull/push oxygen with iron - to "reduce" or to rust it respectively - not to join with it. I admit that's under 1-bar pressures.

Zim is saying that we need more Insight installations, to triangulate all this.

UPDATE 10/18/23: the 4 May '22 quake was tectonic.

Since he asked

A week or so ago obese boomer "CatTurd#2" from Twitter flung a long one at the CoVID fighters, on how they - we - are oh-so-quiet lately. Concerning THE VAXX.

I was protecting the fat turd... by my silence. Let's break that silence.

So far we've found that THE VAXX does not cause miscarriages. Among other nonrepro claims are - pretty much everything DeSantis' surgeon-general has ever said. Mostly Ladapo was a doctor of results. Richard Hanania might cite Ladapo as an instance of the Peter-Principle.

I concede this much: the big log I mean, lug might not even care for DeathSantis as such anymore. Instead this one has endorsed Trump for President... again. I prefer a candidate who refuses the Peter-Principle entirely. I ask quite literally: next year, why not the best? Vivek is looking best, at present.

BANNED IN FLORIDA 4/29: I apologise. Sorry for all the triggering speech I just poasted above. I didn't mean it. >3

Cyrus from Alexandria

...as opposed to the false saint Cyril, of Alexandria.

Marek Jankowiak is telling the tragic tale of the patriach who met the Arab armies before autumn 638 so, the closing AG 930s. Due to Cyrus' axial rôle in Events, and the vagaries of Sources - it's difficult to pin down what exactly was going on then and there.

Jankowiak brings the papyrus "Lond. I 113.10". Here Cyrus is buying the Arabs off. Cyrus must do this as a remove since he is not actually in Alexandria at the time. Jankowiak sides with Nicephorus on this score.

It seems that there came a coup-attempt back in Constantinople, to replace the incestuous imperator-basileus Heraclius with his legitimate son Athalaric. But Heraclius (and niece-wife Martina) still had life in them. The coup failed and Cyrus, recalled. Jankowiak dates this papyrus spring-summer 639 which is AG 940; presumably in Constantinople.

Sometime afterward, Byzantium stopped payments to the Madina. Meanwhile the Nile flooded as usual July–October, which span the commanders of both language-families used to marshal their forces. At the end of 940 / autumn AD 639, Heraclius sent his men to the Delta, under John, presumably arriving at some drier spot to begin the AG 941 fight season.

The papyrus precedes this and Ethiopic text of John of Nikiu skips over this. From other sources, mostly Nicephorus now deemed vindicated, Jankowiak gathers that this move went about as well as the future Damietta Crusades. Theodore did supply a resistance at Sebennytos; but his commander John died July 640/941. Fayyum was lost, along with Heliopolis soon to be graced with the misr Fustat (these two are districts of Cairo today). A host of Miaphysite monks and nuns fled west to Africa. And this is about the same time as Heraclius' death and Martina's move against Constantine III. Alexandria, I hear, will be captured and recaptured and re-re-captured. All too late by then; and, honestly, outside Jankowiak's scope (cue his collaborator Booth: pdf).

Learning to land

The Rosetta mission was good... but could have been great. Lately Hakuto-R1 is having similarly mostly-good results. They share a problem: they didn't stick the landing well. The Apollo term was "brownout" and is akin to the dust kicked up at takeoff.

With that in mind, AIP today discusses some new equations from the Koreans and the Scots. (Stands to reason they'd get along.) This is a model to describe the interaction between a rocket plume and the surface of a planetary body in near-vacuum conditions.

A pity this came too late for this new lander but it does look helpful for the next one. Moon, or Mars.

LANDING PADS 5/15: UniverseToday is studying brownout-mitigation.

Failures at the launchpad

I did watch the mostly-Superheavy-Booster test (with a Starship attached). I hadn't awakened on time for 17 April but, as with Elon, FO'TWENNY was the important day on the calendar. At the time I agreed with the SpaceX folx that hooray it worked. To certain values of "worked".

There was a lot of media attention but most of it was stupid, which I let Zim handle. AFP might not be stupid. The launch-site, aka "Stage Zero", was badly damaged.

Now: this work doesn't just appear from a vision at a mountain. If it had, maybe Elon could have built some... flame-trenches. Those problems at the pad SpaceX absolutely must solve, possibly before even changing-up the actual rocket - the one which mostly worked.

Now for those change-ups. The Teslarati commenters speculate that future prototypes won't have the hydraulics. The hydr- in "hydraulic" means fluid, and fluid expands under great heat especially when also being pounded by concrete and broken Raptors, from below. The best part is no part, as ever.

On topic, the commenters tell us that part of the test in the sky, the part which really did not work, was to flip the Superheavy so as to slingshot the Starship away. This would do without some of those latches and propellant-tanks used to separate the stages. Here it seems that no-part was a part that might need added back-in. This failure alternatively might be fixed by having more raptors functional at the altitude of separation, which altitude itself should be higher (so: air-pressure lower).

Much of this was done for data-collection, the remainder being done to discard a slightly-obsolete machine.

Peter didn't know where the tomb was

Luke 24:12 tells how Peter ran to Jesus' empty tomb, a Johannine flourish. Since March I've been asked to suspect Luke 24:12 as not being, er, Luke's. Underappreciated, I think, might be what Peter himself will report in Luke's second volume, which we Latins call the "Acts". It being the Easter season still, we heard Acts 2:22f.

Here is one of those famous (in the scholarship) speeches which Luke makes up and puts in the Apostles' mouths. Luke's penchant elsewhere is to take Paul's doctrinal-summaries and to have Peter say them, smoothing over the disputes which we know - from Paul - the Apostles held (note Jesus' genealogy here, from David, as Paul's royal Lord). Also here is a Lukan creed, such likewise scholar-famous, not least for their parallels with Josephus' "Testimonium". One more interesting point is the use of Psalms, like Barnabas. Indeed Luke 24:14 has "anticipated" such what-does-this-mean discussions.

We're not getting into all that, this morn. It's only nine AM MST as I start this; I'm not drunk enough (Acts 2:15). Instead I'm interested in how Luke is portraying Peter's experience. Peter is averring that, contrast with patriarch David, we don't have the last Christ's tomb.

In Luke, some can claim they do have that tomb. Namely, the women can claim that, have claimed that since Mark's Gospel. Here in Acts, by contrast, Peter has constructed an entire argument around not having that tomb, from Psalm 16:8-11 LXX. Acts 2 doesn't quite contradict the empty-tomb narratives. Acts is, however, a witness against exactly Luke 24:12 (and John 20 by the way).

It may be that a reader of Luke+Acts together would take this tension for motive to omit Luke 24:12. This was certainly a motive for, say, Bezae to copy MSS without that verse. Except. Once we get into Marcionite circles, and Bezae was assuredly curious about Marcion's take on Judaism, we're not copying the "Judaisers'" Outdated Testament. We've ceased caring about Acts' arguments from Psalms, much less as Davidic prophecy. We are also not copying John 20 and might not even be copying Acts. Without John 20 or Acts 2, a Tatianist might mine these for harmonising supplements, as majority-text Luke 24:12; although we're hearing that Marcion might not have done so, perhaps making a point. Note that Bezae, owning John, doesn't mine those other Gospels for harmony here.

Also the omission of Luke 24:12 comes along with a slate of other minuses in the Western tradition. Old Syriac followed those minuses. Jan Joosten would say that Tatian had included John's race-to-the-tomb, alone, this time not incorporating any Luke 24:12 language. Whether or not Tatian knew the verse, the Old Syriac (re)translator of the Gospels could not find in his own Greek for Luke any verse about Peter's run, any more than in Mark or in Matthew. So the translator duly left it out, with the other minuses.

So let's look to the "harmony" behind the C, S, and P synopsis. These east-Syrian MSS all agree against Bezae for Luke 23:56 - but hold off on that, for now. Also hold off on the Palaestinian Melkite lectionaries which all include 24:12 and don't bother from 23:50f.

