Kephalaia

A rather confused summary of scholarship, with inline critique, is had in the 2020 book The New Testament Gospels in Manichaean Tradition, now on academia.edu. In parallel with this, because mutally-independent, is Zsuzsanna Gulácsi "Diatesseron Themes" in a 2019 conference but published only last year.

Both papers mine the Kephalaia, an enormous Coptic compendium found at Madinat Madi in Fayyum. This is not Nag Hammadi; that library came from a Christian monastery as eschewed Manichee text. Of course Mani's ouevre was postChristian gnostic too; other gnostics viewed themselves as properly Christian and Mani as a prophet-too-far. The Kephalaia had been translated from some form of Aramaic, which Gulácsi says is Syriac. In those years of Aphrahat and Ephrem, the Syriac Gospel was one: Tatian's Diatesseron.

Diatesseronic and generally-Syriac studies seems, to me, a low-hectare field. In the past years I venture that Gulácsi and her publishers should have been made aware of the 2020 book. I venture further that they all simply refused it. For my part, I understand why; its introductory summary is doing too much at once, so overreaches.

At present, absent a rebuttal, Gulácsi stands: the Kephalaia is a Syriac text dependent on the Diatesseron foremost, with some side ventures into such standalone Syriac-translates as Matthew and John, probably also Peter and Thomas (and not Luke or Mark). The third century of our era just Hit Different.

BACKDATE 12/16