Important manuscripts of the Greek New Testament and other early Christian writings are held by institutions in Alexandria. This report provides an update on the current location and identification of these documents, including the ‘Akhmim Fragment’ of the Gospel of Peter. It also gives preliminary information about four witnesses to the Greek New Testament which have now been added to the official register. These comprise a tenth-century catena manuscript of the Gospels (GA 2937) and three gospel lectionaries (GA L2477, L2478, and L2479).
Beacon of learning and cradle of text-critical scholarship, the city of Alexandria on the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea to the west of the Nile Delta has historically played an important part in the transmission of Greek literature. Although changes in population and politics have affected the character of the modern city, it remains home to a number of important Christian manuscripts. Some of these, in fact, have only recently arrived in Alexandria, while four are witnesses to the Greek New Testament which had not previously been included in the standard register, the Kurzgefasste Liste.
This article has been prepared and published as part of the CATENA project, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 770816). Professor Houghton’s travel was funded by the University of Birmingham College of Arts and Law Research and Knowledge Transfer Fund.
1 The present article provides information gathered from the inspection of artefacts in February 2018 at two significant institutions, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. On the basis of this, the details of several manuscripts in catalogues and scholarly editions should now be updated, and the newly registered witnesses to the Greek New Testament may be further examined both as artefacts and as evidence for the biblical text. It is also possible that the resources described in this article may lead to further discoveries in these collections.
The ancient library of Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy I Soter in the third century bce , was destroyed during the Roman period. In 2002, a new library and cultural centre known as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina was opened in a prominent position on the city’s seafront close to where its predecessor is believed to have been located. Many of the library’s holdings came as donations from other institutions. According to its senior staff, the library itself currently holds no Greek manuscripts. However, on one of the lower floors of the building there is an Antiquities Museum presenting artefacts found during the construction of the building alongside a wide range of items of Egyptian cultural heritage. Its holdings include 80 papyri, 30 from Oxyrhynchus and several from other collections (P.Fay., P.Fouad, P.Cair.Masp., and P.Cair.Zen.). Most are in Greek, including various fragments of Menander (P. Oxy. VII 1013, X 1235 and 1236, P. Oxy. XIII 1605), Euripides’ Orestes (P. Oxy. IX 1178 and XIII 1616), the histories of Herodotus (P. Oxy. XI 1375) and Thucydides (P. Oxy. X 1245), a commentary on the latter (P. Oxy. VI 853), and multiple texts of Homer’s Iliad (P. Oxy. VIII 1087 and XV 1820; P. Fay. 141, 160, 209 and 309); there are also two fragments of Vergil’s Aeneid (P. Oxy. VIII 1098 and P. Fouad 5, the latter bilingual). All of the papyri were acquired from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 2001, and since then have been assigned a new shelfmark as they form part of the permanent collection of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Antiquities Museum (BAAM). A full, illustrated inventory of the holdings of the museum, including these papyri, is available online at .
Among the Oxyrhynchus papyri transferred to Alexandria are two witnesses to the Greek New Testament. P. Oxy. VII 1008 ( P 15), a single page containing 1 Cor. 7:18–8:4 probably copied in the third century, is now identified as BAAM 0543. P. Oxy. VII 1009 ( P 16), featuring parts of Philippians 3–4, may have come from the same manuscript: its present shelfmark is BAAM 0544. In addition, the Antiquities Museum now holds GA 0242, fragments of two pages from a fourth-century parchment codex of the Gospel according to Matthew. This appears in the inventory as BAAM 0513. A further papyrus formerly in the Cairo Museum is described as ‘Prayer of a Christian Woman’ (P. Cairo Cat. 10696, now BAAM 0505). Of the six extant lines of this sixth-century document, the last two quote the openings of the Gospels according to Luke, John, and apparently Matthew, making this a non-continuous witness to the New Testament text (Var 26 in Aland’s Repertorium). 3
The most substantial Christian manuscript held in this collection is BAAM 0522. Its previous shelfmark was P. Cairo 10759, and it is also known as the ‘Akhmim Fragment’. A parchment codex, of which 33 folia are extant, this is the principal witness to the apocryphal Gospel of Peter and also contains chapters 1–27 of 1 Enoch, part of the Apocalypse of Peter and the Martyrium of Julianus of Anazarbus. Extensive attempts to locate this important manuscript in 2010 failed—despite a note in the Leuven Database of Ancient Books that one page of the manuscript was on display in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina—with the result that Paul Foster notes in his critical edition of the Gospel of Peter that ‘the codex is now missing’. 4 In February 2018, the authors not only saw two bifolia of this manuscript on display in the Antiquities Museum, but, after telephone permission had been granted from the Ministry of Antiquities, were shown the rest of the codex. This is stored in the metal cabinet immediately under the display case in which the selected leaves are on show, with each bifolium preserved between glass plates. The museum’s ownership of the document is confirmed by the database, which includes colour images of four pages. 5 There do not appear to be any further Greek Christian documents in the collection: despite some inaccuracies in the database, this remains a very helpful tool for tracing papyri formerly in Cairo which are now permanently held in Alexandria. 6
Situated in the premises of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, in the ancient part of the city, the Patriarchal Library holds over 500 manuscripts and almost 3,000 early printed books, as well as several thousand modern volumes. It was home to the famous Codex Alexandrinus (GA 02; London, British Library, Royal MS 1 D VIII) before its presentation to King James I by Patriarch Cyril Lucaris in 1624. In subsequent centuries, wars and political turbulence meant that the library's holdings were often moved between Alexandria and the patriarchal residence in Cairo (Haret el-Roum), with consequent loss of material. Patriarch Meletius II Metaxakis was responsible for the establishment of the library in its current location in 1928.
