Hymn to God. Miracles of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ (Ethiopia, 19th century)

MS 228

A book in a bag

This manuscript easily fools one into assuming it is much older than its (at best) 200 years. It contains two separate works, a hymn to God (fols 4r-7r) and Miracles of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, commonly known as The Miracles of Jesus (fols 8r-30v). The latter has survived in around eighty manuscripts, of which the earliest date from the 15th century while most were produced in the 19th and 20th centuries (Witakowski, p. 280). It is a collection of episodes from Jesus’s life, which He, so the introduction, told the Apostle John, making it ‘one of the fullest and longest […] apocryphal gospels’ (Witakowski, pp. 279, 285). The Ethiopian text is not an original, but a translation of the Arabic Apocryphal Gospel of John with some deviations and additions from other sources (Witakowski, pp. 290-8). The St John’s copy recounts thirty of the forty-two miracles.

Both texts, the hymn and the miracles, are written in Ge‛ez, also called Classical Ethiopic. The original consonants-only writing system was probably adopted from a South Arabic Sabean/Minean script with some influences from the Greek alphabet (Haile, pp. 569-70). Vowel signs were added to the script’s twenty-six consonant letters at a later stage, possibly due to a rise of second-language users coinciding with the arrival of Christianity in Ethiopia (Haile, p. 571). Instead of speaking of an alphabet, however, it is more appropriate to understand Ge‘ez characters as units of consonant-vowel sequences. Much like Latin, Ge‛ez has survived only as a liturgical language.

Unfortunately, it is not known how this manuscript came to St John’s College. It arrived in a (now) dark-brown leather satchel into which the book fits so snuggly that it must have been made for it. A strip of printed cotton, presumably a bookmark, has remained between folios 14 and 15 (the first miracle).