‘ … thereafter he shut the door’ Matthew 25.10c in the ‘Schøjen Codex’ – A Short Note

Abstract

In an earlier issue of this periodical attention was paid to the problem of retranslating a ‘versional’ text into a supposed Greek ‘original’.T. Baarda, ‘The Reading “Who wished to enter” in Coptic Tradition, Matt 23.13, Luke 11.52, and “Thomas” 39’, NTS 52 (2006) 583–91. The reason for that article was the ‘reconstruction’ of a quite extraordinary Greek text as the hypothetical source of an early Middle-Egyptian Coptic text of the Gospel of Matthew. This reconstruction was presented in the splendid edition of the Gospel of Matthew in Middle-Egyptian Coptic that was published by the late Professor Hans-Martin Schenke.H.-M. Schenke, Das Matthäus-Evangelium im mittelägyptischen Dialekt des Koptischen (Codex Schøjen) (Oslo: Hermes Publishing, 2001). The deviations of this ‘retranslation’ led Schenke to his daring thesis that the Coptic text was based on a Greek text that was completely different from our present Greek Matthew, being an independent translation of the Hebrew or Aramaic Gospel of Matthew mentioned by Papias. In this short note the reader will find another example of the problematic character of such retranslations.