Over at Hypotyposeis, forgery-hunter extraordinaire Stephen Carson looks at The Secret Sayings of Ye Su and asks some interesting questions:
[W]hat's a Greek text doing in Tang-dynasty China? Furthermore, if it belongs to the Tang-dynasty era (618-907), why was it written in the long-extinct Koine Greek, instead of the Atticizing Byzantine Greek or, even more appropriately, in the Syriac dialect used by the Nestorian Christians who actually visited China? Why does this text seem so relevant to modern concerns (e.g. “such topics as the place of women and gays within the community”)?[. . .]
Why would a Chinese-provenanced text be written on a material that comes from Egypt instead of paper, which they invented? For that matter, why was this text written on a scroll instead of a codex, which superseded the scroll in the fourth and fifth centuries?
And that's just based on the blurb!
Posted by Ben Brumfield at June 29, 2006 06:16 AM