A Corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic, vol. III: The Forty Martyrs of the Sinai Desert, Eulogios, the Stone-Cutter, and Anastasia.

• Author: FITZMYER, JOSEPH A.
• Position: Review

A Corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic, vol. III: The Forty Martyrs of the Sinai Desert, Eulogios, the Stone-Cutter, and Anastasia. Edited and translated by CHRISTA M[ddot{U}]LLER-KESSLER and MICHAEL SOKOLOFF. Groningen: STYX PUBLICATIONS, 1996. Pp. [v] + 138. $57.

This volume is the first to be published in a new series being devoted to writings in Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA). M[ddot{u}]ller-Kessler published in 1991 a new grammar of this form of Aramaic, Grammatik des Christlich-Pal[ddot{a}]stinisch-Aram[ddot{a}]ischen, Texte und Studien zur Orientalistik, vol. 6 (Hildesheim: Olms). As an editor of the new Corpus, she is joined by M. Sokoloff, who is the author of A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University, 1990). Volume I of the Corpus was devoted to the CPA text of the Old Testament and Apocrypha (1997), and volume II will have the New Testament Gospels and Epistles from an early period. Volume III now presents the CPA text of three biographies mentioned in its title.

These lives were published earlier in this century by the twins Agnes S. Lewis (who purchased the manuscript in Cairo in 1906) and Margaret D. Gibson, The Forty Martyrs of the Sinai Desert and the Story of Eulogios, Horae Semiticae, vol. 9 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1912). M[ddot{u}]ller-Kessler and Sokoloff now build on their work and the corrections of it that had been made by E Schultess in a review. They also add six fragments that were independently published by Schulthess (1902) and H. Duensing (1906), along with other unpublished fragments that have been kept together with the manuscript in Westminster Theological College, Cambridge.

The bulk of the volume...