Other Eastern parallels include the Dura-Europos empty-tomb harmony, and the Arabic harmony; these lack Luke 23:56 entirely. If the latter be true Tatian, as Tatian's presumed anti-Jewish leanings would lead us, Tatian had made no mention of the righteous women following (Jewish) custom. Only the archons of this world follow the Sabbath, for him; with the same effect as in Bezae.

I have to conclude against Jan Joosten, for Luke. Old Syriac owned a Bezae-like text of Luke 24, alongside the Diatesseron in parallel. I expect - for the Theodosian Age - only Antiochene texts available to the Orient, that is John Chrysostom's text including our Luke 23:56 but also our Luke 24.

I agree with the Syrians themselves that Christians had reached the Euphrates before Tatian did. Leaving aside the "Thomas" lore, Marcion's sect were among the first apostles of Luke - and of Luke's text of Romans. I think that their variant of at least Luke 24 was translated to Syriac ahead of time where no-one much cared about (say) Spain. Dura-Europos does show an Eastern interest in the post-resurrection events, contemporary with that Gospel of Peter in Upper Egypt. Luke 24 would fit well in a post-Easter qeryana lectionary.

To return to why Luke 23:56 exists in all Old Syriac witnesses, where it was not Tatianic: here was an intrusion from the Antiochene Greek newly introduced. It was enough to restore the Judaism in the original Luke 23. It was not enough to overhaul the chapter after that, which the Old Syriac chose to leave alone.

The Sojourn

I stumbled on Gili Kugler awhile ago; this points out that early(ish) Biblical accounts although repeatedly recalling the Egyptian "sojourn" don't consider it a "captivity". Isaiah 30, for one, considered Egypt a refuge for contemporary Judah. This irenism, so far as to praise Egypt as a land of milk and honey(!), would include Genesis 13; Exodus 16, 22-3; Numbers 11, 16, 20; Deuteronomy 11, 23. This irenism continues to the assuredly postexilic Holiness Code in Leviticus 19.

Oracles against Egypt do crop up. Relevant here might be Isaiah 9, 19 or Ezekiel 29-32. But even these make no mention of the slavery. Calum Carmichael wrote whole books on the Priestly subversion of Egyptian religion. This subversion makes sense to me only on assumption that other (Jewish!) priests were taking Egyptian cues. Just as Sigmund Freud taught us, about the Levites. Contemporary with the Holiness Code and other Persian-era Levitical works I am given to understand that Second Isaiah knew Israel's Exodus including that Egypt was restraining Israel (pdf) although this author might still be wanting (say) the Commandments and the plagues (pdf).

Exegetes would likely call Kugler a shlabotnik who hadn't considered the Genesis/Exodus bridge, between the wise king whom the Quran will name 'Azîz and the Pharaoh whose name be erased. The sojourn would concern Joseph's secretariat, before all that Dynasty XIX unpleasantness.

The whole Exodus narrative is nowadays considered sus. As for my reasons: that the Egyptians so widely disseminated a rival tradition under the later Ptolemies suggests that they were caught off-guard by an anti-Egyptian narrative from the Jews, that is that few high-caste Egyptians had read our Torah until recently. We might further consider the total absence of the Haggada in the Elephantine Pesach.

So: Jan Joosten, on the case of Joseph's form of Hebrew. Hebrew is a Canaani language. Ancient Hebrew is to be exhumed from such preciously-preserved tribal chansons as (now) Judges 5. Classic Hebrew is what we read in the Lachish and immediate preëxilic ostraca, and the core of Judges-Reigns. "Late Biblical Hebrew" seems the acrolect of the Temple after the Exile (excepting quotations, like Nehemiah 9). Books from this late time like Esther might feel uncomfortable with the full dialect-shift, doing the best it can. In Haggai, Lamentations, and Zechariah 1-8 is a "transitional" stage which implicates, also, Ezekiel and some Jeremiah.

LBH will betray itself by its Aramaisms. Joosten's classic, if you like, LBH example is iggeret famous in Syriac where CBH preferred some mutation of seper (as in Arabic, CBH suffered no aspirants in matn!).

Joosten dates most of the Joseph story to the CBH era. Should he?

Joosten is aware some LBH has entered into the Seper Yusef. Joosten writes off the whole of Genesis 39 for the preponderance of LBH therein. From chs. 40f the Aramaic shelyt is in verse 42:6 - although the bare root had come to Aramaic from Bronze Age times, as it exists in Ugaritic; and I must allow the sultan from the Arabia. Joosten's point is that proper Israelites bucked this governance, working rather with msl. Contrariwise comes a LBH word for "food" 45:23, where the CBH would side with Arabic and I think Ugaritic akl and lhm. Joosten points to 1 Samuel/Reigns 20:31, that for MT's malakût which is Aramaic (and LBH and indeed Qâric, borrowed pre-aspiration and pre-emphatic); 4QSam^b retains proper CBH memluka.

So we might just be missing Genesis' pre-MT text. Recall, again, that the most-extensive "4QGen" is a MT scroll not actually found at this cave in the Jordan Desert, such that we remain short on Genesis scrolls BC. Although: I must ask where the Samaritans stand on Genesis 42 and 45. Keeping in mind the Samaritans agree with MT on what Deuteronomy 1:44's bees were up to.

Joosten is aware that authors of sacred literature, on occasion, archaise. In Greek Bibles one only has to look at Luke's aping of the Septuagint. But - he points out - this trick is difficult to pull off, at least with consistency. Goodacre might consider, in a time before Apache OpenOffice, "fatigue". Joosten might point to Genesis 39, which owns much more LBH than 40f owns, as contradicting fatigue. This criterion bolsters Joosten that this chapter 39 was composed after 40f, to be inserted before.

With fatigue in mind (rather more so given the length of this blogpost) I do have to ask after the LBH in Genesis 45. Seems late in the text.

And now I must return to the Plagues of Egypt, and the slavery theme. Are they pure CBH?

The nature of Dugan's beast

Elena Dugan's thesis left Princeton's embargo this morning. The work is good and I don't need to change much in my anticipatory post.

Dugan questions that nagar, or any of the rest of Ethiopic Enoch, really is Aramaic in origin. It might have been logos read as qal but interpreted as rhema so translated nagar. Doesn't matter much.

Dugan's main failing is in her prolixity (which at least made her 380 pages skimmable in a day). For one example she does, in fact, look at the Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah. I'd thought this would have been a waste of her time, given that it certainly postdates Barnabas, which is all she needs to stick a terminus upon the Apocalypse. Now it has become a waste of her readers' time. Sigh.

Of interest to philology is how we might better-interpret certain Ethiopic words in light of parallels in, particularly, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.

Most interesting is how she takes Jubilees away, as a reader of the Dream Visions in any form. Jubilees 4 is another of those Ethiopic-only thingies. It turns out that the Dead Sea has a parallel to J4 which differs in (not) mentioning the Visions. Dugan is quick to say that she's not saying that this scrap is the original chapter, since swapped out. But she's also not saying she's denying it. We just don't know, is her point. So J4 is sus; it cannot be used as evidence.

The whole mess is a problem for dating Jubilees at all. Fortunately, we own hints elsewhere that it was probably composed after the Maccabean Revolt when life was lookin' up for the high priesthood and its legal department, so... 150s BC.

Green metallic

As we're considering the sort of star as has a truly habitable zone, we're being asked to look at stellar metallicity [UPDATE 8/8 also Cowing - and on a reread, I had to rewrite this poast].

The issue is ultraviolet. This is all photonic. We're past the M class of stars and are assuming a magnetic-field on the planet. So we are not considering flares of charged-particles.

High-metal stars, which is most of those with planets (albeit mostly the Hot Jupiters), do UV-B (315-400 nm). The Max Planck Institutes in Germany are saying this does ultraviolence, to the Ozone. So we want stars delivering more to the UV-C (100-280 nm). That's metal-poor stars; UPDATE 8/8 we'll deal with hotter stars later.

