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.