Under the name of Macarius the Egyptian, the great solitary from the desert of Scetis, have circulated numerous homilies, letters and other literary pieces which are sometimes labeled together as the “Macarian corpus.” I have recently identified some new fragments which belong to this corpus, yielding significant information about its transmission history in the languages of the Christian Orient.

The manuscript tradition of this vast and composite corpus of writings is very complex. In Greek, the spiritual works attributed to Macarius were transmitted in four different collections, about which we are poorly informed before the 11^th century. What is more, parts of the Macarian corpus came to us under different guises in Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic and Georgian. The Arabic version, usually referred as “collection TV,” is attested by several manuscripts. Referring to the importance of the Arabic translation,[1] Marcus Plested rightly remarked in his book The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition:

The Arabic Collection TV contains, in addition to elements from Collections I, II, and III, material that is not duplicated elsewhere. There is no extant Greek witness for the form of this Collection. The TV Collection is attributed to Symeon the Ascetic or to Symeon the Stylite.[2]

I should like to point out that, as it appeared recently, the form of the Arabic collection is attested as well by a Coptic (Sahidic) manuscript.[3] I think this document is quite valuable as it allows us to infer that the form of the Arabic collection TV existed before in Coptic.

So far, I have been able to identify three leaves from the Sahidic codex which contain the spiritual homilies of Macarius, but I hope that a systematic search of the deposits of Coptic manuscripts will bring to light further remnants. The original provenance of the manuscript is the library of the White Monastery, situated in Upper Egypt, on the western bank of the Nile. The codex in question can be perhaps dated around the year 1000 AD. Here are some details concerning the fragments identified thus far:

A) A parchment bifolio (i.e. two conjugated leaves), which is kept in the National Library “Vittorio Emanuele III” in Naples (call number IB.16, ff. 4-5).[4] These two folios (paginated 131-132 and 145-146) were mistakenly included by Émile Amélineau among the works of the Coptic monk Shenoute of Atripe,[5] and his attribution went unchallenged for a long time.[6] However, Stephen Emmel counted them among the dubia in his magnum opus concerning the Shenoutean literature.[7]

The text of the Naples sheet corresponds to the Macarian Homily 26 of the Collection III (no. 13 in the Arabic collection TV), which is readily accessible in the French translation made by Father Vincent Desprez for the Source Chrétiennes series.[8]

B) A fragment in Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (call number BnF Copte 102, f. 12), which is paginated 179-180. It contains a portion of the Homily 6 of the Collection III (no. 16 in the Arabic collection TV).

The pagination of the surviving fragments points out that our manuscript is a new witness of the tradition represented until now only by the Arabic collection TV. There are sixteen folios missing in the lacuna between pages 146 (the verso of the second Naples leaf) and 179 (the recto of Paris 102, f. 12). The stichometry indicates that six of the missing leaves contained the end of homily 13 and the beginning of homily 16 (according to the order in the Arabic manuscripts), leaving just enough space for the homilies 14 and 15. It becomes thus likely that the Arabic collection of Macarius’ homilies must go back to a Coptic model represented by the newly identified fragments.