Although I do wish to know if the thickness of the atmosphere might help offset the UV-B photons. A thickly layered superEarth should bear more Ozone and maybe more volume of the O₃, without poisoning Heavy Los Angeles.

Oh, and those K stars' planets. If they even get plants at all, and if their greenhouse is controlled; they'd better pray the K is low-metallic or else those plants aren't ever spreading outside the oceans.

The Sahidic Apocalypse of Paul

Davila has alerted us to Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta and Jacques van der Vliet on the Sahidic Apocalypse of Paul. I've read the introduction and the fourth chapter in Google Books, to which I am grateful since I haven't the 168 euros to toss at it. The book does seem good so far, though.

I take it that the ever-prolific (and much insulted - cf. Stargate) Wallis Budge did an edition of the Sahidic MSS they let him read. A translation, too. Both, as usual for Budge, were rushed and kinda bad. (But, public domain!!!) - anyway, Armenian and Latin and Aramaic and even Greek critical-texts have appeared, before and since; but these have occasioned some bickering over which text is best. Arabic and Ethiopic also exist, but not in critical form. Some handle on the Egyptian dialects would be nice. That is, finally, done here.

The Apocalypse of Paul has herein suffered a demotion, not unlike Mirecki's "Gospel of the Saviour". This apocalypse belongs to the late fourth century. A version of it in Greek owns a preface claiming that it was found in the saint's personal effects over in Tarsus. Sozumen - ruining everything - actually went to Tarsus to ask after it. Of course the elder priests there informed him this story was some egregiously aromatic cameldung; although, it does date this version of the Apocalypse to barely decades before Sozumen's time.

But that's Egyptian monasticism for you. Most of those monasteries were bootcamps for the armies of Hell. Starting with the White Monastery at Panopolis lately Akhmîm.

The Sahidic tradition here was the earliest offshoot from the tradition seen elsewhere in Latin and Aramaic. So it stands to nail down the text. For all we care.

We might care more for what this tradition tells us about the state of the intertexts in Sahidic, which is a hot issue these days. Also valuable is Lanzillotta and van der Vliet on the general social milieu of the White Monastery. It's in Akhmîm but its language is not Akhmîmic, but Sahidic. I wonder if Akhmîmic, notoriously conservative almost to the state of late Demotic, was the language of the pagans. This might explain why Christian literature was rarely composed in Akhmîmic, having to be translated over from (usually) Sahidic. (The Apocalypse seems not to have entered the Panopolitan library, although it will be translated to Fayyûmic.)

Another point of interest to Late Antiquity, is the hero, rather victim, of these forgeries, on how he changed over time. Obviously Jewish apocalypticists went with men like Enoch, then Daniel and Levi, then maybe Ezra and Baruch. That strain eventually settled on famous rabbis like Simon bar Yohai. Christians picked on Peter, famously, with THAT apocalypse. Eventually Egypt preferred saints like Shenoute and Cyril, as Syrians went with Ephrem and Methodius. It seems that it was under antipope Damien's time that the Egyptians rewrote some version of Paul's apocalypse in the name of Saint Athanasius. Pseudo-Athanasius will feature in the Umayyad/Islamic era.

Boron gets interesting

A few decades ago one Alex Cheung (of Korean lineage I think) proposed a Boron-11 / Hydrogen-1 (i.e. single-protonic) fusion reaction. The (very) good news: fewer stray neutrons (if for no other reason than that leftover ¹¹B is such a neutron sponge). The bad: Cheung's process languished in the realm of Theory. - until lately, when in 2021, TAE got a nice reaction started.

The fusion problem has always been that of the Seven Rings - you needed the gold to breed the gold, the gold here being energy. (Slight exception for tritium/deuterium but there you had that neutron problem.) I didn't know it was worth the candle. But - Bikini Atoll showed us that we might be able to get much more gold from the initial investment. You can't know, until you do the engineering.

h/t Winchell Chung (no relation) a host of Chinese names (also not Winchell's) and a "Hoffman" are proposing an improvement to the Boron-Proton process. The yield is so much improved that we might be happy to provide that initial spark, after all.

Jaghbub no longer downloadable

Most of my documents are on the Jaghbub font because that's what the Y2k-era journals like Cambridge UK's ordered me to put them on. First I used the vanilla Jaghbub, mid-2000s; in 2010 I realised that JaghbUni was the best way to go, for PDF exports, and if I wanted some Arabic script in the same document.

I found myself on a different machine today so tried downloading that JaghbUni for that machine. Cambridge UK still says, just go to Bergen's org.uib.no/smi/ksv/Jaghbub.html bro. No. It's 404 or 403 across the board.

I don't think Jaghbub is downloadable anymore. Some seedy sites divert you to some even seedier sites. I shan't link them here.

Chicago is offering MEDOC. They claim this as the update to Jaghbub - altering only hamza and 'ayin. When did I ask for an altered hamza or 'ayin?

We could argue whether the Brave and Google search-engines are fit for purpose (Google used to be good); but - whatever Wall Street claims - I still don't find value in Bing, either.

I think we just have to accept that Link Rot happens and that Jaghbub is a dead font. Whatever. I have copies; I'll still use it.

First Sunday after Easter

This being the first Sunday after Pascha for true dyotheletes, I bring Shimʿon bar-Sabbaʿe the martyr, if perhaps strictly-speaking an Arian martyr. Shapur II over the 340s was warring with the (Eunomian and Eastern-only) emperor Constantius II, failing repeatedly to take Nisibin. The shah took out his frustrations upon the Christians of the ʿIraq. He accused Shimʿon of Roman leanings, and on AD 345 - Wiki claims - sentenced him to the headsman. (Later Constantius would unite the Romans and the war would start up again, but that's beyond our scope.)

Shimʿon on his way to the mat quoted these verses: ne craignez pas ceux qui tuent le corps, puisqu'ils ne peuvent pas tuer l'âme (lâ takhâfû man qâtalî 'l-jasma idh laysû qâdarîn ʿalâ qatli 'l-nafsi) and celui qui aime son âme, qu'il la perde à cause de moi; celui qui la perdra, la sauvera (man ahibb nafsahi fa-liyatlafihâ min ajlî; wa-man atlafihâ faqad ahiyâhâ). He then sang a hymn, the Etsi exuitis vestes illas vestras exteriores published Rene Graffin Patrologia Syriaca II col. 1052.

... well, so Nineveh-de Siʿrt. This chronicle is in Arabic and has altered its sources. Philip Wood finds Siʿrt hard to trust for this age. And indeed some of these themes read as on-the-nose: the treachery of the Jews, his execution on Good Friday, his friends burying him in fear. There's no hill but God will supply a wind to create one. Small wonder the people commemorated this event as "the little palm-sunday".

Still, that the hymn (fourth of four) survives in Syriac points to an ancient tradition for the commemoration at large. Many themes could mine a "Syriac Passion Harmony", although such don't survive in their sixth-century form let alone fourth-.

I can report that the match between Siʿrt's Arabic and the modern Arabic Matthew 10 at v. 28 (fear not those who kill the body; as for the soul, they have no means to kill that) is... verbally close, excepting Siʿrt's jasam over jasad. For the different word-order we may account by paraphrase. The Siʿrt wanders more seriously agley from v. 39 (he who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it). Siʿrt in - I assume - translating Syriac may have used an Arabic bible of the Nestorians (Hikmat Kashouh seems to know what he's talking about; I don't). The latter Siʿrt parallel starts more like John 12:25.

That is: Siʿrt has a harmony. These references may, instead, be Diatesseronic. This is difficult to say, absent an Arabic Diatesseron, let alone Syriac.

