tito orlandi - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by tito orlandi
The study of the socalled Nag Hammadi (= NH) codices has always been directed, from one side, to... more The study of the socalled Nag Hammadi (= NH) codices has always been directed, from one side, to each individual text, 1 and from the other, to the general significance of the collection for our knowledge of the religious doctrines and literary history of Late Antiquity. 2 So peculiar was even at a first glance the character of the texts, so unexpected was their discovery, that it was soon evident that at least part of the conventional wisdom on gnosticism and early Christianity had to be adjusted to cope with these new documents. This situation encouraged the vision of the codices, at least for certain purposes, as an homogeneous entity. In this paper I shall assume that this vision is reasonable, in spite of the otherwise right opinion, which is now generally accepted, that technically the codices, and consequently the texts that they contain, cannot be considered as homogeneous, and I shall explain the sense and motivation of this assumption. This presupposes that I briefly recapitulate the main issues at stake. Let me remind first, that James Robinson in his paper which introduced the celebration of the fifty years from the discovery 3 has indicated the three main novelties brought by the texts in the field of religious studies: the importance of the sect that can be called of " the Sethians " , and the possibility to understand its doctrinal character with sufficient precision; the renovated attention for the apocrypha, with the possibility to better investigate the intertestamental literature; the new perspectives introduced by the Gospel of Thomas in the study of the logia and the sources and formation of the canonical Gospels. To this it should be added the study of the linguistic features of the texts, carried on mainly by Nagel, Kasser, and Funk: it is well known how the landscape of the Coptic dialects and the opinions on the birth of the Coptic language have been radically changed 4 as a consequence of the new documents. In this regard some observations of Bentley Layton 5 on the sociolinguistic aspect of the question are possibly more important than the scarce reaction from other scholars might imply: " It is the kind of Coptic that might have been written by a speaker of A2 (Subachmimic) attempting to conform to the emergent 'neutral' or common dialect of the southern Nile Valley, Sahidic. " The intention by the authors to conform to certain social (in the broad sense) attitudes may have influenced the " natural " linguistic habits, which are the only ones generally taken into consideration. On the other hand, the question whether the NH codices may be taken as an individual collection, perhaps even as a library, or part of one library, rather than a fortuitous gathering of disparate entities, is still open. Alberto Camplani has recently written a lucid synthesis of the many stadies. 6 He explains the various elements brought into discussion: the evidence given by the cartonnage, the subsets recognized by means of palaeographic and codicological study, the colophons; and he lists the different hypotheses deduced from them, namely that the NH codices constituted a Sethian library, or an heresiological collection, or a monastic, or more specially a Pachomian library, etc. The best recent contributions on this subject are those by Clemens Scholten 7 (a monastic library; but his conclusions are not convincing) and Alexander Khosroyev, 8 who is totally sceptic of all the solutions, but does not propose a new one. In any case both contain a detailed list of the studies done so far.
The study of the socalled Nag Hammadi (= NH) codices has always been directed, from one side, to... more The study of the socalled Nag Hammadi (= NH) codices has always been directed, from one side, to each individual text, 1 and from the other, to the general significance of the collection for our knowledge of the religious doctrines and literary history of Late Antiquity. 2 So peculiar was even at a first glance the character of the texts, so unexpected was their discovery, that it was soon evident that at least part of the conventional wisdom on gnosticism and early Christianity had to be adjusted to cope with these new documents. This situation encouraged the vision of the codices, at least for certain purposes, as an homogeneous entity. In this paper I shall assume that this vision is reasonable, in spite of the otherwise right opinion, which is now generally accepted, that technically the codices, and consequently the texts that they contain, cannot be considered as homogeneous, and I shall explain the sense and motivation of this assumption. This presupposes that I briefly recapitulate the main issues at stake. Let me remind first, that James Robinson in his paper which introduced the celebration of the fifty years from the discovery 3 has indicated the three main novelties brought by the texts in the field of religious studies: the importance of the sect that can be called of " the Sethians " , and the possibility to understand its doctrinal character with sufficient precision; the renovated attention for the apocrypha, with the possibility to better investigate the intertestamental literature; the new perspectives introduced by the Gospel of Thomas in the study of the logia and the sources and formation of the canonical Gospels. To this it should be added the study of the linguistic features of the texts, carried on mainly by Nagel, Kasser, and Funk: it is well known how the landscape of the Coptic dialects and the opinions on the birth of the Coptic language have been radically changed 4 as a consequence of the new documents. In this regard some observations of Bentley Layton 5 on the sociolinguistic aspect of the question are possibly more important than the scarce reaction from other scholars might imply: " It is the kind of Coptic that might have been written by a speaker of A2 (Subachmimic) attempting to conform to the emergent 'neutral' or common dialect of the southern Nile Valley, Sahidic. " The intention by the authors to conform to certain social (in the broad sense) attitudes may have influenced the " natural " linguistic habits, which are the only ones generally taken into consideration. On the other hand, the question whether the NH codices may be taken as an individual collection, perhaps even as a library, or part of one library, rather than a fortuitous gathering of disparate entities, is still open. Alberto Camplani has recently written a lucid synthesis of the many stadies. 6 He explains the various elements brought into discussion: the evidence given by the cartonnage, the subsets recognized by means of palaeographic and codicological study, the colophons; and he lists the different hypotheses deduced from them, namely that the NH codices constituted a Sethian library, or an heresiological collection, or a monastic, or more specially a Pachomian library, etc. The best recent contributions on this subject are those by Clemens Scholten 7 (a monastic library; but his conclusions are not convincing) and Alexander Khosroyev, 8 who is totally sceptic of all the solutions, but does not propose a new one. In any case both contain a detailed list of the studies done so far.