January is coming to an end, and it has certainly been a full month! School starting back up threw me for a loop, and it was hard to concentrate for the first week or two. At one point, I even wrote several equations on the white board, all of which were meant for another class - and the students were very lost for a few moments! Everyone has an off day (or a longer/shorter period). Not surprisingly, scribes and monks in the ancient and medieval periods had bad days as well, as evidenced by mistakes in their manuscripts! One notable example is Codex Neapolitanus, Minuscule 109, a gospels book from the 14th century.
The monk or scribe that worked on this text was having a really bad day. In the source manuscript being copied down, the Gospel of Luke chapter 3 [the genealogy of Jesus] was in a two-column format (like most Bibles today). Unfortunately, the scribe seems to have copied the text as if it were one single column. He may have gotten lazy, or more likely, could not understand or comprehend the language that he was transcribing. The result was a genealogical mishmash, and it gave everyone in the passage the the wrong father. In fact, the scribe goofed in such a way that the text makes Phares the creator of the world, and God was made the son of Aram. In any case, the mistake is one that has far outlived the original author... The moral of the story? On the rougher days, it is especially important to pay attention to what you are doing!
The following folktale is from the introduction to an article by Orlanda S.H. Lie, entitled The Concept of Time in the Medieval World View. The paper is very informative, but my favourite section is definitely the story at the beginning, poignantly illustrating what eternal life might be like. You can read the rest of the paper here:
http://www.medievalists.net/2014/04/01/concept-time-medieval-world-view/
Once upon a time a monk left his monastery for a walk in the cloister
garden. He had often been pondering the meaning of eternity and heavenly
bliss and had frequently prayed to God, asking him for an illustration
of one moment of heavenly bliss. All of a sudden he heard the lovely
song of a little bird, perched on the branch of a tree. He stopped to
listen and enjoyed his song until the bird flew away. When he returned
to the monastery, he was greeted by a porter, whom he had never seen
before. “Who are you?” the porter asked. “I am a monk of this
monastery,” he answered. “I stepped out for a little walk in the
garden.” But strangely enough, he couldn’t find anybody there who looked
familiar to him. But not only the people seemed different, somehow the
whole place had changed. The monk was utterly confused and did not know
what to make of it. When they asked him who the abbot was of the
monastery, and whether he could name some of his fellow-monks, he
provided them with the names of people none of them knew. Finally they
decided to consult the annals of the monastery. To their amazement they
discovered that the monk was referring to people who lived more than
three hundred years ago. Moreover, there was also an entry that
registered the strange disappearance of a monk who left the monastery
one day and never came back… And at that moment the monk understood
what had happened. This was God’s way of answering his prayer: the
pleasure he derived from listening to the bird’s song was God’s way of
giving him a foretaste of the timelessness of heavenly bliss. If the
beautiful song of this little bird was already enough to make him
forgetful of the time, how intensely more pleasurable and never-ending
must then be the joy of heavenly bliss in the after life!