Testing Joosten

Jan Joosten posits that the Diatesseron existed in Syriac and owns two witnesses in the subsequent Assyrian Gospel transmission. One was an "Old Syriac", incompetently translated, and - before its well-earned retirement - haphazardly-and-independently corrected in the Sinaitic palimpsest (autograph?) and in the Curetonian transmission. The other is the Peshitta with a much better handle on the Greek, alive and well with the Assyrian Church today. All translators involved were East-Syrians. The lower stratum, which is the Syriac Diatesseron proper, further exposes West Aramaic terms in its Christian vocabulary, like slb for the Romans' cross. The stratum beneath them all is the four-Gospel canon in Greek in a "Western" form that is, prior to the Alexandrine standard and also prior to certain little tweaks we get in actual Western MSS like Bezae and Claromontanus.

For Joosten's theory to work, we must imagine the OS and the P, independently, Reverse-Engineering the Gospels. OS had good reason for its process, namely that its author's Greek was barbarous. With some Greek Bible on one side and the Diatesseron on the other, the two scribes transferred the harmonised text of Diatesseron corresponding to the lines they read in the Greek. Then they checked their work against the Greek, often sparing the harmonising variants of the Syriac for fear of resistance out in the Zagros and Armenian foothills.

Although the lowest stratum was an ancient Greek collection of Gospels, Joosten's thesis implies that - when the revisors split them all up again - their Greek collection was likely not that same base collection. The whole point of the project, remember, was to bring Eastern Christian lections into harmony with the Greek West. I don't read where the Eunomian emperors (and one pagan) had ever asked, say, Ephrem to throw out his Diatesseron; anyway his commentary spread eastward, into Nisibin and beyond. Certainly as of AG 650 the Sasanians had their eyes upon Nisibin and, under shah Shapur II, they launched a brutal persecution at home.

For backstory of the Syriac four-gospel canon I'd suspect the adoption of Nicaea, in its full Dyothelete form at that. Maybe the school of Nisibin, adopting Theodosius' reforms AD 380s so, let's have a nice even AG 700. Yazdegerd's synod at Mahoze spring 410/721 would have nailed down the Peshitta as the official text. After that, most of the Old Syriac witnesses got shifted to monasteries for their parchment only.

By AG 700 Antiochene Fathers like Chrysostom and soon the young Mar Nestorius (pbuh) weren't using "Western" texts anymore. Peshitta should be following Chrysostom and trending "Byzantine". Maybe the Old Syriac had some Alexandrine if they were Rejecting Modernity.

If Joosten is right, any text shared between Old Syriac and Peshitta will be Diatesseronic and "Western". We might not be fortunate to call upon Ephrem for witness, but we should find such text translated to Arabic. Deviations between the four-Gospel codices (where not individual scribal errors) will represent corrections, after the fact. I predict the corrections will follow the Antiochene text-type, "protoByzantine".

Moreover: Joosten believes that Tatian himself did the Diatesseron in Syriac. It is, then, Tatian who inserted the West-Aramaic features like the slb-cross. More: since Tatian's Greek was supposedly excellent, where errors appear in the Old Syriac, such errors are the fault of him who edited that slate of Gospels. Those bugs will creep wherein the Diatesseron did not cover, abandoning that translator to his own (poor) understanding.

I also expect Tatian's personal biases in the base text. Tatian was a famous Encratite. He was also a feminist, refusing 1 Timothy as Marcion had done. In Tatian's time feminism overlapped with antiJudaism. Hence those famous anti-Jew readings in pro-woman Bezae (and not in, say, Claromontanus). We will be seeing Marcionites retaining a Diatesseron in those northern hills. I don't expect Bezae-like variants to survive in our extant four-Gospel codices; for a start, 1 Timothy is in Peshitta (now). I expect, rather, our Gospel codices to restore the proper Greek into Syriac differently, from independent translation. I especially expect variants in Syriac Luke, of interest to Marcionites.

To the extent Joosten has made his case that the Syriac Diatesseron stands behind all the Syriac Gospels, prior to the Councils of Ephesus and attendant Miaphysite schism, prior to the Alexandrine standard - this just means it's old. It doesn't make it Tatianic.

FOLLOWUP 4/23: Assuming we do this: my take on Old Syriac Luke 23 and 24.

The Diatesseron, in the 2020s

I'm not supposed to do this, frankly; but Tatian is out there and I've already noted the Arabic harmony lately so...

I'm starting with Peter Hill and Monier-Taylor; basically because their PDFs are available for free where, say, I. N. Mills "Zacchaeus and the Unripe Figs" (2020) is not.

These authors are telling me that, since Koester published Petersen's summary as an appendix to his own book three decades ago, Diatesseron research is still Problematic. As the authors found the state-of-the-question as of 2020, nobody agreed if the Dura-Europos fragment should count, nor if Tatian's core text was Greek or Syriac. Also annoying is where the Gospel of Thomas should fit into it all.

To me (who shouldn't be doing this) this suggests that we haven't nailed-down what the state of the various parallel texts is/are. Before defining THE Diatesseron we should get a critical-text of some of the witnesses which we know are translations. Arabic, obviously. Also maybe Latin excepting that some scholars seem to have tried and failed at this.

I say "Arabic obviously" with some chagrin. Monier and Taylor note N. P. Joosse's Arabic Diatessaron Project... as suspended. This has forced Monier and Taylor to do their own little Diatesseron project, just to nail down a possible Eastern witness in the Dura-Europos region. As an aside, Arabic renditions of the Gospel are an absolute requirement for anyone dabbling in Islamic/Christian relations, including the progress of Jesus hadith as we see from Tarif Khalidi. Quranic exegetes like Biqa'i also used Arabic Bibles. So it's not just Diatesseronists who are getting hurt here. I can only commend Monier and Taylor for taking up the reins for this side of the Gospel Synopsis.

If we're talking Thomas, which net I'll extend to the Dialogue of the Saviour and the Secret Book of James - these works in Greek run from fragmentary (Thomas) to nonexistent (ApJames). Most of this lore is in upper-Nilotic paraCoptic - Sahidic, maybe Lycopolitan - subject to contamination from some Sahidic New Testament. Or the contamination may flow in the other direction. Where's our handle on the textual-state of that, pre-Shenoute? Monier and Taylor are, happily, not talking Thomas, insofar as their project deals with a narrative event which Thomas doesn't talk about.

Monier and Taylor accept Jan Joosten 2001-2017 that The Diatessaron’s Old Testament quotations seem to relate better to the Syriac Peshitta than to the Greek Septuagint. Joosten hadn't much changed since 1996. Are we all that certain about Joosten?

One final time I shouldn't be doing this. But I'm unsure we're ready for anyone else to be doing this yet, either.

Disharmony

I was caught flatfooted last week not knowing the Syriac translation-tradition over the Gospels. Jan Joosten is curing my ignorance, with his 1996 dissertation (I don't know if this was THE dissertation, which PhD'ed him) on The Syriac Language of the Peshitta. I appreciate Joosten's other scholarship; although in this case, Google Books is what its publishers have allowed me. Mostly I appreciate this book too.

The first chapter handles Matthew. Here: Curetonian, Sinaitic, and Peshitta are separate text-families based upon a common Syriac base or bases. This, to account for much of their features being shared. The Curetonian and Sinaitic base-text was no native Hellenophone and made several mistakes, defined as "divergent from all Greek MSS, best-explained by misreading this particular Greek MS". Joosten flags 2:18, 5:32, 8:9, and 15:22 (read on). He then notes a few "minor variants" which may or may not count, especially 20:21,30; 23:5,8. Also instances of west-Aramaic which Syriac-speakers found confusing, or "overly free translations" such as Curetonian's "Eden-garden" for Luke 23's "paradise".

All three text-families then set out to correct the original, best they could. The reason Joosten believes the Curetonian and Sinaitic families, after their common base, parted their mutually-independent ways; is that a mistake fixed in one family - like that garden - will often fly free in the others. Joosten section 2.1 then handles P. Er. I'll get to that...

