GOSPEL OF SAINT JOHN

New Zealand Times, Volume L, Issue 11652, 17 October 1923, Page 11

GOSPEL OF SAINT JOHN

THE COPTIC MANUSCRIPT A VALUABLE FIND. The object of transcendent interest in the exhibition of the British School of Archaeology in Egypt held at University College is a papyrus manuscript of the Coptic translation of the Gospel according to St. John. The manuscript was discovered at Qauel-Kebir, and i 9 about three parts complete. It was found doubled up and wrapped in linen cloth, and the evidence of the handwriting shows that its date must be approximately 400 A.D., so that it would appear to lie between tho two earliest Greek codifices, the Vatican and the Sinaitic. The leaves, of which there must originally have been about a hundred, have been straightened out by moistening with damp cotton wool, and many of them are in excellent condition. It is conjectured that it was a church book and buried for safety at the time of the Mohammedan invasion. So far it has not been deciphered, but it is plain that it differs in several ways from the orthodox text, and will be authoritative in so far as it will show what was the text of the Gospel as accepted by tho early Copts.

An iron dagger was found among copper weapons that can be assigned with .good probabilty to about 4000 8.C., and is probably tire oldest iron weapon yet discovered. The store of an ivory carver has been unearthed containing a number of partly completed toilet utensils dating from the Nineteenth Dynasty, and including a number of mineralised bodies, mostly from hippopotami, but also two species known only ■in Pleistocene times—a buffalo and’ a long-nosed crocodile. With them were portions of three human skulls, one of full size and two of pigmy size, of which the provisional date of 50,000 B.C. is assigned. It is believed that they were washed down from a higher plateau into a pool formed in the Nile valley antecedently to the retreat of the Nile. They constitute the earliest human remains as yet found in Egypt, and the fragments are sufficiently large for them to be studied usefully by anthropologists. In bulk the most interesting exhibit is that of the polished Ted ware howls which were manufactured between the Third 1 and the Fifth Dynasties. There are some sixty or seventy of these in excellent preservation, and the position in which they were found iD connection with abalaster vases and beads will form valuable material for obtaining relative dating. Evidences in the collection abound of the vanities of the life of the people from whom the relics were derived. There are, for example, vases designed for holding the coloured pigments that corresponded with the rouge stick of to-day, minors of many shapes and sizes, a remarkable slate palette with a handle used for grinding pigments, and worn by constant use, amulets of all shapes and sizes worked in various materials, including some remarkable pottery tracery, necklaces consisting ol heterogeneous objects strung together, and so forth. There are interesting specimens of tapestry, of scarabs, and of abalaster vases.