Nag Hammadi Deutsch, 1. Band: NHC I,1-V,1: Eingeleitet und ubersetzt von Mitgliedern des Berliner Arbeitskreises fur Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften

Abstract

Nag Hammadi Deutsch, 1. Band: NHC I1,-V,1: Eingeleitet and iibersetzt von Mitgliedern des Berliner Arbeitskreises fur Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften, ed. Hans-Martin Schenke, Hans-Gebhard Bethge, and Ursula Ulrike Kaiser. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2001. Pp. xxi + 397. C98,00. This impressive volume, containing a German translation of the first half of the Nag Hammadi Codices with introductions and notes, is the best one-volume treatment that has yet appeared in any language, a striking instance of the tenacity of the German scholarly tradition through thick and thin. Berlin has, for over a century, been the leading center of scholarship in the fields of Gnosticism and Coptology. Technically speaking, the present volume is a continuation, within the overarching series Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten (drei) Jahrhunderte (1897-), of the subseries Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften, whose first volume, containing the Askew and Bruce Codices, was edited by Carl Schmidt in 1905. It was published in Leipzig under the auspices of the KirchenvaterKommission of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. The most recent fourth edition appeared in 1981 under the auspices of the Kommission fur spatantike Religionsgeschichte of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The reunification of Germany in 1989-90 has led to still another reorganization: The present second volume of the subseries Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften is number 8 of a Neue Folge of the whole series, sponsored by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in agreement with the Patristic Commissions of seven German Academies of Sciences. Forthcoming soon will be the other half of the Nag Hammadi Codices, as volume 2 of Nag Hammadi Deutsch, volume 3 of Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften. The series is now no longer published by the Akademie-Verlag in Berlin, but rather by Walter de Gruyter of Berlin and New York. The Berliner Arbeitskreis fur koptisch-gnostische Schriften was organized on an informal basis in East Berlin by Hans-Martin Schenke together with his students. Beginning already in 1958-59, translations by Johannes Leipoldt and Schenke of all of Codex II that was available at the time appeared in the Theologische Literaturzeitung. These were followed, on the basis of transcriptions I supplied, by Schenke's working circle in 1973-78, followed by a series of dissertations. The plan to publish their translations as volumes 2 and 3 of Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften was announced by Schenke at the founding meeting of the International Association for Coptic Studies in Cairo in 1976. So the present volume has been under way for more than a quarter of a century. The work of the Berlin group, initially aided by the sharing of material from the UNESCO photographs of the Nag Hammadi codices that I secured and transmitted to Berlin in draft transcription and translation (prepared by the English-language team I organized), has in more recent years been aided by the French-language Nag Hammadi project at the University of Laval, in Quebec, Canada: La Bibliotheque copte de Nag Hammadi. This was launched on the basis of the same draft transcriptions and translations, but has gone well beyond them, with fresh collations on the basis of the originals in Cairo, to produce critical editions of each tractate with commentaries. Not only has Schenke himself been a visiting scholar at Laval, but also the leading Coptologist of the Berlin group, Wolf Peter Funk, has joined permanently the Laval team, where he has provided a major resource for the French edition. As a by-product of the main Laval project, he has organized a Concordance des textes de Nag Hammadi, which is a series of massive volumes containing computerbased analytic concordances of each codex. Since the Coptic spelling in Nag Hammadi texts was not yet standardized when the texts were originally translated from Greek into Coptic and then copied and recopied in Coptic, the root of a given word in a tractate, and hence its meaning, was at times ambivalent. …