Some of these mistakes are due to harmony, with other Gospels. Joosten rates the harmonies as deliberate; not just easing over sporadic contradictions. And there's midrash: 18:29's debtor has foreknowledge in Syriac not in Greek (Joosten finds this "minor" - I'll dare more). Joosten opines that if we didn't own Ephrem's lore about Tatian's "Diatesseron", modern scholars, to explain the harmonies, would have to invent this text.

With the restoration of a four-gospel collection into Syriac canon, the editors were pushed and pulled. The Old Syriac, it seems, retained much Diatesseron in how it translated each Gospel; likely to mollify the local-parish diehards. As time passed, the daughter families interpreted such convergences as the errors they were, so set to correcting these. Such Curetonian did to 5:18, which deharmony Sinaiticus missed.

We might be missing other Old Syriac errors so egregious that all copyists agreed to fix them before our MSS. This might lead to some variants more "minor" today... or not so minor. Take 15:22 - independently rendered in C and S, but each such that the Canaani woman left Tyre/Sidon to come to Jesus. This is possible from the Greek; but, as Joosten notes, unintentional by Matthew and impossible in Matthew's source Mark 7:25f. I'll ask if we have here an intentional disharmony, by C and S, to divorce Matthew from Mark.

Joosten is aware that for Matthew, Peshitta is close to CS (for my part I've seen this at the end of Luke 23). Bruce Metzger assumed that Peshitta revised the Old Syriac, just like C and S did; I'd assumed similar. More: a case can be made from Joosten that the Scriptorium-Of-P had observed over the vast late-antique Syriana that CS had made corrections, concluding that a thorough and effective revising was in order. So P gathered the MSS, and used these as a bug-filter (if I may). One could compare the Alexandrine and Byzantine recensions across the Euphrates in Greek. This case, Joosten concedes possible 2.1.a.

Joosten 2.1.b is the counter-argument. Peshitta includes harmonies which C and S refuse, to a fault in their case. P is also better at Greek. Joosten concludes that Old Syriac and Peshitta were rival translation-projects from a Syriac Diatesseron base. Old Syriac needed the revisions, which (today) are C and S. Peshitta, I assume, got a few tweaks here and there; but P overall enjoyed the patronage of the Assyrian Church, so didn't suffer the magnitude of variation.

Memro

Jan Joosten's argument toward an ancient Syriac Diatesseron involves west-Aramaic features. Joosten has proposed a west-Aramaic fifth-gospel behind them. Joosten also sees the Old Syriac Gospels especially but sometimes Peshitta too (Matt 11:10) pulling its OT quotes from OT-Peshitta and not retranslating Greek (more-formally "Tatian's Diatessaron and the Old Testament Peshitta", 2001). He overstates his case.

"Abba" (a) could be taken from the Greek, which relates occasional Palaestinian Aramaic on account... Christ used it. I extend this to the salîba Cross (e). The New Testament cross is specifically Roman and every pilgrim heard the word, even Arabs.

Joosten knows Old Syriac wasn't so great at Greek as was Peshitta, so - one could say - cheated. In 2017 Zhen Chen over the Old Testament found little daylight between Peshitta and the Old Greek in - particularly - the Second Isaiah, a treasure-trove of proof-texting in the New Testament. And at least one Christian involved in the OT couldn't help but inject some NT Epistolary text into the first Isaiah.

I think Joosten and those citing him should revisit Old Testament quotations, which might not always be from "the Peshitta" as we have it, but from newly-translated New-Testament quotes and parallels as Paul, 1 John, 1 Peter may have made from the Bible direct.

How to account for the shared OT/NT parallels, and the West Aramaic? I scent the memro tradition. Absent a full Bible, Christians will hear the Gospel in sermons (memrë). These were recited (as qeryanë) to West Syrians by Aramaic missionaries - from Palaestina. Shared OT/NT parallels would be common core, influencing the translations of OT/NT simultaneously.

Al-Farooq and so on

A writer alerts me that Robert Hoyland has an interview out. Before we get to this, let's return to the Aramaisms in the Quran. Classically in the discipline, they're Syriasms. Problem: Western Aramaic wasn't dead yet, as of the first/seventh century (tenth in Syriac); to hear people talk, they're still speaking it in Maʿlūlā. I've longed for a take on which Qâric Aramaism is what. Marijn van Putten has done well with these; here we'll discuss Jan Joosten 1991 followed up elsewhere with two [more] west Aramaic elements. [UPDATE 4/22: Joosten's further followups, through to 1996, won't add to our concerns excepting additional argumentation.]

Al-Farûq is a clear one, "the saviour". The Old Testament in Syriac uses the frq root which we read in the Christian creeds. Joosten (#4; b in his 1996 book) finds the Gospels prefer hy'. He sees hy' in Peshitta NT as an intrusion from the West.

Joosten (#5/c) notes the tôra. That's a mountain, as in the tôr-Mardîn by the Resh-ʿAyna. Well it's a mountain in Syriac (and in the Qurân!). It's a field in the Gospels and in the West. I suppose marg would be the proper Arabic for a field.

As day-versus-night goes, Q. 10:67 contrasts to night, the nahâr. In Arabic yawm is the generic day as unit-of-time (sometimes an apocalyptic metaphor, or a synonym for battle). The Syriac Gospels overloads yûma for the sunlit part of day (#6/d). It wouldn't occur to a Syriac-speaker to do this, elsewhere; Joosten considers this a Westernism.

Sura 4's cross is a silâb. I'd assumed slb was just Aramaic but apparently (followup; e in the book) not. It is a Westernism, not used in the Syriac Old Testament but common to the Gospels.

Can anything be made of these usages, in our Qurân?

(#4/b) implies that ʿUmar was hailed al-Farûq first by the Jews of Babylon. Not in Palaestina; never by Christians. Only further out, starting ReshʿAyna / Mardîn and moving on east to Nineveh and Takrit, might "al-Farûq" make sense. More: it would make sense in Jewish Messianism, not to a reader of the Peshitta. Also Christian Palaestinians where not speaking Aramaic were writing Greek: Doctrina Jacobi, Sophronius, Maximus. I don't read where any of these Melkites or even local Monotheletes were praising ʿUmar. Doctrina Jacobi and Thomas the Presbyter do imply (in Greek and Syriac, note) that the local Jews faced some problems with the Arab invaders. How about the ʿIrâq?

(#5/c) implies that the Qâric pericopae concerning al-Tûr are, likewise, proper Syriac and/or taken from its Old Testament. The Arabs would not have heard Tûr(a) applied to any Palaestinian mount, from Jew or Christian. I speculate this term entered the Qurân after Arabs encountered Tûr- placenames in idafa-state, like Mardîn. Tûr-Sinai is possible from east-Syrian Dyotheletes at Anastasius' monastery, but I'd not bank on it.

As to (#6/d), I expect that Arabs didn't care to expand their yawm for just the sunlit half, on account they had a cromulent word of their own for this in nahâr. I count this as a wash. Likewise (#11, #13 / f-g) on slh for a "sending" where, of course, Islam uses rsl sometimes nzl.

For the Western Cross in (e) I'd start with what the Arabs had from the locals in Jerusalem. Anyone would have used slb there - including Syrian pilgrims, but not just them.

ADDITION 4/22/23: A common term in Qurân is the jannat 'Adni. Joosten notes this (#16) as a Jewish Palaestinian term. The Curetonian - alone - uses this Luke 23:43 [UPDATE 9/30 "F" conking out ~ v. 36]. Usual Syriac, Oriental as it is, prefers the Iranian "Paradise" as we read in the Greek.

29 Cygni

Thayne Currie et al. report a new planet. Literally new; it likely formed during our own Caenozoic. Also new-ish here is a call to redefine "planet" upward in mass, of this one's 15 Jupiters.

ScienceDaily led me to a UT-San Antonio presser which, frankly, is bad. Luckily a little searching afield leads to better pressers, like Keck's (telling us how far it is) and Subaru's. And the arxiv. I should have been reading galaxy_map last night but I was watching Return of the King at the time. Anyway.

