Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, and more
I was interested to discover from this site that apparently more than 7,300 unique individuals used my site last month. For a site dedicated to a subject as abtruse as the Fathers, that’s not bad going. Perhaps we underestimate interest in early Christian history?
We all know that many interesting works are preserved in Classical Armenian translation. Eusebius’ Church History exists in an Armenian version; book 1 of his Chronicle is only preserved in Armenian. But what else exists?
I’ve often mentioned that I have translators at work on Eusebius’ Gospel differences and their solutions (Quaestiones ad Stephanum, ad Marinum). Today I received a translation of a chunk of this work from a Coptic catena, much to my delight.
But what about Armenian? What exists? What catenae exist? What catalogues of unpublished manuscripts? Is there any possibility that this work Eusebius exists whole somewhere? Or new fragments in a catena?
I realise that I have no idea. If anyone can point me in the direction of finding out, I would be most grateful!
As we get XML versions of Liddell and Scott, etc, we inevitably start to wonder about other standard reference tools, such as Lampe. A PDF of the raw page images doesn’t really do it, although that is better than carrying a book around.
Of course those as rich and privileged as myself have no problem here. We just buy a dozen printed copies and place one in each of our homes, plus one in the back of the Rolls. Also, we can get our butler to carry it for us. But this still leaves rather a lot of other people with a problem. And… if we had it in electronic form, it would be possible to do interesting things with it.
I found this blog post from somewhere unpronounceable which asked the same question. And I ask: how do we go about getting an XML version of a copyright text? One that we can all use in our computer programs?
The book was published in 1961, comprises 1600+ pages, and is published by Oxford University Press who presumably own it.
Could Perseus negotiate some deal? Could Logos? How would one do this?
Ancient Greek is tough for computers, and computer programmers, to work with. Firstly it’s a dead language, secondly it’s a non-Roman script, and thirdly no-one knows Greek anyway (although a lot of people pretend).
What we need are tools on our computers. These are appearing, but very slowly. The problem is the non-availability of data.
Except that data does exist. For some years the Perseus site has had a very nice electronic edition of Liddell and Scott, and a tool wherein you can put in any Greek word and it will spit out the meaning and the standardised form. The latter is known as the ‘lemma’, presumably to keep people from understanding.
Perseus have now made their data available in the Perseus Hopper, which can be downloaded for non-commercial purposes. Liddell and Scott is in a big XML file.
Peter Heslin of Durham University has grasped the implications. Version 3.1 of his Diogenes tool includes this XML file, and another file containing all the possible forms of all the words in the Greek language, their lemma, the part of speech (noun, verb, etc), tense, mood, singular or plural (etc), and most importantly the line number of the full description in the XML file. This means that you can look up any word, and get a full description; so long as it’s in L&S. The code is in perl, and is supplied. Perl tends to be impenetrable, but this is a relatively well-written example. So if you want to create your own dictionary program, here’s the materials.
But what about post-classical Greek? Well, there’s the New Testament. A list of all the words, in order, with part of speech, lemma, etc, was created long ago by James Tauber as MorphGNT. The site is down at the moment, but the 1Mb text file does exist.
Now this is fine, but useless. It doesn’t contain the English meaning. But… Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen has digitised Strong’s dictionary and created an XML file of it. This contains the Greek Lemma, for all words in the New Testament, plus the English meaning and other bits of info of no present concern. You can see on his site what the data is, by tapping in his demo example.
MorphGNT also contains the lemma. So this means that if we join the two together, we get all the possible forms of a word in MorphGNT, and the lemma for them; and the lemma plus the meaning in Strong’s. Effectively, we now have a dictionary of NT Greek, forms, base form, and meanings. All we have to do is program it.
What about other, non-classical Greek literature? Somewhere around is a Septuagint in electronic form, with lemmas. This can be referenced either against the meaning in Strong’s, or that in Liddell and Scott. How many words appear in neither? — I don’t know, but it would be interesting to know. Mostly names, I would guess.
