Abraham in everyday life

Interview with Coptologist Gesa Schenke about her research at the Cluster of Excellence "Religion and Politics"

At the Cluster of Excellence, Coptologist Gesa Schenke is studying two Egyptian manuscripts from the 4th and 10th centuries CE. Written in Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, these manuscripts contain the earliest known Jewish-Christian record of the so-called Testament of Abraham. In this text, Abraham recounts his journey to heaven and reveals what awaits people after their death. Gesa Schenke uses this narrative in the “Abraham in Everyday Life” project to explore the extent to which the thought of death and the impending Judgment of the Dead shapes religious, political and social behaviour in everyday life. In this interview, she explains her research.

The core of your project at the Cluster of Excellence is the study of two Coptic texts that contain the so-called Testament of Abraham. What is this about?

Gesa Schenke: The narrative deals with human mortality. Using his own death as an example, Abraham, whom Judaism and Christianity consider the epitome of the human ideal, explains how to die well and what exactly happens during and after death. This unique knowledge, attained with God’s help, he passes on to posterity as his testament. Understandably, the text was so popular that it soon circulated not only in the Jewish community where it originated, but in early Christian communities as well.

The Book of Genesis tells how Abraham takes strangers into his home and entertains them. God then rewards him with a gift: namely, the late birth of a son, Isaac, to his wife Sarah. In return, Abraham shows unconditional obedience to God and is even willing to sacrifice this very son to him. This close bond with God forms the background to the narrative of Abraham’s death. The story is an extension of the account in Genesis 25, where Abraham is simply very, very old, dies and is buried. But in the story now referred to as the Testament of Abraham, the focus is on how exactly this death proceeds.

And what does Abraham say about death?

Gesa Schenke: Abraham’s report is from the perspective of an eyewitness. When God indicates to him through the archangel Michael that it is now time for him to die, Abraham asks to be allowed to visit heaven beforehand to see what awaits him. God allows his friend Abraham to look around heaven under the guidance of the archangel Michael, who is to explain everything to him and answer all his questions. Abraham is also allowed to attend the Judgment of the Dead, where the soul of every person is judged. The scribe Enoch records the individual deeds of each human existence and presents the files to the Judgment of the Dead. The individual sins appear as witnesses against the soul. Only a few souls then pass through a narrow archway into the kingdom of eternal life, while most are driven through a very wide gate into the kingdom of perdition.

After returning from heaven, Abraham writes a report of his journey as a testament for posterity. He then lays himself down to die recording his own death, which appears to him in a form that he finds all too beautiful. This is very interesting: Abraham sees death in a beautiful form because he lived a virtuous life. Thus, God has commanded the archangel Michael to dress and adorn death beautifully so that his friend is not frightened. The narrative shows how to die well and how a person can influence their own death.  A righteous life like Abraham’s leads to a gentle death and eternal existence in the kingdom of heaven. Every human being can therefore decide their own destiny.

The texts you have examined are the earliest manuscripts of the Testament of Abraham. But there is a gap of almost half a millennium between the two manuscripts. How did the text change during this time?

Gesa Schenke: The original text is believed to have been written in the Jewish community of Alexandria at the end of the 1st century BCE or the beginning of the 1st century CE. The assumption is that it was written in Alexandria in Greek. The Coptic text preserved from the 4th century (Papyrus Cologne 3221b), which is now in the Cologne Papyrus Collection, is therefore reasonably close to these events, so that it can be used to gain an insight into what the original text may once have looked like. This Coptic text is probably a translation for those among the local population in Egypt that had little or no command of Greek.

Content-wise, the text presumably remains the same. However, it is now part of a papyrus codex containing parabiblical narratives, i.e. stories that are not part of the Bible but concern biblical figures such as Abraham, Job and Andrew. The Testament of Abraham is followed in the codex by an apocryphal story about the Apostle Andrew and a young singer named Philemon, who, thanks to the boy’s beautiful voice, convert the city of Lydda to Christianity. In the codex, a purely Christian text thus immediately follows the Jewish narrative of the Testament of Abraham. This means that we are observing the formation of a collection of texts for early Egyptian Christianity, although there is still nothing Christian to be found in the story of Abraham itself.

