True Stories and the Poetics of Textual Discovery
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/bsor.v45i2.28914Keywords:
Dead Sea Scrolls, Cairo Geniza, ManuscriptsAbstract
As we know from the Nag Hammadi saga, there is something enchanting about telling find stories. This enchantment is part of the very reason “getting the story straight” is so difficult when it comes to manuscript discoveries: every story worth its salt will be transformed in the telling, and stories that are alive are reactive. If one way to approach these stories is to debunk those aspects that are products of embellishment and myth, another is to attend precisely to their affective power, seeing them as a narrative genre in the longue durée. Using examples from both pre-modern find stories and narratives about the discovery of the Cairo Geniza and the Dead Sea Scrolls, this essay discusses what the find story genre can tell us about how we imagine our relationship with a fragmented past. True or legendary, such stories are always imaginative products. Attending to this dimension can reveal a poetics of textual discovery that is ancient and widely shared--a vital link between modern scholarship, public interest, and ancient myth.
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———. 1949. “The Alleged Antiquity of the Scrolls.” Jewish Quarterly Review 40: 57–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1453006.
———. 1950. “The Hebrew Scrolls: Once More and Finally.” Jewish Quarterly Review 41: 1–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1452769.
———. 1950. “When Were the Hebrew Scrolls ‘Discovered’: In 1947 or 1907?” Jewish Quarterly Review 40: 373–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1453121.
———. 1956-7. “The Dead Sea Scrolls: 1. The Lamech Scroll: A Medieval Midrash: 2. The Copper Scrolls: 3. Was Kando the Owner of the Scrolls?” Jewish Quarterly Review 47: 245–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1452953.
Cole, Peter. 2007. The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2012. The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Collins, John J. 2012. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9781400844609.
Denzey Lewis, Nicola, and Justine Ariel Blount. 2014. “Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices.” Journal of Biblical Literature 133: 399–419. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jbl.2014.0017.
Elliott, J. K. 1993. The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0198261829.003.0033.
Fields, Weston. 2009. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Full History, Volume I. Leiden: Brill. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004193741.
Goodacre, Mark. 2013. “How Reliable is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35(4): 303–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0142064X13482243.
Gibson, Margaret D. 1893. How the Codex Was Found: A Narrative of Two Visits to Sinai from Mrs. Lewis’s Journals, 1892–1893. Cambridge: Macmillan.
Hartranft, Chester D., trans. 1890. Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series. Vol. 2. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
Hoffman, Adina. 2012. “Imagining the Real.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 31: 47–64.
Hoffman, Adina, and Peter Cole. 2011. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. New York: Schocken.
Kotrosits, Maia. 2012. “Romance and Danger at Nag Hammadi.” The Bible and Critical Theory 8: 39–52.
Mroczek, Eva. 2016. The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Na’aman, Nadav. 2011. “The ‘Discovered Book’ and the Legitimation of Josiah’s Reform.” Journal of Biblical Literature 130: 47–62.
Nirenberg, David. 2011. “From Cairo to Córdoba: The Story of the Cairo Geniza.” The Nation, June 1. http://www.thenation.com/article/cairo-cordoba-story-cairo-geniza/.
Piovanelli, Pierluigi. 1993. “Les origines de l’Apocalypse de Paul reconsidérées.” Apocrypha 4: 25–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1484/J.APOCRA.2.301224.
Press, Michael. 2014a. “‘The Lying Pen of the Scribes’: A 19th Century Dead Sea Scroll.” The Appendix 2(3): http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/7/the-lying-pen-of-the-scribes-a-nineteenth-century-dead-sea-scroll.
———. 2014b. “Monumental Stupidity and Control of the Past.” Textual Cultures, Material Cultures. http://textualcultures.blogspot.com/2014/06/monumental-stupidity-and-control-of-past.html#more.
Rainbow, Jesse. 2012. “Textual Loss and Recovery in the Hebrew Bible.” PhD diss., Harvard University.
Reeves, John C. 1999. “Exploring the Afterlife of Jewish Pseudepigrapha in Medieval Near Eastern Religious Traditions: Some Initial Soundings.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 30: 148–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157006399X00037.
Reiner, Fred N. 1995. “C. D. Ginsburg and the Shapira Affair: A Nineteenth-Century Dead Sea Scroll Controversy.” British Library Journal 21: 109–27.
Soskice, Janet. 2009. Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels. New York: Knopf.
Tigay, Chanan. 2016. The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible. New York: Ecco.
de Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht. 1971 [1806]. Beitrage zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament. 2 vols. Hildersheim: G. Olms.
Zeitlin, Solomon. 1949. “Scholarship and the Hoax of the Recent Discoveries.” Jewish Quarterly Review 39: 337–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1453258.
———. 1949. “The Alleged Antiquity of the Scrolls.” Jewish Quarterly Review 40: 57–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1453006.
———. 1950. “The Hebrew Scrolls: Once More and Finally.” Jewish Quarterly Review 41: 1–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1452769.
———. 1950. “When Were the Hebrew Scrolls ‘Discovered’: In 1947 or 1907?” Jewish Quarterly Review 40: 373–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1453121.
———. 1956-7. “The Dead Sea Scrolls: 1. The Lamech Scroll: A Medieval Midrash: 2. The Copper Scrolls: 3. Was Kando the Owner of the Scrolls?” Jewish Quarterly Review 47: 245–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1452953.
Published
2016-07-06
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Mroczek, E. (2016). True Stories and the Poetics of Textual Discovery. Bulletin for the Study of Religion, 45(2), 21-31. https://doi.org/10.1558/bsor.v45i2.28914
