A New Saying of Jesus

[Peter Kirby]

http://www.bricecjones.com/blog/a-new-s ... s-agraphon

An interesting little parchment fragment kept in the Montserrat Abbey in Spain has just been published in Sofía Torallas Tovar and Klaas A. Worp, ed., with the collaboration of Alberto Nodar and María Victoria Spottorno, Greek Papyri from Montserrat (P.Monts. Roca IV) (Barcelona: 2014). I will say more about this excellent volume at a later time, but I wanted to comment on one of the fragments published in it for the first time.

P.Monts.Roca 4.59 is a Christian Greek text of unknown nature. The editors tentatively date it to the fifth/sixth century on palaeographical grounds. It is oblong and written in a fairly well-trained hand. Both sides are inscribed; there are traces of another text on the hair side, so presumably it is a palimpsest. The text is certainly Christian, but it is difficult to know precisely what kind of text we are dealing with. Some of the phrases are similar to phrases found in several homiletic texts (e.g., Cyril, Chrysostom, and Didymus), so a homily is at least a good possibility.

In any case, perhaps the most interesting feature of the text is that it contains a new saying attributed to Jesus. In other words, it is an agraphon: a saying of Jesus that is not found in the canonical gospels. The saying is in bold in the text reproduced below. The text that comes immediately before the saying seems to have been influenced by Matt. 15:13/Is. 61:3 LXX. The "plantation of God" is probably just a metaphor for "the people of God." But what does it mean for the plantation of God to be "retained to pronounce sweet words?" The editors point to a similar phrase in Diodorus' Comm. Ps. 49.19b, but that is equally obscure. All the same, the saying is a nice little addition to the agrapha and we are indebted to Torallas Tovar and Worp for bringing this little fragment to our attention.

"We all
pray
to be the plantation
of God. (...),
not [
plantation [
our judge
and savior
stated saying,
"It has been
retained
to pronounce
sweet words."
___
Like
this:
to provide
in a sensible
and intelligible
way the
profit
resulting
from
both and...
..."

"...of the hater,
of the ugly, and
changing the
most graceless
gloomy thing/person
through his good
providence
putting
an end to
the most painful
sufferings
....."

This translation also appears to be possible:

"Those things that are sweet to say have been retained."

[outhouse]

Ok so we have a new reflection of followers from the fifth/sixth century.

Nothing here other then to know how the movement evolved at a much later date.

[Peter Kirby]

Ok so we have a new reflection of followers from the fifth/sixth century.

Nothing here other then to know how the movement evolved at a much later date.

While it's nothing to go crazy over, strictly speaking, that's not certain either.

After all there was a time before scholars had access to all the manuscripts they do now, of the New Testament, but they didn't make the assumption that the New Testament was from the fifth through fourteenth century... and good on them for that much.

Many classical authors are still extant only in manuscripts dating after 1000 CE.

I.e., the date of the manuscript is only a consideration towards the terminus ad quem for the date of the original.