Albert ten Kate

Collected Papers - From Georgia via Armenia and Egypt to Ethiopia

About the book:

This book is the result of about fourteen years (2009-2023) of papers, made for different symposia about the Eastern-Christian traditions: eight researches on the Georgian Bible and five on the Armenian. There were already papers published in the West: on the Codex Schoeyen and on Codex Scheide, a research on Gregory of Nazianze and an article on the Sanctus. But others remained unpublished, or they were hardly accessible in the West. Therefore we do publish them here to show their importance for the traditions of the Early Church. As the Appendix of Chapter 11 we publish a full edition of the Armenian column of the manuscript Barberinus Orientalis, which is compared with the text of the edition of Zohrab. We include here also three on Coptic and one on Ethiopic, that we add to our previous publications on the Armenian Gospel of Mark, on the Ethiopian Gospel of John, on the Gospel of John in Greek, and on the Coptic Codex Schoeyen. These were for a more specialized public, being as a kind of reference-works. The contributions we publish here, though having a rough, unfinished state of their text, aim at a more general audience: we hope they will be a bit more accessible.

About the Author:

Albert ten Kate is emerite minister of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands and served the churches of Dedemsvaart, Emmen and Bergen op Zoom.

He studied theology in Leiden, where he learned Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic(1971-1978). During the nineties, he learned Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian and Arabic at the intensive summer-course of the Académie de Langues Anciennnes in Saintes(France): so he prepared his doctoral dissertation on the origin of the dogma of Almightiness of God, “Avec dévouement total” (to be published soon in a revised edition by Éditions Croix du Salut). In it he researched the epigraphical and papyrological evidence for this epithet as also its use in all the early versions and the history of this dogma.

After this he published about Biblical Theology in ETL 80-1(“Le cours du Jourdain à travers l’Église primitive”), in JSAS 20 (about Gregory of Nazianze in the Armenian tradition) and about the Sanctus in RAC 29(2019). In Le Muséon 115-1-2, he published about Armenian Gospel-fragments : « Un témoin arménien de la tradition « césaréenne » des Évangiles ».

He contributed to the Ethiopian Psalm-project for the Textual History of the Hebrew Bible (Brill), and to many conferences concerning Armenian, Georgian and Coptic research.

His research on the Ethiopian and on the Greek Gospel of John, as that of Armenian Gospel of Mark, and his Opus Magnum, on the Gospel of Matthew in the Codex Schoeyen 2650, were all published by Blessed Hope Publishing (Chisinau).

With the publication of his Collected Papers, hardly accessible, or unpublished, they are available now. They reveal how the Early Versions and Traditions of the Early Church enrich the faith of today.