Codex Askewianus

The Codex Askewianus , also known as the Askew Codex, is a Sahidic manuscript of several originally Greek Gnostic writings. The composite manuscript contains several works, including a text that was published under the name Pistis Sophia .

The codex takes its name from its previous owner, Dr. Anthony Askew , a doctor and book collector. It was bought by his heirs at the British Museum in 1785 and bears the signature MS. Add. 5114 and is now in the British Library . As can be seen from letters from his environment, Askew apparently bought the manuscript from a London bookseller, nothing is known about the further origin, but all indications point to an Egyptian origin of the manuscript.

The codex in quart format of 21 × 16.5 cm is written on parchment and contains 178 sheets and thus 356 pages, written in two columns of 30 to 34 lines. Overall, the manuscript is in exceptionally good condition, although pages 337–344 are missing. The handwriting changes in the middle of the factory. The first hand shows a fine, careful old uncial handwriting, the second hand a sloppy, clumsy handwriting with signs of trembling, which could indicate an old man as the scribe. Both scribes used different inks and different methods of pagination and correction, and had other peculiarities. Both scribes were probably contemporaries.

structure

Carl Schmidt divides it into four main parts, the first three belonging to a work and the gaps between the parts being later filled with material from other sources. The fourth main part is a separate work.

According to George Robert Stow Mead , there are several main parts:

The first part ends with chapter 62. For an unknown reason, more than one and a half columns remained empty, which were later filled with insignificant notes. The text then continues for no apparent reason. It is mostly secondary with "the first book of Pistis Sophia".
The next section is entitled “The Second Book of Pistis Sophia”. Schmidt suspects a later addition, because the older Coptic manuscripts do not have their title at the beginning, but at the end of a section, which stems from the older tradition of the scrolls. In fact, at the end there is a subscription entitled: "Part of the Books of the Savior". The following chapter 101 is a short piece on the unspeakable gnosis with no sections that completely interrupts the flow of thought. It is clearly a summary of another book.
Chapter 102 clearly changes the subject. Thus it is difficult to understand as an immediate continuation of the text.
In chapter 126 there is another break, prepared by a gap in the text. At the end of chap. 135 there is a subscription again. "Part of the Books of the Savior".
The next section goes from chapters 136 to 143.
After a gap of 8 pages, the next part begins in Chapter 144, it has neither a title nor a subscription. There is an appendix on the last page, with the last two lines subsequently deleted.

content

According to Mead it stands to reason that the parts chap. 30-64 are an insertion into the scriptures, so the codex is a miscellany manuscript.

It is a summary of an extensive literature. According to Mead, the title “the second book of the Pisits Sophia” wrongly gave the entire script its name, which however cannot be changed afterwards. Better would be "The Book of the Savior" or "Parts of the Book of the Savior". Whether the title also applies to the last part is still an open question. This font is a conglomerate of different scripts and not a copy of a single work. This summary should have already been available to the scribes in this form.

The script originally comes from Greek, which can be seen from the large number of loan words. Not only names, but also nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and even conjunctions remain untranslated. This applies to quotations from the Old Testament and New Testament as well as to the rest of the text. In some places the text slavishly follows the Greek sentence structure and forms long periods that are not common in Coptic sentence structure. Irenaeus had one of the similar documents in the Berlin Codex in Greek, which supports this assumption.

Although much is uncertain, there seems to be a consensus that the text and the underlying scriptures were created in an Egyptian environment, overlaid on Gnostic content that comes from outside Egypt, namely from Syria.

Dating

The dating of the composition is related to the question of which sect this book should be attributed to. In conversation are Valentinus or one of his disciples, the Barbelo-Gnostics with their various subgroups: Nicolaitans , Ophites , Cainites , Sethians , then the Archonists . On the other hand, libertinist Gnostic groups are out of the question. Accordingly, the dating spectrum ranges from the 3rd to the 7th century.

meaning

This code was one of the few related Gnostic texts that was not handed down by the Church Fathers and therefore out of a negative attitude. In addition to this, there was the Codex Brucianus and the Berlin Codex Berolinensis Gnosticus 8502 . These three writings, along with the quotations from the Church Fathers, formed the basis for Gnosis research from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century. Only with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi writings did the source situation improve significantly. One problem is still that it is Egyptian translations and revisions of the Greek scripts that have been lost in the original.

Individual evidence

↑ Schmidt Introduction §2, p. XI "This second hand is written more carelessly and clumsily and, based on the trembling features, suggests an older man."

expenditure

[1] Schmidt Introduction §2, p. XI "This second hand is written more carelessly and clumsily and, based on the trembling features, suggests an older man."