The star is 29 Cygni, for whatever reason being called "HIP 99770" here (dudes: tell us the constellation at least, plz). Part of the job of constraining the system was to constrain the star, through Gaia DR3 and better imaging, made possible by its double-digit parallax: 132.8 light-years away, bit further than HR 8799 over in Pegasus. The star is young at about 40 My, and shines as an "A" white star about double our sun's mass. Luminosity is, of course, much higher than twice ours. I think it's on the main-sequence now so, this is about as cool as it gets.

What happened here was a starfield of northern-hemisphere highish-parallax which they watched for 25 years. In that quarter-century, some slow variables trickled through the filter. If the period was long enough - and since they know the star's mass because, hey, main-sequence - they could get a handle on its semimajor; therefore by Kepler its mass-ratio. If close enough to our 'scopes, they might be able to see the planet itself. Especially if the planet is hot. Which, at 40 My and at that 15-Jupiter mass, it probably would be.

The Subaru over in Mauna Kea has not disappointed the San Antonians. One excellent feature of their presser is its diagram of the system as related to Earth's on a flux scale, of irradiance, showing how this planet lives near-exactly on the Jupiter belt. The planet is far hotter than Jupiter though: 1400 K. I take it that if it were a brown dwarf, it should be hotter still; so they're marking it as a planet. Thayne Currie explains his team's call.

Seems like it might be non-dense if it's not doing any fusion. More lithium in its core might spark it. So I expect it is rather larger than Jupiter in size but will contract as the leftover heat radiates out.

I don't know if this system has formed other planets. I'm guessing that if Saturnlikes orbited this star inbound of this monster, we'd know. Might not see 'em, but we'd see the stellar wobble and take a guess at their inclination. The system is young enough that dynamical instability shouldn't have turfed out any Earth-mass planets in its habitable zone.

So: what about their future. Our own Jupiter, gravitationally 7.5 times weaker than this guy, has obviously caused a mess in our inner solar-system such that little but Mars and Vesta could form and stay between 1-5.3 AU (plus those Cerean interlopers). But much of that was because of the Grand Tack where Jupiter and Saturn both were migrating in and out. If 29 Cygni has no Saturn, which I doubt it has, then there's no Tack and the inner system is left more stable.

Fundamental crops

joeroe reports that Neolithic farming is more complex than we thought.

We used to think we knew which crops, still in use in western-Eurasia today, were used in ancient times. So these were the "founding crops" as were sketched in the 1980s. Now, we've dug to levels which can tell us which crops were actually sown and grown, where, and when.

Apparently the first breads had roots (not potatoes obviously) ground into them. A "new glume wheat" was widely grown but - like the sylphium - seems no longer to be among us. Some of the first domesticates were near-duds which weren't much used as opposed to others; I wonder if millet might count (yes yes I know millet proper was eastern then), rather similar grains which farmers - once they'd domesticated herbivores - preferred simply to feed over to them. Some grains decidedly meh in the Near East could be better grown, or at least comparatively-advantaged grown, elsewhere, like in the Balkans.

The authors start the Neolithic 11.6–10.2 ka cal BP so, like, 9650-8250 BC. Of the classic founders, only barley and lentils appear then. Barley is brought to Cyprus during this time; along with emmer 10.8ka=8850-650 BC. They are followed by flax/linen, oat, pea, a lot of stuff including trees like fig and pistachio. Flax is seen at Jericho 7950 BC.

In these very early Neolithic villages, if close to some sparsely-inhabited forests, it may be that children would just go out to pick berries and trap rabbits / birds / squirrels. The scale of these towns still wasn't too large. Maybe that's what Cyprus is doing at the head of the innovations, being an island with limited space for hunting and gathering (although I'm sure they did a lively harvest of molluscs and shore-hugging fish).

Isaiah's Syrian translators

Recently Zhan Chen for PhD did "an investigation into the Peshitta of Isaiah" (pdf). I'm here to continue its musings upon the division of this Syriac text.

Chen's dissertation argues that the Peshitta translation-team broke out Isaiah into two volumes, chs 1-33 and then 34f. It sees a parallel with 1QIsa^a by Qumran. And the divisor was based on verses; if it had been done from words, the split should have been at ch. 35. Chen was unaware that Egypt witnesses a tripartite split, one sure division at ch. 46 and maybe - important here - the earlier one at 30:5.

Over both his putative volumes Chen finds two translators at work. One was a sort of Syrian Jerome, translating from the Masoretes excepting where he found the Hebrew text difficult, where he brought in the Greek (with exceptions like 25:6-8 - more, anon). This work went up to ch. 29 (and not to 33). The other translator - working at least from ch. 40 on - was fine with the Greek so just translated what he felt like.

From chs. 30-39 things get more hairy for Chen. An observation is conceded that the overlap with a putative two-volume scroll-set is imperfect.

The most pro-Greek translation covers chs. 30-33 which should complete that first scroll of two. I'll inject this in Egypt starts second scroll of three. As to the section from ch. 33 on, Chen admits chs. 36-39 is prosaic; this translation could be churned out by any Hebrew-reader with a NW-Semitic language as his mother-tongue. The Greek, itself, wasn't so far from a literal Hebrew translation and MT at that - this ain't Jeremiah.

Chen proposes that first translator was a Christian. Especially 25:6-8 is parallel with 1 Corinthians 15; which it should not be, for this translator elsewhere keen to follow the Hebrew. Although, even here: the translator isn't going to the Greek Isaiah.

I propose that one Vorlage was in three volumes and the other in two. That 1QIsa^a presumes a two-volume text, and the Egyptian three, and that a Hebraising two-volume product was intended: all suggest that the three-volume basis was Greek and the two-volume basis, Hebrew. The translators worked from this split, agreeing for the first (Christian) translator to work on the first third upon a fresh scroll or codex with space for half the full Isaiah. Then the second translator filled out that first half, up to ch. 33. Anybody could have put their oar into chs. 34-9; but the second translator took over from ch. 40 onward. If, as in Egypt, another break cropped up ch. 46; that second translator simply bypassed it.

Bezae against the Sabbath

TC again! A couple years ago Jason Robert Combs (pdf) pondered the MS evidence for Jesus' Sabbath-observance, in Luke. Str8 outta BYU. Well at least it's not Liberty . . .

We've here seen Bezae 05/D^ea, alongside allies like 08/E(^a), as having Gospels and Acts free from such Tendencies as we've seen for Paul in Claromontanus 06/D^p. Combs is taking on Bezae to report other Tendencies, which 08/E et al. did not follow. Ehrman had cited Bezae for specifically anti-Jew alterations, the previous year (pdf). I just got here so I didn't know...

Combs' verses are 4:16, 23:56; and (buried in Combs' text) Acts 17:2. Its Luke 4:16 omits that the customary Sabbath was, exactly, the Lord's; 23:56, that the womens' rest on the Sabbath was κατὰ τὴν ἐντολήν. Here Bezae, says Combs, had imbibed anti-Sabbath arguments, as seen in Ignatius and "Barnabas".

So now I have to ponder Marcion, at least compared with the Clairmontaines: yay women boo Jews. Ehrman tells me that J. Rendel Harris no less had pondered likewise.

Tertullian reports that Marcion had Luke 4:16 when Jesus came to Nazareth, and that Marcion is aware (cf. v. 23) that the Gospel noted Capernaum. Tertullian is very aware that Marcion's Gospel had Jesus entering at least the synagogue at Capernaum, ineptus for Marcion's argument inasmuch as Marcion presents Jesus as not properly Jewish. The modern Paulician reconstructions posit that Marcion had Jesus enter the Nazarene 'gogue as well - but not "according to Jesus' custom". I suspect they're right, about Marcion. Likewise Tertullian in conceding Marcion on Luke 23:56 doesn't note that the spice-bearing women be observing mandatum. UPDATE 4/13 On Tatian's side I do not find Luke 23:56 in the Arabic harmony nor in the Dura fragment.