Every lemmatized Greek text can now be a source of data to this process of creating as large an electronic Greek dictionary as we like. And, of course, we need more dictionaries of lemmas-plus-English-meaning. What others could be done, I wonder?
I’ve just looked for “lemmatized Greek text” in Google and, among many interesting results, I have found the Lexis site, which claims to be able to help produced lemmatized Greek texts. It runs on Mac, and I haven’t tried it; but it works with the TLG. Likewise Hypotyposeis talks about lemmatized searches in TLG. I think Josephus must be available somewhere in lemmatized form — where?
What I’m not finding is much Patristic Greek, tho. What we need, clearly, is G.W.H.Lampe’s Patristic Greek Lexicon in XML. This was published in 1961, so will be in copyright until all of us are dead. But… couldn’t someone license an electronic version for non-commercial use? It’s much too expensive for me to buy just at the moment (although a pirate PDF of the page images does exist, I see; apparently pp.1202-3 are missing, tho).
There is much that I don’t know still, tho. Interesting to see that there is a blog called Coding Humanist. Is there anyone out there interested in this stuff too?
I’ve had an email from the Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana in Florence telling me that they are actively exploring digitising the Plutei collection. This includes massive numbers of the oldest manuscripts of any number of the classics, including both Tacitus manuscripts. They think it will take around 30 months, and they intend to put the results online.
Remarkably, they’re also looking at ways for people to contribute to the online material and so enhance the content. This is very far-seeing of them, and will be most interesting to see.
All early days, but very, very interesting.
From the PAPY-L list I learn that P.Oxy 1780 and 1924 are being offered for sale by Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania at Sothebys, and expected to reach ca. £300k.
http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?lot_id=159503126
The Sotheby’s site gives details of the Ms.
I’ve just had a note from the excellent Robert Bedrosian. It seems that he has translated Eusebius of Caesarea’s Chronicle book 1 directly from the Armenian into English! It’s here. Andrew Smith of Attalus.org translated it from Petermann’s Latin into English, but this is the first translation from the original langauge. And… he’s made it public domain, so anyone can use it.
Robert has also scanned most of the Budge translation into English of Bar-Hebraeus Chronicon Syriacum (the secular history).
Robert’s site is much less well known than it deserves to be. It’s impossible to get people to translate Classical Armenian into English, even for money (I’ve tried!). Yet here is a great selection of primary Armenian sources, all free, all online, all of the highest historical interest.
More later when I have a chance to actually look at this!
Jim Davila of Paleojudaica tells us that the old man is back on the road and still asking, ”Was God an astronaut?” The answer was always ‘no’, of course; but he made quite a bit of money asking it. Compared to all those dreary “God is dead but I’m going to stay a bishop anyway” books of the same period, he was a breath of fresh air. And the artwork was better too…
There are any number of people trying to sell books falsifying Christian origins. Most are forgettable. They have their day in the sun, attract some dimwitted disciples, and then perish utterly.
I suppose that most of them are just chancers in it for a quick buck. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, if you think it’s all rubbish. Indeed I remember many years ago getting a CD of a couple of UK newspapers, and doing a search for “Jesus”. What I got was book reviews; one after another, each peddling “the real Jesus”. Each and every one of them used the same method; find excuses to ignore what the historical record says, then invent some story which is agreeable to comfortable people in the period in which they were writing. Of course the final fairy-stories varied wildly. But each was solemnly reviewed, apparently without the reviewers ever saying to themselves, “Hang on. Didn’t we have another one of these last month? And the month before? They can’t ALL be true!”
Then there are the haters, drearily whining about how evil the Christians are, repeating the same old “Well look at the crusades” tosh. These tend to be less literate than the conmen, and less readable, and less honest. Hate is a bad guide to anything. There’s some absurd ex-priest in Canada peddling some whopping lies. Apparently he was once an episcopalian, but found even that lax organisation was too principled for him. A couple of writers stopped writing sex books and started writing “Jesus was really Osiris” books. I’d have thought too many people knew about ancient Egypt for that to sell, but apparently I’m wrong. There used to be some guy who called himself Roman Piso and asserted that Jesus was actually one of the Calpurnius Piso’s. Another one says Jesus was Julius Caesar. Yet another claims that Christianity was made up in the 4th century. Another one prefers some indefinite date in the late 1st century. Not all have published, but all have tried!
