Alin Suciu here discusses a Coptic leaf found in a Syriac manuscript from Saint Mark’s Monastery in Jerusalem that I came across a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to him for his remarks!
A couple of weeks ago, Adam McCollum (Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Minnesota) sent me the photograph of the recto of a paper leaf written in the Bohairic dialect of Coptic. The fragment was used as an endpaper in a ca. 15th-16th century Syriac codex from the Monastery of Saint Mark in Jerusalem (shelfmark no. 64). Adam came across the fragment while cataloguing the Syriac and Arabic manuscripts in this location.
Upon inspection, it appeared to me that the leaf preserves a portion from the Martyrdom of Macrobius (clavis coptica 0286). According to Coptic hagiography, Macrobius was a bishop of Nikiou (Pshati) martyred under Diocletian.[1] The new fragment recovered from the Syriac manuscript is important because only one other fragment from this martyrdom has survived. Thus, in 1949, the Bollandist Paul Devos published a similar Bohairic leaf from the Martyrdom of Macrobius, which…
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