A note on becoming a footnote to an endnote
Update 05/01/2024:
It look like the endnote in the official Polish edition, given to Anna for the translation, is misleading, but not in the way we originally thought.
What is now clearer is that the endnote if trying to refer not the Gospel of St Thomas, but to the entirely different and much whackier Infancy Gospel of Thomas, probably written in Greek in the 2nd century and of which various later mediaeval versions do exist, though no ur-text.
While the Infancy text, narrating the life of Jesus as a child, has long been regarded as heretical (some of the stories in there put a, erm, very different slant on Jesus), and it doesn’t really count as a gospel, it appears that it was actually quite popular in Slavonic areas into mediaeval times. While there is no dog -domesticating going on in these versions, I understand Anna thinks it’s much more likely that folklore oral additions such as one given by Rocho in his tale to villagers, were in keeping this ‘Jesus as child’ tradition, rather than to the then lost Gospel if St Thomas.
So Anna is taking the matter forward with mediarevalists rather than patricists, and remains keen to research further.
………………
I’ve been reading Władysław Stanisław Reymont’s magnum opus Chopli (The Peasants), a lyrical but realist study of only slightly post-feudal Polish peasant life in the late 19th century. It was written between 1897 and about 1904, and more or less won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924. It remains a staple classic in Poland, though has been a bit ignored elsewhere, though a new English translation by Polish Brit Anna Zaranko does a great job in bringing it to a wider audience. Obviously, I’m reading Anna’s translation because my Polish language journey is only just beginning.
Imagine my surprise then, dear reader, when I came upon this surprising endnote (see pic) about a story told to the villagers by the wandering pilgrim Rocho, all about how Jesus domesticated the first dog.
For, as you will well know, not only does the fragmentary and non-canonical Gospel of St Thomas ‘discovered’ in the Nag Hammadi Library amongst a cache of Coptic MSS make no direct reference to Jesus domesticating a wild dog (Burek by name in Rocho’s tale); the MSS itself was also only discovered in 1945, 31 years after the death of the author, and half a century or more before the time the author was writing about.
Intrigued, and encouraged both by Mikołaj Kirschke, a very courteous Bluesky-Pole with perfect English, and by the famous East European film critic Michael Brooke, who dug out the Facebook profile of the translator, Anna, I wrote to Anna and asked if this was actually just a mistake on her part, or even a little joke to see if anyone actually reads all the end notes.
I did not expect a reply. Anna messaged back within fifteen minutes and said she too was intrigued. It was New Year’s Eve, and she was at her desk translating.
It turns out that the end notes in her translation are a mix of her own useful explanatory comments about Polish culture of the time and notes that were added to the official Polish edition that she had received when she was commissioned. She had simply translated the note and not, I assume, not queried too hard whether it made sense or not.
So she got to work. She had already emailed Prof Marina Warner, historian and mythographer, about Rocho’s stories in general, and the later is intrigued, so the former may email the latter more specifically about this story.
In the meantime, she’s already had feedback on her filling out of my original question from patristics scholar Andrew Louth (emeritus professor of patristic and Byzantine studies in the Department of Theology & Religion of Durham University), who backs Anna’s working hypothesis that Reymont actually had some access to mediaeval Slavonic tales or writings that may have their roots in earlier 2nd or 3rd century Christian lore, though (this is my guessing) Reymont’s ‘access’ may have been via tales he heard during his rural upbringing or some such.
How this then ends up with a pithy note from a Polish editor simply saying that the tale is from the Gospel of St Thomas is still beyond us (maybe it was their little joke!), but the whole idea that we may have stumbled on some mad tangled route back towards some kind of MSS which is related to the 1945 Gospel of St Thomas but has never been recognized as such, and may or may not be discoverable, is thrilling, if that’s the kind of thing that thrills you, especially as it comes serendipitously at a time when scholars at the University of Poznan are currently digitizing a whole bundle of Old Polish apocryphal texts and opening them to the public.
Anna is also, via Andrew Louth seeking to enlist the support of Francis Watson, another Professor in the Department of Theology & Religion at Durham University, who is apparently an expert on early apocryphal texts.
Heh, it’s all a long shot, but it’d be nice to think that my curious reading habit (i.e. reading all the notes carefully) ends up as a footnote in a scholarly article about an endnote. I’d like being a handy footnote to an endnote on my gravestone. It’d kind of fit my life.
