Friday, December 31, 2021

Carmel McCarthy on the dating of Chester Beatty MS 709

  

The vellum manuscript acquired by Sir Chester Betty in 1957 contains a total of seventy-five folios and consists of two clearly distinct sections. The first ten folios reproduce an exchange of letters between Severus of Antioch and Julian of Halicarnassus relating to the corruptibility or incorruptibility of the body of Christ, while the remaining sixty-five folios contain a substantial portion of Ephrem’s Diatessaron Commentary. The parchment is consistently thick in this first part, whereas in the second it is sometimes thick, sometimes thin. Leloir observes that since the writing in this first part is a mixture of the Estrangela, Nestorian and Serta scripts, and contains certain distinctive orthographic features, it should be dated several centuries later than the second part, probably in the eighth or ninth century. The script in the second part is Estrangela, and Leloir dates this part of the manuscript to the end of the fifth or beginning of the sixth century, at the latest. He cites certain peculiarities of script as a basis for this dating, and compares its script to that of MS Syriac Add. 12150 of the British Museum [written in Edessa in 411/412 AD] which contains writings of Clement of Rome. Titus of Bosra and Eusebius of Caesarea Valdivieso agrees with this dating, also citing MS Syriac Add. 12150, as well as three further MSS of a slightly labor period. (Saint Ephrem's Commentary on Tatian's Diatessaron: An English Translation of Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709 with Introduction and Notes [trans. Carmel McCarthy; Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement 2; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 2000], 28)