With Harris I might read, in Bezae, a Marcion-leaning Luke. As for Tertullian: for Luke 4:16 anyway, Bezae enjoyed some backup in Latin (strong enough perhaps to influence Latin Origen) and in later(?) Bohairic. Also Peshitta omits a possessive-suffix here; although, Cureton even now fails us chs. 4-6. Tertullian may have deemed these two Lukan disputes politic to avoid.

UPDATE 7:15 PM MST - I tracked Luke 23:56 Peshitta / Cureton. I'm reading w-b-shbt' sly 'yk d-pqyd in both. pqyd translates ἐντολή. UPDATE 4/14: Sinai same. UPDATE 9/30: "F" stops at v. 36.

Sahidic Gospels

Having looked at Old Syriac, it's probably a good time to check in on Old Sahidic. Anne Boud’hors and Sofía Torallas Tovar are working on a critical text of the Second Gospel. More-likely listed fourth, up the Nile...

Obviously we got a lot of Sahidic Christian text. What we don't have, is much constraint on it all. The Coptic Church today, as its name suggests, is downstream of Ptah's city Memphis so preserves its own postEgyptian literature and tradition. Meaning: not the upper Egyptian, Sahidic tradition; which now, literally, must be dug out of the sand. Bibles which note Sahidic variants tend to do so manuscript-by-manuscript without much knowing when the manuscript was written, let alone when its base-text was translated.

This is further a pain in our rears when figuring out where and how canon-Sahidic might have intertext with all that extracanonical stuff, starting with Thomas obviously.

So: on to Mark. Boud’hors and Tovar are, basically, following Tito Orlandi 1973 on the manuscript "sa 1", then proposed "T1" now a fully-demonstrated "sa I" family alongside that MS "sa 92" discovered 2008. Another family updates "sa I", clustering around the manuscript "sa 9". There are plenty of scattered revisions around these, like "sa 123" caught in the middle of revising "sa I". There may or may not be a "sa II", from which Shenoute quoted; I take it that Boud'hours and Tovar are still hammering this out. I am further interested where in this project Akhmimic will show up, as we're being told its Bible is a transfer from Sahidic.

Mostly the "T2" ("sa II"?) revisions worked to bring Mark closer to Matthew and Luke. Also some archaisms were updated.

The authors report the Marcan text was translated from an Alexandrine type, that is Vaticanus/B. Mostly.

In "sa I" some "Western" variants are maintained; most strikingly, Mark's very placement in four-gospel codices, at the end where we Augustinians insist upon it being The Second Gospel after Matthew. This may explain the references to Sinaïticus/ℵ and Washington/W which although generally Alexandrine is, per Holmes in the Blackwell Companion (2010) ch. 5, Western in its Gospels. Same with 𝔓⁴⁵. But, re-reading Blackwell: Holmes did warn in part only. I'd personally be wary of considering a textual-minus as a properly-Western reading on account codices like 𝔓⁴⁵ were known to shorten the Greek a bit, especially - I imagine - upon an inexpertly-composed text, like... Mark. Omissions could be coincidental!

Still. I am leaning toward a third-century project, contemporary with Peshitta. It would, I think, confirm (if that's not too hard a word) a later acceptance of Mark in upper Egypt. The Nag-Hammadi sect(s) seem mostly to have preferred Matthew, Luke, and John.

Curetonian

Whilst we're on this manuscript-kick, Paleojudaica reports the end of Matthew 11 and a big chunk of Matthew 12 is found in Syriac. Grigory Kessel, Vat. iber. 4.

As the title suggests, the Vatican had this one in "Iberian", that is upland Kartuli now the Georgian language; the latest scribe is surmised to be John Zosimus at Saint Catherine's world-renowned monastery. The Vatican then mislaid it. Now it's found again - and seen to be a palimpsest of a palimpsest. The lowermost text is the Syriac.

The VI4 underundertext is not the Peshitta; also, it is not a Diatesseron. What we have here parallels Cureton's MS (published; UPDATE 6/30 digitised; h/t). So not terribly exciting... except that it bolsters that copies abounded of that Curetonian Gospel text-type, at least for Matthew. We now must take the Curetonian Gospels seriously.

The Curetonian type is still unattested outside the Gospels. Joosten holds that its vorlage is shared with the Sinaiticus, thus far the only other Old Syriac type; each tradition then independently corrected its errors. The underlying Greek of each was "Western". Not Claromontani on account I'd likely have heard, by now; more like Bezae UPDATE 4/12: Um. 08? Anyone?

The Georgian scribe had overwritten an "Apophthegmata patrum" (Greek), which Greek - I assume a monk also of the Sinai - overwrote this Syriac. The Syrian who handed over the MS, in those days still in fine physical form given how many rewrites it came to survive, was likely a bishop lately ordered to use a "better" Bible forthwith.

The Curetonian proper ended up in the Saint Mary Deipara monastery in Scetis, lower Egypt; which monastery was used by the Miaphysites over the AD 8-14th / AG 11-17th centuries. I get the feeling these manuscripts came from Tikrit. Pace the journalists who think "Palestine" just because Zosimus - the eraser of the parchment - used to live there.

The Curetonian's first translation, being from a preByzantine and preAlexandrine type, because that's what "Western" means here, likely predated all that skub over the Godhead's physis. I do however detect that some Miaphysites felt distaste for the Peshitta, associated with the Nestorians, which Bible they kept trying to replace, with the Bible of Philoxenus then with that of Paul of Tella. Other Miaphysites might resist all comers by holding on to pre-Peshitta types - the Scetian monks among the latter. One example who stayed in Syria was Sahdona.

Claromontanus' rejection

I've had occasion to mention a Claromontano Group of Biblical manuscripts: the bilinguals 06, 10, 12 and (looking it up) Sangermanensis 0319 and 0320. Among "D-Cluster" and/or "western" texts these had a Tendency, at least their exemplars did (0319 and 0320 may or may not assert corrections). Tertullian argued from the text-type but Tertullian left our Church, or at least his followers ended up forming their own denomination.

On the Alexandrine side, is 𝔓⁴⁶ with its own tendency (we'll get to that). This ancient B-Cluster papyrus shouldn't share much in common with (adulterated!) "western" manuscripts.

Ryan Kristopher Giffin reports these MSS share this much: Philippians 3:12, which plus has Paul admit he is not yet justified (pdf). Giffin further notes that 𝔓⁴⁶ tended to shorten Paul's text; perhaps as a breviary for personal use, never meant to be employed in (say) a lectionary. (This, by the way, could explain the papyrus' omission of all four Pastorals including Philemon.) I'll add Jennifer Wyant (pdf) had seen similar truncations in 𝔓⁴⁵ and 𝔓⁷⁵. Giffin argues for the plus as authentic Paul.

This Philippians plus lasted long in the West, cited by Irenaeus and then by his own Latin translator and by several Latin homilists. I have to assume that Tertullian as a Claromontanine knew it as well. But I don't think all those Church fathers were Claromontani; Irenaeus, for one, was not. And Tertullian didn't challenge Marcion on this verse implying that these protoPaulicians shared his text here whatever it was. The plus is in the Gothic Epistles, translated from Greek. 𝔓⁴⁶ shows how we cannot restrict this variant to the West.

Giffin thinks that the omission is accidental. I wonder.

Giffin had to make his case that Paul considered himself unjustified in this context but justified in others. Readers noticing a contradiction might hope to resolve that contradiction, especially if the omission doesn't hurt the sense of the verse. Meanwhile, copyists orthodox and Marcion-curious (like Bezae although this one only did Gospels+Acts) both might have considered its presence not just in the Claromontani codices but also in foreign and Arian Bibles and in Pelagius' Expositions. And who knows, maybe in Tertullianist material we haven't found yet.

To Jerome especially, that version of Philippians just looked sus.

