Thursday 16th March 9:00—10:30, Session 1
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| Overview of programme | ||||||
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Session: |
Translating Bible 3 |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 1 |
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Moderator: |
Ian Johnson |
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Paper 1: |
Biblical Apocrypha: The Role of the Harrowing of Hell Episode in the Margins of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 41 |
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Paper 2: |
Literacy as a Context of the Medieval Bible Translations into Polish |
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Paper 3: |
The Textual Lineaments of Three Medieval Identities: Reading Targum Sheni of the Book of Esther |
Biblical Apocrypha: The Role of the Harrowing of Hell Episode in the Margins of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 41
Patricia O Connor
This paper reconsiders a particular manuscript witness of the Old English Bede, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 41 (CCCC41), which continues to inspire scholarly discussion due to the surprising number of Old English and Latin texts that were written into the manuscript’s margins. The diverse nature of these marginal texts encompass Latin charms, masses, prayers and offices for the liturgical season as well as Old English charms, an extract from the Old English Martyrology, a fragment from the wisdom poem Solomon and Saturn and a number of biblical apocrypha. The objective of this paper is to examine the apocryphal Harrowing of Hell extract from the Gospel of Nicodemus homily which was written into the margins of CCCC41 from pp.295 - 301. The Harrowing of Hell extract describes the heroic events that occurred during the three days between Christ’s death and resurrection; namely, Christ’s descent into Hell, his battle and ultimate triumph against Satan and the fiends of hell, and culminates with Christ rescuing the souls of the righteous from Hell. The presence of this apocryphal homily in CCCC41 presents an intriguing textual relationship with the manuscript’s principal text, the Old English Bede; a relationship hitherto unacknowledged and unaddressed by scholarship. This paper contends that the marginalised Harrowing of Hell extract gains new significance when read within its immediate manuscript context in CCCC41.
This focus on the textual relationship between this peripheral apocryphal extract and the canonical ecclesiastical text that forms the centre of this complex manuscript will shed fresh insights into how these important texts were received by late Anglo-Saxon community.
Literacy as a Context of the Medieval Bible Translations into Polish
Tomasz Mika
The main purpose of the article is to answer the question about translating the holy text from Latin (literate culture, literate language) to Polish (oral culture, spoken language). What kind of problems had an anonymous mediaeval scribe, who could write in Latin and could not write in vernacular language (with no model of translation)? The syntax and semantic analysis of the Polish translations of the Holy Bible made it possible to identify the types of problems and to try to answer the most important questions.
The Textual Lineaments of Three Medieval Identities: Reading Targum Sheni of the Book of Esther
Leonard M. Koff
The Second Targum of the Book of Esther, a translation of, and radical commentary on, the Hebrew Esther, contains material about Solomon and Sheba not found in the Biblical Esther, but found in the Koran (Sura 27). Targum Sheni was probably
written in sixth-century Byzantine Asia Minor (most likely Palestine) before the rise of Islam and then used in Islam’s textual construction of itself as the theological heir of Temple, as well as rabbinic, Judaism: the Koranic account of Solomon
and Sheba islamicizes pre-existing Jewish additions to the Biblical Esther. In an analogous way, the inclusion of material about Solomon and Sheba in Targum Sheni reveals the patterns of rabbinic intertextuality that entail adding to,
and elaborating on, biblical texts to establish the boundaries of rabbinic Judaism. In addition, implicit anti-Christian references to Jesus in Targum Sheni — parodic references (glancing, but nonetheless clarifying for rabbinic Judaism)
— serve to continue separating Jewish and Christian self-identities. The wood, for example, of the tree
from which Haman hanged himself, becomes, in Targum Sheni, the anti-wood of Jesus’ crucifixion, wood that informs in Jewish
theological ways Haman’s punishment for his assault on Jewish existence; Haman’s gallows is not wood that is for Haman or others redemptive: he and Jesus are figurative Amalekites. Targum Sheni thus defines the dependent reasoning that
constructs aspects of theological identity, of communities of readership, persisting into the medieval world proper between Judaism and Islam, within Judaism itself, and between Judaism and Christianity.