The song of Melito

Brent Nongbri announced late last week a codex of one Melito, a Jew baptised in Sardis and then its bishop. Melito composed a memra on the Pascha - in Greek. I hadn't yet looked at this one here; let's do that.

The codex, Crosby-Schøyen, is not Greek; it is a Sahidic Coptic translation of the Greek. This Coptic got edited - in 1990. Before that publication, one Stuart George Hall (a relative of my maternal grandfather's mother, I warrant) edited the Greek in 1979 with some help from the then-unedited MS. I assume this was helpful to the Coptic edition; I don't know if anyone has gone back to the Greek. Officially.

Unofficially Nongbri points to the public-access version from Rev. Alistair Stewart-Sykes (pdf). A second edition exists, but the translation remains the same; thus, how Nongbri can endorse the text.

I shall name him "Sykes" here so as not to confuse him with unrelated Stuart Hall.

Sykes adapts Hall's translation to make it read line-by-line, like the memra it is. I cannot help but think that this was cantillated. In Catholicism, the deacon cantillates the Pascha introduction at the start of the Vigil: this is the niiight.... Melito was a Quartodeciman, arba'-'ashari as it were, hosting the Feast on the very day of Jewish Pesach. I feel like cantillation was something he'd taken from his own Seder as a child. I done tol' you this was ancient.

As Sykes reads Hall: Melito's community was big on the Apostle John, as were many in Anatolia. Jesus heals the blind in all gospels, but only in the Fourth does He perform the semeion of a man blind from birth. Also there's that Passover thing, where John stands apart.

Melito need not have had his "Johannine" lore from John alone. Nails feature in Ignatius and Justin also. And in that Passion-Resurrection narrative we get in a "Gospel" narrated in Peter's name.

Sykes says that Peter was likewise Quartodeciman. Where John's Gospel wants to say that the Jews killed Christ, it slips later and admits of Romans hammering the actual nails (the nailmarks visible later still). Melito #76, imagining a Jew (like himself) wishing he had not sinned against the Saviour, has the Jew pray he had not hung up and nailed Him. The Jews should have been like Pilate, washing hands, maybe letting some Syrians and Arabs do it. Peter is where you go, for Jews taking over the SPQRs' carpentry.

For more harmonic notes, Melito #98 has an earthquake. John 19 (like Mark 15) has no such thing; this is Matthew 27:51>54, also - yes - Peter. Melito mixes the 19:19 vinegar with gall, as did the Psalmist. John 19:19 does not; we find the Psalm's recipe instead in Matthew 27:34 and (then?) Peter. Being #104-5 seated at the Father's right hand is Psalm 110, as cited by Mark and Paul (Romans) and 1 Peter, later Barnabas and Hebrews and Ephesians... but also not John. Born of a virgin? Also Matthew, and Ignatius and Justin - not John.

Melito, I agree, used John and Peter, and I'll add Matthew. Perhaps not Mark anymore, a dying gospel at the time (it got better). I don't think he had Luke.