Cave of Treasures

6th century Christian text

The Cave of Treasures (Classical Syriac: ܡܥܪܬ ܓܙܐ, romanized: Maʿarraṯ ġazzē, Arabic: مغارة الكنوز, romanized: Maghārat al-Kunūz, Ge'ez: Baʿāta Mazāgebet, Tigrinya: መዝገብ ገዛ), is an apocryphal and pseudoepigraphical work, that contains various narratives related to the Christian Bible.[1] It was written in the Syriac language, approximately at the end of the 6th, or at the beginning of the 7th century AD. Its authorship was traditionally attributed to Ephrem of Edessa (d. 373), but modern scholarly analyses have shown that the true author was some other person, who also lived in Upper Mesopotamia, but much later (c. 600).[2][3][4][5][6]

## Origin

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This text is attributed to Ephrem the Syrian, who was born at Nisibis soon after AD 306 and died in 373, but is now generally believed that its current form is 6th century or newer.[7]

However, there are some inclusions within the work that support its creation in the 4th century. One such example is the inclusion of a certain "brother Nemesius"; some speculate that this is Nemesius, the 4th century governor of Cappadocia. Other inclusions reproduce Ephrem's peculiar methods[clarification needed] of exegesis and supply many examples of his methods in religious argument, with which we are familiar from his other writings. His pride in the antiquity of the Syriac language appears in this work. The text was most likely written by a Syrian Jacobite living in Mesopotamia. Although it was likely not written by Ephrem the Syrian, it was likely written by an author trained in his school or one of his disciples.[8]

The oldest Christian work on the history of God's dealing with man from Adam to Christ is probably the anonymous Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan, which, in its original form, is from the 5th or 6th century AD. The writer of the Cave of Treasures borrowed largely from the Conflict of Adam and Eve or shared a common source with it.

## History

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The Cave of Treasures was introduced to the world by Giuseppe Simone Assemani, the author of the Catalogues of Oriental Manuscripts in the Vatican Library, which he printed in Bibliotheca Orientalis in four thick volumes folio. In Vol. ii. page 498 he describes a Syriac manuscript containing a series of apocryphal works, and among them is one the title of which he translates Spelunca Thesaurorum. He saw that the manuscript contained the history of 5,500 years, from the creation of Adam to the birth of Christ, and that it was based upon the Scriptures. He says that fables are found in it everywhere, especially concerning the antediluvian Patriarchs, and the genealogy of Christ and his  mother. He mentions that the Patriarch Eutychius describes a cave of treasures in which gold, frankincense, and myrrh were laid up, and refers to the portentosa feminarum nomina, women of Jesus' ancestry. No attempt was made to publish the Syriac text; in fact, little attention was paid to it until August Dillmann began to study the Conflict of Adam and Eve in connection with it, and then he showed in Ewald's Jahrbüchern (Bd. V. 1853) that the contents of whole sections of the Book of the Cave of Treasures in Syriac and the Conflict of Adam and Eve in Ethiopic were identical. And soon after this, Dillmann and others noticed that an Arabic manuscript in the Vatican (No. XXXIX; see Assemânî, Bibl. Orient. i. page 281) contained a version of the Cave of Treasures, which had clearly been made from the Syriac. In 1883, Carl Bezold published a translation of the Syriac text of the "Cave of Treasures" made from three manuscripts (Die Schatzhöhle, Leipzig, 1883) and five years later published the Syriac text of it, accompanied by the text of the Arabic version.

Some passages from the Cave of Treasures are found in the Coptic Enconium of Mary Magdalene of Pseudo-Cyril.[9]

Of the subsequent history of the Syriac Cave of Treasures, little is known. The knowledge of parts of it made its way into Armenia soon after the book was written, and more than one translation of it was made into Arabic, probably in the 7th and 8th centuries. In connection with the Arabic translations, they all end with the account of the cruelties perpetrated by Archelaus and Sâlûm after the death of Herod. (See Bezold's text, page 247.) The last paragraph of the Arabic text mentions the twelve Apostles who went about with Jesus, and refers to his baptism by John the Baptist, and says that he lived on the earth thirty-three years, and then ascended into heaven. Thus, for the last twenty-six pages of the Syriac text, there is no equivalent in the Arabic version. The same is substantially true for the Ethiopic Conflict of Adam and Eve. The section of the Syriac for which there is no rendering in Arabic or Ethiopic contains a series of statements addressed to "brother Nemesius". It is possible, but unlikely, that these were added to the work by a later writer. As they do not deal with matters of genealogy, and deal almost exclusively with Jesus Christ's life and crucifixion, they probably failed to interest the Arab translator, and he left them untranslated, unless parts of the original Arabic translation have perished. A version of the Cave of Treasures made its way into the Arabic Apocalypse of Peter or Book of the Rolls.

That the Syriac Cave of Treasures was known and used by Solomon, Bishop of Perāth Mayshān (now Basra) in 1222 is proved by the earlier chapters of his work the Book of the Bee. He excerpted from it many of the legends of the early Patriarchs, although his object was not to write a table of genealogical succession, but a full history of the Christian dispensation according to the views of the Church of the East. The best manuscript of the Cave of Treasures which we have, in the British Library, Add MS 25875, was written by an Eastern Christian scribe in the Alqosh, and was bound up by him in a volume which included a copy of the Book of the Bee.