The Testament of Abraham in the parchment codex from 962 (Parchment Biblioteca Vaticana Copto 61) gives us an insight into how it shaped the everyday lives of people at that time. It is part of a collection of legends of saints that exclusively concern saints whose feast day was celebrated in the summer month of Mesore (July/August). Both the patriarch Abraham and the archangel Michael, both leading figures in the Testament of Abraham, have since become Christian saints. The feast day of Abraham is given in the manuscript as the 28th of Mesore (21 August). For this end, the narrative is preceded by an entry explaining where the text comes from. Archbishop Athanasius is said to have discovered it among the ancient apostolic writings. Athanasius is also the speaker here who presents this text to the congregation, addresses them directly, and urges them to follow the story attentively and to lead a righteous life for the sake of their souls. At the end of the narrative, Abraham is invoked as a saint who will permanently protect the assembled congregation. In the 10th century, the Testament of Abraham served as a feast day sermon in Christian hagiography and had the explicit aim of encouraging people to lead righteous lives.

Using the two texts, you will examine the question of how ideas about death and the impending Judgment of the Dead shape religious, political and social behaviour in everyday life. What ideas about death and the Judgment of the Dead does the Testament of Abraham convey?

Gesa Schenke: The text has a clear message: a virtuous life, like that of Abraham, leads to a pleasant death, followed by eternal life. Otherwise, one runs the risk of encountering death in all its raw ugliness. While death had made himself beautiful for Abraham, Abraham asks death to show his true form. In the oldest text from the 4th century, death actually has a hundred heads that resemble Egyptian gods. Some have the faces of cats, snakes, leopards, goats, monkeys, cows, ibises and flames. It is in such a form that death confronts those who have not led a virtuous life.

In the 10th-century text, there is no longer any mention of “a hundred heads”, but only of “several heads”, some of which appear as snakes and others as flames. This already tells us a lot about the everyday life of people at that time: certainly still omnipresent as statues in the 4th century, the Egyptian gods must have long since disappeared by the 10th century and therefore probably no longer played a role. This shift was apparently accompanied by a change in ideas about death and the Judgment of the Dead, which a text such as the Testament of Abraham also reflects.

The Testament of Abraham deals centrally with the close personal friendship between God and Abraham. What makes Abraham’s relationship with the divine so interesting in terms of religious politics?

Gesa Schenke: In this text, God calls Abraham his friend. This friendship is the reason why the archangel Michael is to be gentle when he tells Abraham that it is time for him to die. Abraham’s status as a friend is also why he is allowed to visit heaven in advance, as well as why Michael is asked to dress and adorn death in such a way as not to frighten his friend unnecessarily. Among other things, the text answers the question of whether a human being can be friends with a god. The answer is clear: yes, and to the human being’s great advantage.

What still makes the Testament of Abraham so interesting today?

Gesa Schenke: The story of Abraham’s journey to heaven prior to his death was still being told in the 19th century and is now receiving a great deal of scholarly attention, particularly in Greek manuscripts from the 11th to 18th centuries, 32 of which are known so far. However, the text was also preserved in Romanian, Church Slavonic, Arabic and Ethiopian until the 19th century. It was therefore very popular and widely disseminated over a long period of time.

Nonetheless, researchers have so far focused primarily on the Greek manuscripts, which are preserved in a short and a long version. The former is somewhat closely related to the older Coptic manuscripts, whereas the long version is very far removed from them. The latter is almost twice as long and researchers attribute to it almost absurd traits of a farce or parody. In it, Abraham is 995 years old and continues to refuse to die and obey God’s instructions; he is thus extremely disobedient and is always inventing new excuses for not dying yet. He wants to travel the world and punish the sinners he encounters. Unlike in Genesis and the Coptic manuscripts, his wife Sarah is still alive and seems to outlive him. Something has clearly happened to the text here that cannot be compared to or explained by the early Coptic manuscripts, which are very well thought out and have a clear structure. Nevertheless, the long version in Greek was long regarded as the original version of the Testament of Abraham.

The most important goal of my project is therefore to make the much older Coptic version of this text available to researchers, since the oldest text from the 4th century is not only relatively close in time to the presumed original from the 1st century, but also completely logical and thoughtfully composed with a clear message. Only by looking at the oldest Coptic texts can we ask a very important question: How did a text that originated in the Jewish community of Alexandria in the early 1st century, was handed down in the 4th century with similar Jewish texts and new works of early Christianity, and was then firmly anchored in the worship of Christian saints in the 10th century – how did this text manage to become a handed-down Greek parody in the early modern period? This is a question that Classicists, i.e. researchers who deal with ancient Greek texts, and scholars of religious studies must now address. (fbu/pie)