Gideon Yohanna Tambiyi

This research focuses on an unpublished discovered Sahidic Coptic bi-folio 4th century parchment of Matthew 2:11-16 which preserves the early account of Jesus and his parents coming to Africa. Dated c. AD 300-350 and discovered in Egypt, it is owned by a private collector in California with number P.Aslan.112. It has two leaves of the middle of the quire and contains 11 lines with approximately 10 letters per line. This thesis will embrace transcription, descriptive-analytical method laid down by Bentley Layton, collation, palaeography and historical method for analysis. New Testament textual scholarship will be enhanced through the analysis of this Coptic parchment supplemented by 70 and the result will be made available to the academic world as a means to contribute and restore the original text of Matthew 2:11-16 in the Sahidica and the Greek New Testament. It will be the first ground-breaking textual research in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Recent discoveries have uncovered numerous variant readings to the text of the Greek New Testament as a result of scribal practices in Hellenistic Egypt. These textual variants have exposed the corruption of the text as part of the works undertaken by the early Egyptian scribes. These texts witnessed interpolations and reduction but such Alexandrian efforts have vanished in history as Africans are seldom involved in analyzing some of these newly discovered biblical manuscripts. This work argues that the Egyptian Christians were the earliest emendators who engaged in text-critical studies through the production, preservation, and the palaeographical, papyrological and codicological analyses of ancient biblical manuscripts and that the efforts of the Egyptian Christians were to emend the text but ended up corrupting the text. The work also intends to show how such understanding can help the revisit of these early Egyptian Christians' efforts and practices in our African universities in order to compete and cooperate with Western counterparts through participating in the modern emendation processes of the Greek New Testament.