Critical Edition of the Sahidic Gospel of John

The Coptic version is the most important ancient translation of the New Testament. The Sahidic version is within this language for most of the books of the New Testament (and als o for the Gospel of John) outstanding. This is due to both the age of the translation and also the number of manuscripts attesting the Gospel of John in this dialect. The Sahidic version belongs (on princ iple) to the Alexandrian form of the text of the New Testament. It gives, however, witness to many important variants. The translation from Greek into Coptic started already around the end of the second century. However, Greek manuscripts from the time before the end of the persecutions, that is from before the beginning of the 4th century, are very rare. Thus, the Coptic version of the Gospel of John gives witness to rare variants of the Greek texts used for translation. The aim of this project has been to use all known and available manuscripts of the Sahidic Gospel of John to create a comprehensive critical edition of this important ancient translation of the Gospel of John. For this all known and available manuscripts of this text in the Sahidic dialect have been used, that is to say, 172 manuscripts; 5 are fully preserved, 5 almost fully preserved and the res t are fragmentary manuscripts. The results of the proposed project are first and foremost, but not only important for Coptology. They will provide Coptologists with a modern tool to study the Sahidic text of Johns Gospel. They will also be a new basis to understand this text in the context of Egyptian Christianty during the first millennium.