Manuscript Tradition
Scholars disagree whether the original language of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas was Greek or Syriac, based on the finding or lack of badly-translated Greek or Syriac vocabulary or idiom. The few surviving Greek manuscripts provide no clues in themselves, for none of them date before the 13th century (James), while the earliest authorities, according to the editor and translator, Montague Rhodes James, are a much abbreviated 6th century Syriac version, and a Latin palimpsest at Vienna of the 5th or 6th century, which has never been deciphered in full. There is such an unanalysed welter of manuscripts, translations, shortened versions, alternates and parallels, that James found that they have prevented an easy accounting of which text is which. This number of texts and versions reflect the work's widespread popularity into the High Middle Ages.
Read more about this topic: Infancy Gospel Of Thomas
Famous quotes containing the words manuscript and/or tradition:
“This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound off with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest effort of the evening.... It may be remarked, in passing, that the number of compositions in which the word “beauteous” was over-fondled, and human experience referred to as “life’s page,” was up to the usual average.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)