TurretinFan is upset about a Coptic MS. misattributed to Athanasius

Papyrus Bodmer VI, showing Proverbs 6:10 – 17 in Coptic. ca. 4th century; “public domain

Note: The image above is not the Homily of the Papyrus of Turin but a Coptic manuscript of the Old Testament. I have it up there because it’s free to use and is a Coptic manuscript of the same century as HPT. I clarify this here lest Mr. X accuse me of being deceptive and passing it off as a genuine image of the manuscript under discussion below. If the reader is interested, a genuine image of that manuscript can be found here.

he crack apologist and fivepoint Calvinist who calls himself “TurretinFan,” and who is known to us as Mr. X, first got upset about this manuscript in 2008. Then, he got upset again in 2009. Now in 2021, after a blogging sabbatical of six weeks, he has decided to let us know that he is upset again. Maybe that explains his absence; in his mental unrest, he couldn’t bring himself to log onto his blog and has spent the days in severe prayer. I don’t know.

It’s not hard to imagine why Mr. X is so upset; the mansucript in question is the “Homily of the Papyrus of Turin” [HPT]. The (lost) original dates to around the 4th century—the one extant manuscript is from the 6th—and Catholic apologists like to cite it as an early example of Marian veneration:

O noble Virgin, truly you are greater than any other greatness. For who is your equal in greatness, O dwelling place of God the Word? To whom among all creatures shall I compare you, O Virgin? You are greater than them all O Covenant, clothed with purity instead of gold! You are the Ark in which is found the golden vessel containing the true manna, that is, the flesh in which divinity resides.

That would be enough to upset any Calvinist. But Mr. X is upset because he doesn’t think Athanasius wrote it; and it’s not right, he says—it may even be downright ugly mendacity—for apologists like Jimmy Akin and Steve Ray to say that Athanasius wrote it: even though Coptic scholars once upon a time happy attributed it to him. For example, in 1958, the Belgian Coptologist Louis Theophile Lefort published a text of the manuscript with the title L’homélie de S. Athanase des papyrus de Turin.

MAY 8, 2008

Mr. X, whose identity and credentials remain unknown to this day, is aware of Lefort (for why wouldn’t he be?) and cites him in his blog article of May 8, 2008. He has a whole list of reasons he’s unconvinced by the peer-reviewed journal Le Museon:

The title, he says [HPT], “is not itself frightfully reassuring. It suggests attribution to Athanasius based on a single copy (probably in Coptic-Sahaddic not Greek) from the 6th century or so.”
HPT was, he says, “unknown to the Western Church as part of the Athanasian corpus” prior to its identification as such in Le Museon.
HPT is cited frequently by “popular Roman Catholic apologists … especially because of its discussion of Mary.”

Well, okay, I suppose. All this could suggest something; or not much at all. The fact that ancient manuscripts would exist in only a single copy is entirely common. It’s also entirely common for scholarly thinking on authorship to change with time. It’s entirely common for scholars to attribute some works to a whole list of possible authors. King Leir, a possible source for Shakespeare’s play (note the variant spelling “Leir”) has been variously attributed to Thomas Kyd, Richard Greene, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, Anthony Munday, and even Shakespeare himself. No one agrees who wrote it or if we can know. But we do know it’s not a forgery.

And Mr. X does not question the authenticity of HPT (at least not in 2008 he doesn’t). He doesn’t say why it would matter if someone other than Athanasius wrote it. He doesn’t say why it matters that it’s in Coptic rather than Greek. (It’s a copy, after all; the original may have been in Greek.) Indeed he claims (or pretends to be) agnostic about the whole thing. He’s just curious; he’s just asking questions:

I wonder whether any of the Catholic apologists who have been citing this work … have any defense of its authenticity. I’m guessing that each of them got the citation from some secondary source or other (perhaps even tertiary, as Lefort appears to have provided his translation in French), and did not perform any research as to the authenticity of the quotation.

Nevertheless, my guess could be wrong, and I’d be delighted to be mistaken. I don’t mean this article to suggest that I’ve definitively proved the spurious nature of the quotation, but simply given the reader good reason to question its authenticity. If there is another side to the argument, I’d love to hear it.

March 3, 2009

But then, one year later, on Dr.* James White’s site, Mr. X got upset again, and this time said that HPT is a “spurious quotation.” Not just the attribution of it to Athanasius is “spurious,” but the quotation itself! He doesn’t suggest who the forger was, or whether Jimmy Akin found a DeLorean and went back in time to plant the manuscript in Alexandria. And he lashes out at the supposed dishonesty of Steve Ray and William Albrecht, who quote from HPT as though it were genuine:

Sadly, rather than correct his error and be honest with his readers, Mr. Ray has chosen to pretend the problem doesn’t exist, directing his readers, once again, to the video musings of Mr. William Albrecht.

All of a sudden latterly agnostic Mr. X has become strident and bombastic about HPT:

[W]hen Rome’s apologists try to defend their spurious works [You’d think Fr. Pacwa forged the thing; I mean, he does know Coptic.] with irrelevant, inaccurate, or misleading argumentation, one wonders whether they even care about the truth. One hopes that Mr. Albrecht’s video post can be chaulked up to youthful zeal rather than a malicious wish to mislead his viewers. Likewise, we can presume that Mr. Ray simply doesn’t take his own work’s integrity seriously enough to defend his citation of a spurious work, instead directing his readers to a video that we can be sure he did not fully research for accuracy.

