The Teachings of Sylvanus (Nag Hammadi Codex VII, 4): Text, Translation, Commentary.

• Author: Good, Deirdre

This edition of a text known both within the present work and to readers of The Nag Hammadi Library in English as "Silvanus" (hereafter Silv) presents the text and a translation. Commentary on the text makes up the bulk of the book wherein the text is examined in the light of six areas. Summaries of these are then given in six excursus (on biblical material, Philo, Stoa, Platonism, Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi texts, and patristic texts). Greek and Coptic indices conclude the work. For bibliographical references, the reader is referred to the edition of Janssens, Les Lecons de Silvanos (Quebec: Laval, 1983).

For the purposes of this review, the text was checked against the 1972 facsimile edition, the 1983 edition of Janssens, and the version given at the end of Regine Charron, ed., Concordance des textes de Nag Hammadi: Le Codex VII (Sainte-Foy: Laval, 1992). [See next review (ed.).] Comparable translations by Janssens (French) and Peel and Zandee (English) for J. M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988) were also used.

Silv belongs in form to ancient sapiental literature wherein teacher speaks to pupil as father to son. Wisdom, including wisdom christology, is an important theme of this Christian wisdom text. Passages from the Bible are given a "Hellenistic" interpretation along the lines of Philo and Origen. Zandee believes the text to have been written by an author of average ability in the Alexandrian school of Christian interpretation. The work nevertheless shows Stoic influence in ethics and anthropology.

The Coptic text of Silv corrects several errors of Janssens by noting some caught in a review of that text by W.-P. Funk (BiOr 45 [1988]: 18-24). Typographical errors that remain include 86, 19 (for [Greek Text Omitted] read [Greek Text Omitted]); 96, 26 (for [Greek Text Omitted] read [Greek Text Omitted]); 114, 30 (for [Greek Text Omitted] read [Greek Text Omitted]); 115, 31 (for [Greek Text Omitted] read [Greek Text Omitted]); 116, 26 (for [Greek Text Omitted] read [Greek Text Omitted]).

Zandee's Coptic text does not include the morpheme dividers (apostrophes) present in the facsimile edition and in Charron's edition of Codex VII. These marks facilitate word division and reading (the apostrophe marks the conclusion of a form consisting of two or more phonemes). Some superlinear strokes are preserved, while others are not. No explanation for the principles by which the translation...