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Exploring the Ethiopic Book of the Cock, An Apocryphal Passion Gospel from Late Antiquity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2004

Pierluigi Piovanelli
Pierluigi Piovanelli
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
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Extract

The Mashafa dorho, or Book of the Cock, is an apocryphal passion narrative that survives in an Ethiopic () version, which in turn has clearly been translated from an Arabic Vorlage. The anonymous author describes it as an oral teaching (the terms are dersān, “homily, discourse,” and temhert, “doctrine, instruction”) that he or she received from the apostles themselves. One of the author's main concerns is to relate “in detail” (4:18) “all that has happened” to Jesus (4:8). At the end of the narrative, the author acknowledges his or her debt to John the Evangelist, who was—“in tension with, yet finally in harmony with Peter”—one of the foremost eyewitnesses to the events of the passion. Although a fragment of the Book of the Cock has long been known to Western scholars, and the entire work enjoys to this day a privileged place in the liturgy of the Ethiopian church, the antiquity of the traditions that it preserves has not been recognized; hence the claim to have “newly discovered” an apocryphal text, the origins of which lie in the fifth or sixth century C.E.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 96 , Issue 4 , October 2003 , pp. 427 - 454
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The present study stems from the preparation of a critical edition, with commentary, of the Book of the Cock, sponsored by the Association pour l'Étude de la Littérature Apocryphe Chrétienne (Geneva, Lausanne, and Paris) and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Ottawa). Parts of this study were presented at the annual meetings of the AELAC in Dole (France), June 2002, and of the SBL in Toronto, November 2002. It is a revised and expanded version of the introduction to the French translation—the first rendering of the Book of the Cock in any contemporary language—that will be published in Pierre Geoltrain and Jean-Daniel Kaestli, eds., Écrits apocryphes chrétiens, vol. 2 (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade; Paris: Gallimard, forthcoming). The division of the text into chapters and verses used here follows the division adopted in that translation. Unless otherwise stated, translations of biblical texts follow the RSV. I would like to express my gratitude to Alessandro Bausi (Naples), François Bovon (Harvard), F. Stanley Jones (Long Beach), Enrico Norelli (Geneva), and to Rémi Gounelle, Jean-Daniel Kaestli, and Claudio Zamagni (Lausanne) for their constant support and insightful suggestions. Thanks are also due to Elizabeth Parton and Steven Scott (Ottawa), as well as to Gene McGarry (Harvard), for helping me to improve my English prose.