Tuesday, January 1, 2019

"I have guarded them, and none of them is lost"

"Much further north, east of Budapest, beyond the Danube frontier of Rome, a skeleton was found at Hács-Béndekpuszta that still clasped in its hands a [late 5th-century] leaden tablet inscribed with verses of the Gospel of Saint John taken from the Gothic translation of the Bible made by Bishop Ulfilas [(c. 311-383)].  They are the prayers of Jesus for protection for his followers (John 17:11-12):  'Holy Father, keep them in my name. . . .  I have guarded them and none of them is lost.'  The part-runic Gothic writing, held in the grave, gave mute protection to a 'barbarian' on the edge of the steppes of Eastern Europe, in the same way it would in the catacombs of Rome itself."

     Peter Brown, "A world winking with messages," The New York review of books 65, no. 20 (December 20, 2018):  53 (52-54).  Brown cites pp. 40-41 of Carla Falluomini, The Gothic version of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles:  cultural background, transmission and character (de Gruyter, 2015), which says that the skeleton was that of a young man, and that the tablet, first uncovered in 1955/1958 but since lost, was dated to the last third of the 5th century.  Only in 1996 was it recognized that the text it bore was that of Jn 17:11-12.
     Image is a scan of a scan of most of Plate 17 in D. Székely, "A lead tablet with inscriptions from Hács-Béndekpuszta," Mitteilungen des Archäologischen Instituts der Ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 7 (1977 [1978]):  41-43 and Plates 17-20 (which was published before the text had been deciphered, and compares it to the script of the Gothic Lord's Prayer in the University of Upsala's Codex Argentus).

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