Yet Erich was different. He wasn’t a hater, but an enthusiast. It has always been quite possible to believe in his sincerity, if not entirely so. Let’s face it, he’s made too much money to listen very hard to his critics. Yet his books are fun! Tosh, but fun.
Apparently the Old Testament Apocrypha have now attracted his attention. Well, I bet the contents are probably about as valuable as a good deal of the low-grade throwaway scholarly work on them. Hey, I’m waiting to see the cover art. It’s got to be better than Clarendon Press version of the Revised Standard Version, with hard covers.
Von Daniken asks if the gods are aliens. Maybe we can get him to ask if certain biblical scholars are aliens. We’d have to conduct test-tube experiments, repeatable trials. We want to be scientific, right?
Let’s see if we can get Bart Ehrman in a test-tube, and add some water and see if he turns blue. If he does, he must be a witch!
The power of nonsense is great, but every fraud gets found out in the end.
The linen which he spreads on the crown of your head denotes the freedom to which you have been called. You were before standing bareheaded, as this is the habit of the exiles and the slaves, but after you have been signed he throws on your head linen, which is the emblem of the freedom to which you have been called. Men such as these (=freemen) are in the habit of spreading linen on their heads, and it serves them as an adornment both in the house and in the market-place. — Theodore of Mopsuestia, Liber ad baptizandos.
While scanning the English translation of Theodore’s sermons to those awaiting baptism (now online here), I came across this interesting statement, that during the ceremony of manumission the ex-slave’s head was covered; and thus that being bare-headed was a mark of a slave.
I wonder how this relates to the oft-mocked injunction of Paul, that women should cover their heads, particularly since female slaves and prostitutes could be interchangeable.
Can someone tell me what the following piece of Unicode Greek means? The problem is the plural ‘angels’, in one section:
Alternatively, perhaps, there is one angel in Matthew, **while the ones who encounter the women are different from that one**, and both the place and the time of the sighting of the angel are also different. Similarly, too, the two angels in John, seen inside the tomb, are different from the one in Matthew, seen outside, sitting on the stone in front of the tomb.
The Greek for this bit is:
e#teroi de\ kai\ a!ggeloi au0tou= oi9 pro\j ta\j gunai=kas
ἕτεροι δὲ καὶ ἄγγελοι αὐτοῦ οἱ πρὸς τὰς γυναῖκας
This is from one of the catena fragments of Eusebius of Caesarea, Quaestiones ad Marinum, discussing problems at the end of the Gospels. A PDF of Mai’s edition is here, and this is found on p.88, where it says:
null
Mai renders it “alii item angeli apud eum mulieribus oblati” which would mean that Eusebius had forgotten that there was only one angel in Matthew 28.
2This is a very puzzling sentence. The Greek is: ἕτεροι δὲ καὶ ἄγγελοι αὐτοῦ οἱ πρὸς τὰς γυναῖκας, which at first sight might appear to mean “and his angels that encountered the women are also different”. However, neither in Matthew nor in John, the only two evangelists here under discussion, do more than one angel encounter more than one woman; Eusebius’ knowledge of the bible can hardly have slipped in this, given its normal accuracy, and he is careful, below, to distinguish the angels appearing in these two gospels from humans in the other two. The translation printed assumes that αὐτοῦ means not “his”, with ἄγγελοι, but “from that one”, with ἕτεροι (and is not the adverb “there); but, quite apart from the problems already mentioned, this is also doubtful on linguistic grounds: ἕτερος, which can in some writers have a genitive to mean “from”, is in this text normally put with παρά; and αὐτοῦ is here uncomfortably distant from ἕτεροι in the word-order. If the text is corrupt, the corruption seems too deep for a convincing emendation.
