Coptic language

The History of Joseph the Carpenter.

The original language of this history is Coptic.

From the Coptic, it was translated into Arabic.

The Arabic was published by Walon in seventeen twenty-two, with a Latin translation and copious notes.

Walon's version has been republished by Fabricius, and later in somewhat amended form by Thilo.

Chapters fourteen through twenty-three have been published in the Sahidic text by Zoega in eighteen ten, with a Latin translation, and more correctly by De Laurier in eighteen thirty-five, with a French translation.

Tischendorf employs various arguments in support of his opinion that the work belongs to the fourth century.

It is found, he said, in both dialects of the Coptic.

Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers.

I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helms, and today we're going way back in time for this week's author, who wrote on papyrus in Coptic script sometime around the 3rd century CE in Egypt.

Yeah, this manuscript went undiscovered for many centuries, eventually turning up in Cairo in the late 1800s, a find that Indiana Jones could only have dreamed of.

After making its way to Berlin, fate kept impeding the publication of this document.

Our guest today, Sarah Parkhouse, is a religious historian at the University of Manchester whose research focuses on the emergence of Christianity within the Greco-Roman Egyptian context.

She writes about canonical and non-canonical gospel literature, as well as gender papyrology and martyrdom.

Sarah is the co-editor of the book series Coptic Gospels and Associated Texts and the author of the 2019 academic monograph, Eschatology and the Savior, the Gospel of Mary Among Early Christian Dialogue Gospels.

Sarah, welcome to the show.

We have portions of it in Armenian.

We have a version of it in Coptic.

And The Book of the Rolls is one of these translations.

It's both a translation and sort of a new work.

Now, that being said, you know, with Pista Sophia, you know, we had to wait until 1851 to even to get a Latin translation.

And the first guy to translate it into English, G.R.S. Mead, didn't know Coptic.

So he translated from the Latin.

So it's a translation of a translation.

I'm giggling like an idiot.

Well, you're a language nerd, so why not? So this is his address to monks rendered from Coptic, Coptic, C-O-P-T-I-C, which is a, I actually know a Coptic.

One of my teammates at the gym is Egyptian and he's a Coptic Christian.

Yeah, I love him.

I think he passed away recently.

So the Nag Hammadi scriptures were found in a specific ancient dialect of Coptic, and he's pretty much the only person in the world who was fluent in that language just to translate these

texts.

So he wrote this text that compiles most of the major ones, and then he has really great introductions and descriptions about what they are.

Maybe it's better in Greek.

Well, we have it all in, yeah.

Bentley Layton, the scholar, says, I can't imagine how great it was in Greek because we have it in Coptic translated.

Oh, right.