Griffith's Old Nubian Lectionary

In preparing this revision of F. LI Griffith's edition of the Old Nubian Lectionary, I have endeavoured to eliminate the numerous faults in the original publication. In addition to frequent errors in transcription, the text contains restorations that are often anomalous or unsuited to the space available. The reader is not always told how extensive a lacuna is, or when the size is given, it may require adjustment. At times Griffith did not accurately signal the presence of a lacuna: either he misplaced brackets or omitted them altogether. Further, he did not usually indicate how many lines of text he assumed were missing from the end of one page to the beginning of the next, if such indications do appear, they are not necessarily accurate. In addition, Griffith was not overly careful in reproducing the supraliteral marks, thereby obfuscating an orthographic system which is more clearly in evidence in the Lectionary than is any of the other Old Nubian texts now available. In my commentary to the revision I note all the instances where I depart from the text of the edition princeps and whenever necessary I show why the changes were made. All restorations which I introduce into the text I attempt to justify or at least to explain in the notes. I have sought to be more accurate than was Griffith in indicating supraliteration, in measuring lacunae, and in gauging the amount to text presumed missing between pages. Since Griffith did not include a translation, our chief clue as to how he understood the Nubian lies in the interlinear Greek version which he added to his transcription. Not infrequently his version is misleading. After much hesitation I have decided to juxtapose to the Nubian text what could have been its Greek model, but I must urge extreme caution in making deductions from it. I follow the text of Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece and introduce variants only when the Nubian seems to warrant it. But the Nubian version is not always literal, and its interpretative tendencies make it unrealistic to assume that we can in every case reconstruct the underlying Greek (see e.g.104.6-7 ad Rom 11:26 and 112.10-11 ad Gal 4:5).