The Nuhra Project:
The Odes of Solomon

The Odes of Solomon: The Nuhra Version (2021) is the product of an extensive collaboration between Semitic and Indoeuropean languages expert and award-winning Holocaust scholar Samuel Zinner, PhD, and author Mark M. Mattison, an independent scholar of early Christian texts. Together we’ve launched The Nuhra Project, a collaborative partnership dedicated to promoting awareness, study, and appreciation of the second-century Odes of Solomon. It’s a multidisciplinary, interfaith, holistic project, embracing both academic research and artistic expression – a celebration of the core spirituality of the Abrahamic religions. The heart of our project is the The Odes of Solomon: The Nuhra Version (2021), which we’ve committed to the public domain. It may be freely copied and used, in whole or in part, for any purpose. The Odes of Solomon: The Nuhra Version (2021) Annotations, which detail textual variants and explain our translation choices, are Copyright © 2021 Samuel Zinner, edited by Mark M. Mattison.

Likely completed early in the second century CE in Syria, the Odes of Solomon have been preserved in three languages: Coptic, Syriac, and Greek.

The five Coptic odes are quoted in Codex Askewianus (B.M. MS. Add. 5114), a fourth- or fifth-century CE leather Coptic manuscript containing a text titled Pistis Sophia. (1) Officers of the British Museum purchased it from Dr. Anthony Askew in 1785. (2) These odes, copied from an earlier Greek or Coptic text, are particularly noteworthy for including Ode 1. Pistis Sophia is therefore the only extant witness to Ode 1, as the first two odes are missing from the Syriac. The following odes are quoted in Pistis Sophia: Ode 5:1-11 in ch. 58; Ode 5:12-15 in ch. 59; Ode 1:1-5 in ch. 59; Ode 6:8-18 in ch. 65; Ode 25:1-12 in ch. 69; and Ode 22:1-12 in ch. 71.

The Syriac odes have been preserved in two manuscripts. Cod. Syr. 9 (Ms H), composed sometime between the thirteenth and fifteen centuries CE, (3) is missing the first three leaves, which contained the first two odes and part of the third. The pages of this manuscript had been stacked in the office of J. Rendel Harris for at least two years before he went through them in 1909 and realized they contained the long-lost Odes of Solomon. (4) Codex Nitriensis (B.M. MS. Add. 14534), dating to the ninth or tenth century CE, (5) contains Odes 17:7b – 42:20. It was brought from an Egyptian monastery to England by Dr. H. Tatum in 1843, but the pages containing the Odes of Solomon weren’t identified until 1912. (6)

Finally, a Greek copy of Ode 11, simply titled “An Ode of Solomon,” has been preserved in pages 57 through 61 of the Papyrus Bodmer XI, a third- or fourth-century Greek papyrus found in 1952 near Dishna, Egypt and currently conserved in the Bodmer Library in Cologny, Switzerland. The Papyrus Bodmer XI is noteworthy as the only extant Greek manuscript containing any of the Odes of Solomon. Particularly noteworthy is the presence of several lines (vv. 16c-h and 22b) which are not found in the Syriac and may in fact have been interpolated from the lost Ode 2 (see The Odes of Solomon: The Nuhra Version (2021) Annotations). 

Notes

(1) Michael Lattke, Odes of Solomon: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 2.
(2) James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Odes of Solomon: The Syriac Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 5.
(3) Lattke, Odes of Solomon, 4.
(4) Charlesworth, The Odes of Solomon, 5, 6.
(5) Lattke, Odes of Solomon, 4.
(6) Charlesworth, The Odes of Solomon, 6.

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