NT Gateway Weblog

On the Forbidden Gospels Blog, April DeConick has an excellent call to learn Coptic, which I would like to second. If you are a graduate student on a Christian Origins type programme, I would particularly encourage you to get started on Coptic now, if possible. I have come to it late and have not always found it easy, but it is definitely worthwhile; I wish I had had the opportunity or encouragement to do it earlier. I don't yet think I would be competent to teach it formally and I am lucky in that we have down the road here at UNC Chapel Hill Zlatko Plese. One of his Coptic students, Ben White, led us in our Coptic lessons in the first half of our Gospel of Thomas course this last semester, and I was delighted to delegate to him for that part of the class, not least since he did a fine job. We used the Lambdin introductory grammar, which has been the standard, but the arrival of Bentley Layton's new grammar may change that in the future. Like April, I don't have my copy yet (you see, all these publishers get plugs for free here on the NT Gateway blog, and I don't even get copies of the books I plug, which is quite nice of me, I think).

Update (1 August, 00.32): Judy Redman comments and Daniel Foster writes the following (brought up from comments to this post):

Rick Brannan also offered an apology for Sahidic Coptic last fall, with some very specific examples of how a knowledge of Coptic is helpful in NT studies.

And since you're giving away free plugs...maybe you could throw in a plug for the electronic editions of Crum's Coptic Dictionary and the Sahidic Coptic Collection, which are struggling to attract enough interest to be put into production. :-)

Labels: Coptic

---

I am grateful to Ben White for drawing my attention to Bentley Layton's new book:

Coptic in 20 Lessons
Introduction to Sahidic Coptic With Exercises & Vocabularies

That link is to the Peeters catalogue on the book, which also has a table of contents (PDF). Up until now, the only realistic option for an introductory grammar was Lambdin, so I am excited about the new Layton book. I don't have a copy yet, but will report on it as soon as I have one. Amazon have it for $34. Layton is "the man" when it comes to Coptic, so the publication of this looks like very good news.

Labels: Coptic, Layton

---

Paterson Brown emails to make the following announcement:

After a half-year of most pleasurable work and a recent careful proof-read, our online edition of J.M. Plumley’s Introductory Coptic Grammar in both hypertext and MSWord is at last completed:

http://www.metalog.org/files/plum.html

It’s of course an exceedingly complex text, and so has had to be compared literally letter by letter. Plus I undertook the task of inserting dots between the word elements, in order to exhibit the proper parsing throughout. Even though the occasional glitch no doubt inevitably remains, at this point the text should be basically reliable.

See my previous comments here. This is a really welcome addition to the world of online Coptic resources. Personally, I love being able to see Plumley's own handwriting too; it's that real-life link to his Tottenham vicarage study in the 1940s.

Labels: Coptic, Plumley

---

Thanks to Paterson Brown for the note that the on-line edition of Plumley's Coptic Grammar has been revised. The major update is that a downloadable MS Word version is now available in addition to the original mimeograph version and the complete hypertext version, which has itself undergone revisions in presentation. Here is the main link:

J. Martin Plumley's Introductory Coptic Grammar

I must admit that I have not used this introductory grammar much myself, preferring the Lambdin introduction. But Lambdin is not that easy to get hold of and it is a little expensive, so this service over at Metalogos is a superb one, all the more so in the light of April DeConick's recent call for compulsory Coptic for all:

No one who studies early Christianity should be allowed to graduate with a Ph.D. without having learned Coptic. There are too many early Christian documents in Coptic for it to be considered just an "additional" language any more.

Update (Wednesday, 7.49): Judy Redman has comments, with links, in a post on Update on Plumley’s Coptic Grammar and other Coptic resources.

Labels: Coptic, Plumley

---