Gospel of the Saviour
The Gospel of the Saviour is a fragmentary Coptic text from an otherwise unknown gospel that has joined the New Testament apocrypha. It consists of a fragmentary fire-damaged parchment codex that was acquired by the Egyptian Museum of Berlin in 1961. Its nature was only discovered in 1991, when it came round to being described, and was revealed in a 1996 lecture by Charles W. Hedrick.
Translations and formats
It has been edited and translated into English by Hedrick and Paul Mirecki and by Bart D. Ehrman.The fragmentary nature of the text admits of more than one sequential ordering of the contents, giving rise to more than one useful translation, and some public discussion.
Date, origin and style
The manuscript appears to date from the 6th century; Hellenisms in the vocabulary and grammar suggest that it was translated from a lost Greek original. The hypothetic original Greek text on which it is based is thought to have been composed somewhere in the late second or early third century, judging from the theology and style. The Gospel is not a narrative but a dialogue, a form often chosen in Antiquity for didactic material.Alin Suciu has argued that the Gospel of the Saviour is not in fact a gospel but rather belongs to the Coptic genre of "apostolic memoir" and was written after the Council of Chalcedon in 451.