The Megiddo Mosaic

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.  A social media post drew my attention to this article in The Sun:

AN ANCIENT mosaic with the inscription “God Jesus Christ” is being dubbed the greatest find since the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The massive discovery “confirms” Jesus’ divinity about a hundred years before the Council of Nicea – fundamentally changing our knowledge of early Christianity.

I confess that I thought that this had to be a hoax.  The pictures did not reassure me.  But it seems that it is not.  The mosaic in question was discovered in 2005, and a preliminary publication was made in Y. Tepper, L. Di Segni, Leah, with contribution by Guy Stiebel, “A Christian Prayer Hall of the Third Century CE at Kefar ‘Othnay (Legio): Excavations at the Megiddo Prison.”  Israel Antiquities Authority, (2005).  This is online here.

and does indeed have such a text on it.  According to this rather more sensible site, the mosaic dates to 230.

The reason that the story has appeared is that the mosaic has been lent recently to the Museum of the Bible in Washington, and material about it appears on the website here, complete with photographs of the inscriptions.  These highlight various words, but not, curiously, the “God Jesus Christ” stuff.

The inscriptions mention the man who commissioned the inscription: Gaianus, also called Porphyrius, centurion, our brother, has made the mosaic at his own expense as an act of generosity.  Also named is Brutius the workman who did the actual work, a woman who paid for the table in the centre of the room, and four other women.

The so-called “Akeptous inscription” is the one in which we are interested.

Προσήνικεν
Ἁκεπτοῦς
ἡ φιλόθεος
τὴν τράπε-
ζαν Θ(ε)ῷ Ἰ(ησο)ῦ Χ(ριστ)ῷ
μνημόυνον.

“The god-loving Akeptous has offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial.”

This image comes from the Museum of the Bible website and highlights the word “Akeptous”.

Much more interesting is the abbreviated words on the last line but one:

….  ΘΩ  ΙΥ  ΧΩ

= Theō Jesou Christō

Greek inscriptions are not my thing.  So I was rather grateful to find an article online by Christopher Rollston, “A Stunning Trio of Early Christian (3rd century) Inscriptions from Biblical Armageddon: ‘God Jesus Christ,’ Five Prominent Named Women, a Named Centurion, a Eucharist Table, and Two Fish” which examines in detail and transcribes exactly all the inscriptions.  It is very dry, as it should be, but excellent and very useful.

I’d like to end with a linguistic query.  “Ἁκεπτοῦς” looks to me like a 3rd declension genitive.  My Greek is sufficiently feeble that I cannot see what the nominative would be.  Would anybody like to comment on this, and the syntax of the sentence?

Some bits are clear enough:

Προσήνικεν (3rd Aorist active, it was set up) … Ἁκεπτοῦς … ἡ φιλόθεος (nominative singular feminine, the god-loving) … τὴν τράπεζαν (accusative singular feminine, direct object, “the table”) ….  Θεῷ Ἰησοῦ Χριστῷ (dative singular masculine, “to God Jesus Christ”) … μνημόυνον (accusative singular, the second accusative, “as a memorial”).

But can Ἁκεπτοῦς be a nominative female name?

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“Galenalia” – A Fake Roman Holiday

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I came across a troll offering the following curious claims:

St Valentines – was Galenalia in the pre Christian time and Lupercalia in the Pagan Calendar and Easter – was the first festival of the Pagan year celebrating renewal or rebirth celebrating the god of fertility – Ostara, and for a bonus point – Christmas – was Saturnalia

Of course the author neither knew nor cared whether any of this was true.

