Life of John, Hegumenos of Scetis (Arabic Life and Ethiopic Epitome)
Vie arabe de saint Jean de Scété (with Ethiopic epitome)
· Anonymous (homiletic Life by a successor of John; Arabic recension)
· John of Scetis c. 595-685; the Arabic Life survives in two complementary Arabic manuscrip…
· hagiography
no English translation located. No published English translation of this text was located in the catalogues and series checked. Where only a non-English rendering or a translation of a daughter version exists, it is recorded below and does not close the gap. Treat this as a gap candidate, not as proof that no translation exists; the evidence names every source checked.
Why this is in the register
Ugo Zanetti (ed./trans.), Saint Jean, higoumène de Scété (VIIe siècle): vie arabe et épitomé éthiopien, Subsidia Hagiographica 94 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 2015); the Harvard record gives language French/Arabic/Ethiopic, with contents 'Vie arabe de Saint Jean de Scété' and 'Épitomé éthiopien' (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Saint%20Jean%20higoumene%20de%20Scete&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 No English version appears under any title in HOLLIS (searches for 'Jean higoumène de Scété vie arabe' and the English title 'Life of John of Scetis' return only this French volume and unrelated items).
A major seventh-century Egyptian monastic Life (John of Scetis, teacher of the future patriarch John III and of Zacharias of Sakha), surviving only in Arabic and Ethiopic; French translation only. The Arabic was translated from a lost Coptic original, so this is Copto-Arabic hagiography strictly speaking.
No open electronic text was verified for this work. The Greek/Coptic/Geʿez may exist only in a print or subscription edition (Migne, CSCO, TLG, CMCL).
Scanned witnesses
Scan search: no scan located. Zanetti 2015 (Subsidia Hagiographica 94) is print only: BnF cb45511740n, no 856$u. The two Arabic witnesses could not be resolved to shelfmarks because catalogue.bnf.fr SRU exposes no manuscript records (bib.type 'manuscrit' queries return 0) and Gallica/archivesetmanuscrits images are 403 from here. DigiVatLib title/keyword searches for Scetis/Scetensis returned only unrelated items (Vat.ar.398 f.84r; Vat.ar.77 patristic florilegium). Beta Masaheft's search page is client-rendered (no parseable results, 20,521 nominal hits for any term) and no LIT id could be obtained; its IIIF endpoint is alive (GET /api/iiif/LIT1234/manifest -> 400 'no manifest available for LIT1234' with the ds_verification_token cookie). OpenAlex returns only open reviews of Zanetti 2015 (Aethiopica, Revue de l'histoire des religions), not the edition or a facsimile. e-rara returns a 'Verifying your browser' wall (HTTP 200, 12,560 B); MDZ's search returns 'An error occurred while serving your page' for every query (HTTP 200, 27 KB shell); ONB's Primo search is a JS-only shell (4,788 B); loc.gov returns Cloudflare 429.
Cite: Tergwame, “Life of John, Hegumenos of Scetis (Arabic Life and Ethiopic Epitome)”
(coptic gap dossier), 2026.
https://naxiai.com/christian/gaps/coptic-zanetti-vita-john-scetis-arabic