## Contents

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The author of the Cave of Treasures called his work The Book of the order of the succession of Generations, referring to the Patriarchs and Kings of Israel and Judah; and his chief object was to show how Jesus was descended from Adam. He did not accept the genealogical tables which were commonly in use among his unlearned fellow-Christians, because he was convinced that all the ancient tables of genealogies which the Jews had possessed were destroyed by fire by the captain of Nebuchadnezzar's army immediately after the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. The Jews promptly constructed new tables of genealogies, which both Christians and Arabs regarded as fictitious. The Arabs were as deeply interested in the matter as the Christians, for they were descended from Abraham, and the genealogy of the descendants of Hagar and Ishmael was of the greatest importance in their sight, and it is due to their earnest desire to possess correct genealogical tables of their ancestors that we owe the Arabic translations of the Cave of Treasures. The Nubians and Egyptians were also interested in such matters, for the former were the legendary descendants of Kûsh, and the latter the descendants of Mizraim, and Ham was the great ancestor of both these nations. It is clear that medieval Syrians, Arabs, Egyptians and Ethiopians regarded the Cave of Treasures as an authoritative work on their respective pedigrees.[10]

In the title Cave of Treasures which was given to the "Book of the order of the succession of Generations" there is probably a double allusion, namely, to the Book as the storehouse of literary treasures, and to the legendarily famous cave in which Adam and Eve were made to dwell by God after their expulsion from Paradise,[11] which was said to contain gold, and frankincense, and myrrh and was thus commonly called "The Cave of Treasures".

The Syriac Cave of Treasures tells us very little about the supposed physical attributes of the cave, said to be situated in the side of a mountain below Paradise, and nothing about Adam and Eve's way of life there. But in the "Book of Adam and Eve", the whole of the first main section is devoted to details of the physical cave.[12]

## References

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1. ^ Toepel 2013, p. 531-584.
2. ^ Ri 1987, p. 183-190.
3. ^ Leonhard 2001, p. 255-293.
4. ^ Minov 2013, p. 155-194.
5. ^ Minov 2017, p. 129-229.
6. ^ Wet, Chris L. de (2017-07-14). The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-315-51304-1.
7. ^ Budge, E. A. Wallis (1927). The Book of the Cave of Treasures. London: The Religious Tract Society. pp. 1–42.
8. ^ Budge, E. A. Wallis (1927). The Book of the Cave of Treasures. London: The Religious Tract Society. pp. 1–42.
9. ^ Marquis, Christine Luckritz (2016). "An Enconium of Mary Magdalene: A new translation and introduction". In Landau, B. (ed.). New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. Vol. 1\. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. p. 197\. ISBN 978-0-8028-7289-0.
10. ^ Budge, E. A. Wallis (1927). The Book of the Cave of Treasures. London: The Religious Tract Society. pp. 1–38.
11. ^ Wet, Chris L. de (2017-07-14). The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-315-51304-1.
12. ^ Budge, E. A. Wallis (1927). The Book of the Cave of Treasures. London: The Religious Tract Society. pp. 1–38.

## Sources

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* Budge, E. A. Wallis (1927). The Book of the Cave of Treasures. London: The Religious Tract Society.
* Leonhard, Clemens (2001). "Observations on the Date of the Syriac Cave of Treasures". The World of the Aramaeans. Vol. 3\. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. pp. 255–293\. ISBN 9780567637376.
* Minov, Sergey (2013). "The Cave of Treasures and the Formation of Syriac Christian Identity in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Between Tradition and Innovation". Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine, and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity. Brepols: Turnhout. pp. 155–194.
* Minov, Sergey (2014). "Dynamics of Christian Acculturation in the Sasanian Empire: Some Iranian Motifs in the Cave of Treasures". Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians: Religious Dynamics in a Sasanian Context. Piscataway: Gorgias Press. pp. 149–201.
* Minov, Sergey (2017). "Date and Provenance of the Syriac Cave of Treasures: A Reappraisal". Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies. 20 (1): 129–229\. doi:10.31826/hug-2018-200105.
* Minov, Sergey (2020). Memory and Identity in the Syriac Cave of Treasures: Rewriting the Bible in Sasanian Iran. Leiden-Boston: Brill. ISBN 9789004445512.
* Ri, Su-Min (1987). "La Caverne des Trésors: Problèmes d'analyse littéraire". IV Symposium Syriacum 1984. Roma: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium. pp. 183–190.
* Toepel, Alexander (2013). "The Cave of Treasures: A new Translation and Introduction". Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. Vol. 1\. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. pp. 531–584\. ISBN 9780802827395.
* Toepel, Alexander (2019). "Late Paganism as Witnessed by the Syriac Cave of Treasures". Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies. 59 (3): 507–528.
* Wood, Philip (2007). "Syrian Identity in the Cave of Treasures". The Harp. 22: 131–140\. doi:10.31826/9781463233112-010. ISBN 9781463233112.
* Wood, Philip (2012). "Syriac and the Syrians". The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 170–194\. ISBN 978-0-19-027753-6.

## External links

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Adam and Eve

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