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Papyrus Berolinensis 20 915)1 SETHIANISM AND THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION IN A PARTIALLY RESTORED COPTIC CODEX (PAPYRUS BEROLINENSIS 20 915)1 For about a century, the Papyrus Collection of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin has had among its holdings the remnants of a mysterious papyrus codex that has simply been referred to as the “Coptic Book.” Its highly standardized Sahidic text is written in a fine literary hand of the 4th century. However, it was always a closed book. There has been a mystery not only as to its author and its contents, but also as to the circumstances of its discovery. No record about its provenance or original acquisition seems to exist. As to its state of preservation, the “book” did not look like a book at all, since it consisted almost entirely of a big pile of about 2500 unassembled, more or less small individual fragments. It might have been due to these discouraging circumstances that, for decades, the manuscript — after initial transcriptions of a few fragments — was abandoned and almost completely forgotten. But in more recent years, extensive work has been done in order to prepare it for publication2. Though the reconstruction of the text is still far from complete, light at the end of the tunnel is slowly emerging. For the now- restored 246 fragmentary pages give a fairly clear impression about the character and content of the text. They support the view that this is not only a difficult text, but also a quite interesting and probably very im- portant witness to the development of early Christian theology. There- fore it seems to be both advisable and prudent not to wait until the task is completed — and hold this manuscript back until its editio princeps is ready — but to make accessible already certain pages with especially 1 This essay is based on a speech given at the 1998 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Orlando, Florida. 2 See the previous reports presented at the fifth and sixth meetings of the Internatio- nal Association of Coptic Studies (IACS) in Washington, D.C., 1992, and Münster, Germany, 1996: G.S. ROBINSON, Codex Berolinensis P 20915: An Initial Survey, in D.W. JOHNSON (ed.), Acts of the Fifth International Congress of Coptic Studies, Washing- ton, D.C., August 12-15, 1992, vol. 2, Rome, 1993, p. 369-379; and G.S. ROBINSON, Codex Berolinensis P 20915: A Progress Report, in S. EMMEL, M. KRAUSE, S.G. RICH- TER, S. SCHATEN (eds.), Ägypten und Nubien in spätantiker und christlicher Zeit: Akten des 6. Internationalen Koptologenkongresses, Münster, 20.-26. Juli 1996, Band 2 (Sprachen und Kulturen des Christlichen Orients, Band 6, 2), Wiesbaden, 1999, p. 169- 177. 240 G. ROBINSON interesting phenomena or problems, and to ask the scholarly public for help in solving at least some of the many mysteries3. The difficulties of this text are mainly due to its fragmentary state of preservation, not to mention the loss of the original sequence of the leaves (since no pagination is extant except the number 152 on one of the fragments). The pages now at hand still do not result in a coherent text. What we have really makes sense only on the assumption that it was originally a much larger work. Judging by the remnants, it must have been a theological treatise that betrays highly speculative philo- sophical thinking on a great variety of topics, mainly connected with problems that result from interpreting Scripture. Its cardinal themes ap- pear to be God’s creation and God’s wrath. This raises the question as to whether the entire codex could have been composed of more than one tractate. There is indeed one page that shows a break in the text with horizontal lines inserted as separation. This could be where one tractate ends and another begins. The other al- ternative would be that this treatise simply had two cardinal points that are somehow linked to each other, since God’s wrath might have been discussed as the consequence of the transgression after creation. That God had second thoughts over having created humans is at least ex- pressed on one page by quoting Gen 6:7. This could make it appear more likely that the break indicates two different chapters of the same tractate. However, the attempts to restore the original sequence of thought, that is to say the sequence of the pages, has thus far not been very successful4. In addition to these problems, we neither know the author nor the title of the work, nor do we know of allusions to it in some other work, much less do we have an actual copy of the same text. One would, of 3 In this regard, there has already been prepared an article as a pre-publication of certain pages: H.-M. SCHENKE, Der Barnabasbrief im Berliner “Koptischen Buch” (P. Berol. 20915), in Enchoria, 25 (1999), p. 53-75 (= SCHENKE, Barnabas). See also H.