 previous article in this issue | next article in this issue  |
Preview first page |
Document Details : Title: A New Witness to the Acephalous Sermon of Shenoute, On the Judgment (A26) Author(s): ZELLMANN-ROHRER, Michael Journal: Journal of Coptic Studies Volume: 20 Date: 2018 Pages: 205-215 DOI: 10.2143/JCS.20.0.3284661 Abstract : Recent conservation work on a fragment of a parchment codex kept at the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri (University of California, Berkeley), has revealed a new witness to an acephalous sermon of Shenoute, provisionally titled On the Judgment. The sermon offers a lengthy discourse on the consequences of the divine judgment of the dead, as an incentive to pious conduct in the present life, with detailed descriptions of sinners, their sins, and the punishments awaiting them. Especially prominent in this catalogue is the criticism of corrupt ecclesiastics and rich, immoral landowners who abuse the poor, one prominent among them who may be identified with Shenoute’s arch-enemy Gesios. The Berkeley fragment belongs to a passage near the beginning of the sermon in which Shenoute imagines in vivid detail the agonies of a sick and dying man: though comforted by friends and kin, he is tormented by thoughts of the coming punishment for his sins and the apparition of angels who will bring him before God for judgment. |
|
