Yesterday I came across a Syriac manuscript written in 1992—yes, just 18 years ago—that was copied from an 1184/5 manuscript, i.e. a leap of eight centuries!
It’s a hagiographic ms containing the stories of Jacob of Nisibis, Ephrem, and Awgen. In addition to the 12th c. ms, it was compared (according to the colophon) with a ms. “apparently of the 15th generation of the Lord”.
It was copied at Dayr Al-Za’faran, where it remains, and the older copies were there, it seems, in 1992, but are so no longer.
Finally, believe it or not, the manuscript is written on the empty lines of a Turkish-English-German calendar book!
The ms date is given in the colophon in AD (and the calendar book itself is for 1992), and the date of the early exemplar is also given there as 1496 AG (= 1184/5 AD).
Pearse is one of those first people to champion Stephen Carlson's efforts to disprove the Mar Saba document. Just the mention of homosexuals drives Pearse to distraction. At the top of almost every conspiracy which argues that the Mar Saba 'must' be a fake is the fact that the manuscript was preserved in a relatively modern book. We come across this in Carlson's work and more recently in Tselikas's report to BAR.
'Why wouldn't the copyist have preserved the document on a fresh piece of paper?' Surely paper was no scarcer at this monastery than at Mar Saba. What then is the reason that two monastic copyists would have preserved an ancient MS in a modern book? I don't know but my inability to explain things never leads me to conclude that the phenomenon in question must be artificially contrived. I don't walk around with false assumptions about the infallibility of my own intellect.
I am always prepared to admit I don't understand things when I first come across them. I am not God. I am just a guy from Scarborough, Ontario with a lot of spare time. Of course it seemed strange at first that an ancient manuscript might have been preserved inside of a relatively modern book. Yet here we have another example and yet another reason NOT to believe that the Mar Saba document was a forgery ...