-M. SCHENKE, Das Berliner “Koptische Buch” (P. 20915) und seine Geheimnisse, in ZÄS, 126 (1999) p. 61-70 (= SCHENKE, Koptisches Buch). 4 Of course, it is always possible to group some leaves together, not only by the simi- larity of their profiles — that is to say by the shape of the fragments where the breakage occurs — but also by their content. But for the entire codex, there is no conclusive result in sight, since on the one hand certain motifs occasionally overlap or seem to be repeated in different contexts, and on the other hand the profiles of the pages often do not comply with the sequence based on the content. At least any attempt to reconcile both ordering systems (according to the profiles and to the content) have failed thus far. The possibility that the pages might have been out of order already in antiquity (before most of the break- age occurred) only complicates the potential difficulties faced in restoring the manuscript. It is, of course, also conceivable that some single leaves even within the extant part of the codex are completely lost. SETHIANISM AND THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION 241 course, understand the extant fragments much better, and could recon- struct much more of the codex, if the complete text were at our disposal in any language5. As far as we know, this work, originally composed in Greek, is extant only in this one copy of the Coptic translation. Perhaps a colleague will be able to identify it elsewhere. One would hope that such strange and provocative thoughts as our text contains would ring a bell, if anyone has encountered them somewhere else. All the evidence gathered thus far points to a world of thought in the vicinity of Alexandria. Indeed, the text seems to give rather early testimony to some variety of Alexandrian Christian theology. Perhaps it falls somewhere in the trajectory of Philo → Valentinus → Cle- ment → Origen → Silvanus (in its final version as found in NHC VII,4). Even though we do not know the author, we do get a glimpse of him from the way he quotes not only what is now normative Scrip- ture, but also — on the same level of authority — what are now consid- ered non-canonical texts. Some of these quotations are quite unusual. There is, for instance, one from the Kerygma Petri, if our restoration of the text here is indeed correct6. Only Clement, Valentinus’ pupil Heracleon, and Origen appear to have known the Kerygma Petri at all. Clement uses it as an authentic writing of Peter — as did Hera- cleon, according to Origen — whereas Origen himself doubted its au- thenticity7. In general, the author not only discusses his often very speculative problems by appealing to Scripture itself, he also argues in terms of many other theories of various theologians or schools of thought. However, precisely because of the extremely fragmentary state of the pages, it is not always obvious whether a teaching that comes to light through the restoration of the text is really a teaching by the author, or one that he only reports, in order to correct or repu- diate it later (in the lacunae of the text, or on the pages that are lost). One of these concepts is the “teaching of the Sethians,” a phrase that occurs on one of the larger fragments, together with some specific 5 Fortunately, the text does contain a large number of sometimes extensive quotations that — once identified — facilitate the reconstruction of the text of at least some of the pages. 6 For the exact quotation and the problems connected with it, see SCHENKE, Koptisches Buch, p. 67-68. 7 Other signs in our text, such as the occurrence of the word cektws (“culpable”), rather point to Origen. According to Liddell & Scott, this adverb is not unique in ancient Greek profane literature. Yet regarding patristic literature, Lampe lists only Origen, though the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae lists (next to eleven times attested in Origen) one instance each in four other authors of the patristic period, as follows: Eusebius Scr. Eccl. et Theol., Gregorius Nazianzenus, Eustathius Scr. Eccl., and Alexander Aphrodisiensis Phil. 242 G. ROBINSON names from the pantheon of this school. Such a surprising occurrence, of course, poses automatically the question of the relationship of our text to Gnosticism on the one hand, and to the heresiologists on the other, a question that only further research can answer. It seemed there- fore appropriate to select this immensely interesting passage with its im- mediate context for a special pre-publication. The context, however, is precisely the problem, since there are still so many uncertainties regard- ing the codicological reconstruction. The following five restored pages, therefore, are presented only in the sequence that seems the most prob- able according to our current understanding.
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