Coptic

Abstract
This is the first edition of the considerable remains of a 4th century Coptic papyrus codex containing the Gospel of Matthew recently acquired by the Schøyen Collection. The edition includes an introduction, the Coptic text and a German translation, both of them with critical notes, a complex index of the Coptic text, a Greek reconstruction, and a full set of facsimiles in colour.

This new text is of extraordinary importance for 1) Coptic linguistics, 2) New Testament textual criticism, and 3) Synoptic Gospel research.
1) The text is written in a variety of the so-called Middle Egyptian (or Oxyrhynchite or Mesokemic) dialect of Coptic not yet known, and, therefore, it completes considerably our view of the whole spectrum of this dialect.
2) The text presents a translation of Matthew which is independent of the other Middle Egyptian translation found in the Scheide codex as well as independent of all the other Coptic translations.
3) The text transmitted in this codex is not simply the canonical Gospel of Matthew, but "another Matthew". The differences of this Gospel of Matthew when compared with the canonical Gospel of Matthew, cannot be explained by it being an unusually free translation of the canonical Matthew. Rather the translation of the Schøyen codex represents a different Greek Vorlage. Regarding quantity, the differences between the two Matthews are similar to the well known differences between the so-called western text of the Acts and the neutral text of the Acts. But the quality of the differences is of another kind. It seems that the two Greek versions, viz., the extant canonical NT Matthew and the hypothetical Greek Vorlage behind the translation of the Schøyen codex, cannot directly be dependent on one another.

Because the relevance of the Schøyen codex for textual criticism and Synoptic Gospel research needs further clarification, a tentative reconstruction of the hypothetical Greek Vorlage of the Schøyen codex is included in an appendix. This reconstruction is structured according to the layout of Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece27 in order to facilitate a comparison of the new text with the Greek standard text with the purpose of making the quality of the differences immediately apparent, especially to those more interested in New Testament scholarship rather than in Coptic linguistics.