Barnabas compared

I'll continue my thoughts on Barnabas' take on Christ.

Jesus existed alongside Creation as Genesis 1:26's Imago Dei (5:5), and became incarnate. This sounds Johannine but really, follows 2 Corinthians 4:4. On the other hand, Paul - ever full of selfcontradiction - simultaneously had taught that Jesus became the Son of David. Barnabas' reaction was to refuse Paul as an authority, simply declaring the Imago Dei as allbinding dogma, and refuting the Davidide thesis - here by way of Psalm 110 (cf. Matthew 22:41-5). The Virgin Birth is not explicit so, more Hebrews than Luke or Justin.

Less emphasised by Paul but more by 1 Peter and 1 Clement, Barnabas' Christ is the Servant of Isaiah 52-3 whose Passion (pascha) befits a Rene Girard figure to redeem all humanity. In Barnabas 5:1 the Lord does his own Paradosis (1 Clement 16:7 / 1 Corinthians 11:23 / Isaiah 53:6): not betrayed, nor passed around by others.

Barnabas famously dislikes the "Jews", whether this be a rhetorical stance for in-house consumption or no. It/he aligns with John and Peter in having the Synagogue of Israel slay Christ - by crucifixion, using that motif of the Bronze Serpent also John 3:14+12:34. The Israelis just nail him up there, without Roman input. The nails by the way match Ignatius and John against the Synoptics.

In one stunning departure from mainline Christian dogma Israel are "lawless", having lost their covenant at Sinai. The Disciples start out as lawless, also; Barnabas knows they were Jews. One wonders, in between, why Isaiah or the other prophets and psalmists even bothered. Then one understands that Barnabas is an Enochian.

Barnabas differs from Mark and the others in not mentioning the "Sign of Jonah" nor the Passover; all he'll note is that Christ's body had time to go rotten (5:1). Barnabas doesn't mention the empty tomb nor the lead-in to the post-Resurrection appearances. I think this is because these themes were apologetic, for chain-of-custody, aimed at outsiders and docetists; Barnabas wrote to insiders and isn't aware of docetism. The Resurrection chapter 15 comes on the eighth day, in the context of the Sabbath closing the seven-day week - so Sunday. Barnabas does agree with canon not to elevate Christ straight from the Cross; also, Barnabas implies post-Resurrection appearances, although he doesn't care to whom.

Barnabas is sure that the End is nigh, hinting at why the Sinaiticus includes it after John's Apocalypse. In that light his dating of events is vague. Unlike us who recite Theodosius' Creed, Barnabas is more like the Second Isaiah: Barnabas won't say when Christ lived and died. Under Tiberius? - Claudius? This may involve the embarrassment that Christ preached the imminent End himself and, now, it's four decades hence or more.

Some say Barnabas depends on Matthew. I am unsure. Barnabas passes up chances to defer to New Testament citations; everything is Old Testament. Barnabas doesn't even know that Christ himself had argued Christology, as Matthew 22:41-5 [EXPANDED 7/2]. By contrast Matthew has the motive to transfer Christological disputes back into Christ's own mouth.

Barnabas' gospel

Along the lines of the gospel in the Acts of John, and perhaps more to the point in Ignatius' Epistle to the Smyrnaeans: here comes J Christopher Edwards' gospel in the Epistle of Barnabas. Edwards seems to have provided an advertisement for the 95-page book in a 22-page summary.

The epistle doesn't hint as to who composed it; "Barnabas" has been attached to its content, later. "Later" means after late stage Animal Apocalypse, itself no earlier than AD 70. I'll just call him that for simplicity, as is my usual practice. Hey maybe he'd got named after the guy in our Scriptures...

For Barnabas, Jesus did deeds matching - more or less - what we read in the canonical four. Barnabas however isn't interested in telling a Gospel, as such. Rather, Barnabas intends to preach how Jesus' career is the true fulfillment of Scripture - including the usual Isaiah and Psalm references, and some unusual like Enoch. If Barnabas can't relate some deed or saying to the Old Testament - Barnabas doesn't care, so isn't going to tell us. Thus leading to takes like Crossan's that we're watching someone compose a Gospel on-the-fly, not knowing anything real about Christ's vita.

After we abandon that Barnabas actually wrote this thing, scholars have settled upon Alexandria for its authorship. This may or may not be right; in light of Egypt (generally) not having much evidence for a Christian community, until Justin or still-later.

As to the merits of Barnabas' gospel... I'll get to that later. Barnabas did get copied including with Sinaiticus, and even translated (to Latin); but I can see how it didn't get much cited.

Seventy Shepherds

In the Enoch corpus, "the Dream Visions" running chapters 83-90 in Geez is fragmentary in Aramaic. Last year Loren Stuckenbruck took a side-eye at chapters 83 and 84. That November I allowed chapter 84 might have floated the Red Sea and/or the Nile, whenever; although I agreed that chapter 83 came later, serving to glue chapter 84 to the now-Ethiopic text. Apparently those two chapters aren't the only accretions to the Animal Apocalypse chs. 85f.

Elena Dugan in 2021 noted that chapter 90 isn't at Qumran either. She calls the extract the "Seventy Shepherd Schema", implying that the insertion or appendix actually starts around 89:33. This brings the allegorical history into the post-exilic era and leads into the eschaton. I take it that, contrast (say) Nehemiah, no Dead Sea document ever refers to the Animal Apocalypse beyond that point. So: evidence of absence.

To bound this eschatic era, Dugan sees Barnabas and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs reading all chs. 85-90. I concede (or confess, perhaps): I hadn't read Barnabas enough to notice those allusions, but per VanderKam (pdf) Barnabas 16 has a lot of Dream Vision at least over chs. 85-90. In 2013 Carl Olsen got in on it, in an appendix. From Google Books alone, this intertext is difficult to tease-out; but I read p. 248 that Barnabas was reading Micah 4:1-8 as an outgrowth of "Enoch" here. (Olsen further tagged the Apocalypse of Elijah, but this seems later than Barnabas so irrelevant to Dugan. Although: where's John's Apocalypse?)

The eschaton of chapter 89 involves a second Temple, grander than that of Maccabean times. Could be Herod's, upon its completion; could be the New Jerusalem. Princeton won't let us read the thesis - yet. They are scheduling its release a fortnight from now.

The race to Christ

Among the variants here and there in the New Testament is where disciples run, or don't run, toward the relics of the risen Christ or even the Christ himself. For John 1-20, that Peter and the Beloved Disciple race to the tomb is integral to the Johannine argument, that the Disciple be the new Son Of Mary (as for Simon Peter, to the devil with him). Questions abound whether Luke likewise had Peter run to the tomb. Allow me TC once more: Schrader and Simonsen (pdf) note MSS of John which have "Mary" (whichever Mary that be) race to Jesus also, to touch him, before Thomas can touch him.

S&S further note a myth from the Valentines, that John 20:16 offers an analogue to Achamóth called in Greek Sophía. Per Irenaeus and Clement Alexandrine both: Achamóth has lost the Light, but now recognises it in Christ. So she races toward Christ, who then fashions her according to Gnosis and heals her.

I am unclear on the Irenaeus / Clement synopsis beyond this. The two haeresiologists share additional Valentinist themes such as Achamóth's joy, but I know not if Valentine intended when Achamóth sees Christ, or once she receives her glorious form. S&S are I think correct that John's Gospel pervades the message; Clement adding Matthew 28:9's theme of "worship".

For my part pace S&S, the race to Christ develops the Race To The Tomb which may even be in John's more-grounded (and antiPetrine) source. Touching Christ's flesh would come from 1 John 1, whence the Thomas story comes. John's Gospel isn't (yet) docetic or antidocetic. It is certainly not yet Valentinian. It is just... Johannine.

I account for the omission of Mary's race to Christ, by the protoOrthodox seeing, exactly, the heretics sponging around the sacred text. By taking away Mary's run, the copyists took away the heretics' prooftext.