Mr. X insists on conflating two separate questions: Whether HPT itself is “spurious,” or only the claim that St. Athanasius wrote it. It’s as though he thinks that, unless Athanasius can be shown to have wrote it, a forger must have.

But what is Mr. X’s evidence, which he thinks Steve Ray and William Albrecht care nothing for?

First, Mr. X says that HPT “is not to be found in any standard list of Athanasian works.”

But that would call into question only its authorship, not its authenticity as a Coptic text. The Gnostic Gospel of Judas doesn’t appear in any standard list of the biblical canon—not because it’s a forgery but only because it’s not inspired. Arden of Feversham doesn’t appear in any of the collected works of Shakespeare because no one seriously thinks that Shakespeare wrote it. But someone in the late sixteenth century did (probably Thomas Kyd).

Second, Mr. X says that the manuscript exists in only one text.

But, as I pointed out above, that’s entirely common with ancient manuscripts and hardly proves anything one way or the other about HPT’s authenticity. The only thing it proves is that it’s an ancient manuscript.

Third, Mr. X says one would expect a Catholic who believes in Marian veneration to be attached to HBT because it articulates what they already believe.

But that’s not an argument; that’s an expression of bias. I could just as easily say that HPT’s Marianism is the reason one would expect Mr. X to be upset with it. That kind of “argument” works both ways.

Fourth, Mr. X says that Lefort himself refused to claim that Athanasius wrote HPT merely because his name was at the top of the manuscript.

But that proves that Lefort is a careful scholar who does not wish to claim more than the evidence suggests. It proves that the authorship, not the authenticity of the manuscript is in question.

“The weight of the scholarly evidence,” Mr. X grandly concludes, “is that the work is spurious, and Mr. Albrecht has given us no reason to doubt that consensus.”

But Mr. X has cited no such consensus. At best, he has informed us that the authorship of HPT is in doubt. He has cited reasons why Catholic apologists should clarify that the authorship of HPT is not settled. That’s it.

November 1, 2021

And now, this month, Mr. X is upset again. Catholic apologists, he says are “still [Still!] citing the work because of what it says about Mary.” He notes that the Clavis Patrum Graecorum identifies HPT as “doubtful.” He also cites the French biblical scholar Simon Claude Mimouni, who in 1995 wrote: “It is difficult to consider the attribution [to Athanasius] to be genuine.”

I am at pains to point out, once again, that what Mimouni disputes here is the attribution. And indeed, Mr. X himself admits that patristics scholar Robert Caro (not to be confused with the LBJ biographer) proposes that Didymus the Blind wrote the HPT. Well now!

We can consult the valuable Catholic Encyclopedia and learn who Didymus the Blind was. He was a fourth-century theologian in Egypt, associated with St. Athanasius. He was a strong opponent of Arianism and “perfectly orthodox” in his Christology.

He was early placed at the head of the famous catechetical school of Alexandria, over which he presided for about half a century. St. Athanasius highly esteemed him. The orator Libanius wrote to an official in Egypt: “You cannot surely be ignorant of Didymus, unless you are ignorant of the great city wherein he has been night and day pouring out his learning for the good of others. He is similarly extolled by his contemporaries and by the historians of the following century, Rufinus was six years his pupil. Palladius visited him four times in ten years (probably 388–398). Jerome came to him for a month in order to have his doubts resolved with regard to difficult passages of Scripture. Later ages have neglected this remarkable man.

So we don’t have a case of a “spurious work” at all, only a case of uncertain authorship. Which is it, Mr. X? Even if Athanasius did not write the text, it’s possible an associate of Athanasius did. And that may explain how the saint’s name got at the top of the manuscript. It was in the Athanasian school, if you like. The true author, if not Athanasias, was probably not some theological renegade trying to burden the Church with heresies about Mary and claiming that Athanasius taught these things. More likely, the author was a fully orthodox and respected associate of Athanasius who was expressing authentic teaching about the Blessed Mother.

Mr. X concludes with a characteristic flourish of extravagance:

From the standpoint of historical theology, keep in mind that the veneration of Mary is something that grew over time. [I know of no serious Catholic apologist who would deny this. This is not exactly news.] It is not an apostolic tradition, nor does Scripture teach us to venerate Mary in the sense that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox ask us to do. We can describe her as being blessed by God in the sense that Scripture says, and we can also affirm her apparent role as one of Luke’s eyewitnesses for the Gospel of Luke. That said, the cult of Mary is entirely inappropriate.

All of which is a classic example of someone who has proven something quite modest but who thinks he has proven something spectacularly large. I am happy to concede that Catholic apologists should be more careful, when citing the HPT, to note that its authorship is uncertain. But apparently Mr. X thinks that he has proven that the “cult of Mary” is a fraud, which is nonsense. That would be like an historian discovering that a document has been misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, and then claiming he had proven that equality is really only a very recent idea in American politics and we probably ought to discard it.

That’s the kind of thing Mr. X does.

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