Read more
Excerpt from The Mythological Acts of the Apostles: Translated From an Arabic Ms. In the Convent of Deyr-Es-Suriani, Egypt, and From Mss. In the Convent of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai and in the Vatican Library
The manuscript from which I have taken most of these stories was found by Mrs Gibson and myself in the Coptic Convent of Deyr-es-Suriani, or St Mary Deipara, in the Wady Natron, Egypt, the monastery from which, fifty years ago, a great treasure of Syriac Mss. was conveyed to the British Museum by Messrs Tattam and Pacho. We photographed it almost completely during our first visit to the Convent in 1901, but as some of our films came to grief in the process of development, we returned in the spring of 1902, and by accepting the kind hospitality of the Egyptian Salt and Natron Company at Bir Hooker, we were enabled once more to pitch our tent outside the gate of the Convent, and by making use of a dark room kindly lent to us by the monks, to change our film-cells several times, and fill up most of the gaps of our series in the space of a single day.
From Egypt, in 1902, we proceeded for the fifth time to Mount Sinai, and there, in the Convent of St Catherine, I copied, and we together photographed, four of the stories in Cod. Sin. Arab.539, from which Mrs Gibson had already drawn some of the texts edited by her in Studia Sinaitica, No.V.
When these photographs had been developed by us in Cambridge, I was disappointed to find that there were still several pages more which 1 had not secured. Four of these, ff. 41th , 43th , 49th and 103th , and some few lines elsewhere, I filled up very easily from two MSS. in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Fonds Arabc 75 and 81. But I found, to my great chagrin, that owing to a mistake I had totally neglected to take the last seven extant pages of the Deyr-es-Suriani MS. Without their text my list of apocryphal stories would have been incomplete; and I therefore applied to the distinguished Arabist, Professor Ignazio Guidi of Rome, to ascertain for me if an Arabic text of the Martyrdom of St James the Just exists in the Vatican Library. He replied by sending me a copy of the legend from the Roman Codex 694, and at the same time he offered to furnish me with the Martyrdom of St Paul, from the same MS.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