The standard catalogue of the Patriarchal Library is that of Theodoros Moschonas, partly reproducing the work of Nikolaos Phirippides, his predecessor as librarian. The first edition (1945) combines Phirippides’s descriptions of manuscripts 1–380 with Moschonas’s shorter entries for 381–518 and an index. 8 A second edition, published in 1965, reproduces an adjusted copy of the 1945 catalogue with typescript annotations and information on manuscripts 519–37. 9 This was prepared by Jacob Geerlings in conjunction with a project to microfilm selected documents of this collection. In the last fifty years, however, little work appears to have been undertaken on the patriarchal holdings. A project at the University of Helsinki begun around the year 2000 planned to produce a new catalogue, in conjunction with the conservation and digitization of the collection, but this seems to have been abandoned. 10 In recent years, there has been a small-scale project to send codices for restoration at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. A subcatalogue by Nikolaos Tzoumerkas of 57 Byzantine manuscripts (i.e. those copied between the tenth and fifteenth centuries), based on the descriptions in Moschonas, was published two years ago. 11 This indicates that the current system of shelfmarks still corresponds to the first number printed in Moschonas’s catalogue. Our experience at the library, however, revealed that difficulties may persist in identifying and locating items: we learnt that the collection has a tendency to become disordered during the periods when the librarian is resident in Thessaloniki. In addition, the manuscripts are kept in less than optimal conditions: we were not permitted to enter the store because of health concerns, and mould and bookworm were in evidence even in recently repaired documents. Improvements to storage facilities are therefore urgently required, along with digitization to assist with the wider use and long-term preservation of this archive.
Prior to our visit, the Kurzgefasste Liste listed ten continuous-text manuscripts of the Greek New Testament held in the library of the Greek Patriarchate in Alexandria. 12 Changes in shelfmarks between the first and second editions of the printed Liste suggest that some reference had been made to Moschonas’s catalogue, but this was not fully implemented, as shown in Table 1.
Of the ten registered manuscripts, it was possible to verify seven in person. Three of these require updating of the shelfmark in the Liste (GA 81, 904, 1302): although details of former shelfmarks have been provided for reference in Table 1, these do not form part of the current identifier. The other three manuscripts mentioned in the Liste could not be verified on our visit. The early fragments of Mark (GA 080) had been stored separately in the librarian’s office. Last seen in 2016 or 2017, they could not be located on our visit and no photographic record was available. 13 Moschonas notes that the Alexandrian portion consists of two leaves, containing Mark 9:14–20 and 10:23–9; the librarian recalled there being six fragments preserved between glass. The thirteenth-century Pauline catena manuscript GA 2205 could not be identified in Moschonas’s catalogue: the current MS 87 is a copy of Aristotle, no item has the former shelfmark 87, and there is no entry for a Pauline catena of this date or size. In addition, no photographs of this witness are held by the INTF: the entry in the Liste appears to rely on the description in von Soden. 14 Further research for the CATENA project by Georgi Parpulov, however, has identified this manuscript as GA 2659 (Athens, Benaki Museum, MS 8), which matches von Soden’s details of a copy of Theophylact’s catena on Paul written on paper beginning at Rom. 3:25. GA 2205 must therefore be removed as a duplicate. The description of GA 2208 given in the Liste records simply that it consists of sheets glued together as part of a binding, on which 2 Cor. 11:23–7 is visible. This may relate to MS 372 (formerly MS 317, which is the shelfmark given in the first edition of the Liste), but there is no mention of this in Moschonas, who simply notes that the manuscript is an incomplete copy of a set of ecclesiastical canons. In favour of the identification, however, is the similar size of the pages. Unfortunately, we were not able to inspect this manuscript on our visit.
Continuous-text Greek New Testament manuscripts in the Patriarchal Library of Alexandria