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.