volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

374 Antiquity of the Coptic Version of the Bible.
and this Christian could not have been buried there
for some considerable period after that. I was able
to see enough of the Coptic text of the MS. to satisfy
me that the writing and style of page were different
from anything of the kind I had ever seen before, and
I therefore took careful note of everything in the tomb
which might help me to date the MS.
In March, 1911, I handed the MS.^ over to Sir F. G.
Kenyon, who submitted it to a careful examination
palaeographically, and found great difficulty in assigning
an exact date to it ; but he decided that it was older
than any other Coptic document available for comparison.
There the matter stood until the MS. was taken to pieces
and each leaf mounted between two sheets of glass.
On foil. io8b and 109A there was a short composition
written in Coptic, but in a cursive Greek hand, and this
Sir F. G. Kenyon was able to date with practical certainty.
He compared the writing with that of a large
number of dated Greek papyri, and decided that it was
written about the middle of the fourth century. He
says : " This gives a terminus ante quern for the Bible
text, which otherwise one would hardly have ventured
to place so early. Since the character of the mistakes
in this Codex (see pp. xviii ff., xxxi ff.)^ is such as to
preclude the possibility of its being an original transla-
tion, it is fair to argue that the version [Sahidic] itself
must, in all probability, have come into existence before
the end of the third century ; while it may, of course,
be yet older. Our MS. therefore tends to support the
earlier rather than the later of the dates that have been
assigned to the origin of the vernacular Bible in Egypt."
Now, if this composition on foil. io8b and 109A was
written about the middle of the fourth century, it follows
that the MS. itself must have been written at an earlier
period. Hence it is now certain that copies of some of
the Books of the Old and New Testaments, written in
^ Now Brit. Mus. Orient. No. 6803.
' The references are to the pages of the Introduction to my edition
of the Coptic texts in the Codex ;
of Upper Egypt, London, 1912.
see Coptic Biblical Texts in the Dialect