But what on earth is “Galenalia”?  Well, I did what any modern would do, and Googled.  I got this sparkling bit of AI output:

Galenalia was a pagan festival that celebrated Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and trade. It was celebrated by the Celts after the midwinter festival of Imbolc. The festival was centered on the idea that being single is better than being with someone who is not a good fit.
Some of the ways women celebrated Galenalia included:

  • Leaving home for weeks at a time
  • Traveling with other women
  • Gathering the animal pelts of their boyfriends
  • Setting the pelts on fire
  • Eating winter squashes and root vegetables
  • Placing flowers on the graves of former lovers

In the 5th century, Pope Gelasius I combined the traditions of Galenalia with other holidays to create Valentine’s Day. The pope used the Roman love lottery, where men would draw the name of a Christian saint and live a year expressing that saint’s beliefs. Over time, Valentine’s Day became a holiday to celebrate love.

Thankfully Google now references this generated drivel to the source websites, which turned out to be:

Plus an entirely irrelevant link – hey, this is AI – to an NPR article.

The first of these links appears to be the real source and … it is a satire site, subtitled “Daily Humor since 1998”.

The Pagan Origins of Valentine’s Day – By Kathryn Doyle

Chocolates. Wine. Romance. These are common elements of modern Valentine’s Day, but they’re a far cry from the holiday’s origins more than 2,000 years ago, when the holiday was first marked as a festival of breaking up with long-term boyfriends.

What we know as Valentine’s Day was celebrated by ancient pagans after the midwinter festival of Imbolc. The “Galenalia” festival was dedicated to Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom, trade, and recognizing that being single is better than staying with a dead-end guy.

The worst of the winter had passed and women no longer needed to rely on a man as a source of life-saving body heat at night. Mothers and daughters would gather their boyfriends’ animal pelts, set them on fire, and feast on winter squashes and root vegetables until the fires burned out.

Thanks to the writings of Catullus and other Latin poets of the late Roman Republic, we know that women would celebrate Galenalia by leaving their homes for weeks at a time, traveling together on “gal-cations,” apparent sojourns in search of spiritual renewal following the death of old relationships. To the north, Iron Age Celts placed bouquets of flowers on the graves of sacrificed boyfriends.

In the 4th Century A.D., right when Christianity was starting to heat up, Pope Julius I sought to establish a new holy day to memorialize not one but several saints named Valentinus who were all brutally martyred in different, inspiring ways. He wisely chose to adopt and absorb the traditions of Galenalia as part of the new feast day, assigned to February 14th on the Julian calendar. This resulted in the short-lived transition holiday “Minervalentines’s Day” which became “Galentine’s Day” which became the “Valentine’s Day” of modern parlance.

Valentine’s Day was popularly embraced, but over the years church leaders worked to change the focus from pagan breakup customs. They downplayed dumping or sacrificing boyfriends, especially by the Middle Ages when the crusades were becoming a real PR fiasco. Instead, religious tracts encouraged women to “get back out there, mingle, not look for anything serious, necessarily, but be open to having fun.”

In later years, breaking up with boyfriends would actually be condemned as heresy, which historians attribute to the church’s desire to propagate as much as possible in the face of massive plague-related personnel losses.

You would have thought that joke was fairly obvious, but evidently not.

Just for safety’s sake, I did take the time to look at the RealEncyclopädie 13 / Bd. VII.1 (Fornax-Glykon), col. 576 (p.146 of the PDF that goes around).  Needless to say there was no entry.  The nearest was a poetic epithet “Galenaia”, applied to deities to whom sailors pray for a smooth voyage.

It’s a hoax, people.

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Review: Saints of Ethiopia – An English Translation from Scriptorium Press

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Scriptorium Press is a new publisher, and offers a growing series of English translations of hagiographical texts.  Most of these are from the Greek.  All of them seem intended for use by the educated general reader with an interest in the lives of the saints.

An interesting volume is their Saints of Ethiopia (140 pages, C$16).  ISBN 9798300901172. This is an anthology of texts which throw light upon the origins of the Ethiopian church.  This is a welcome attempt to make this little-known area of orthodox life more accessible.

Not everything in it is newly translated.  The editors do not seem to know Ge`ez, and so they have done their best with whatever they could translate.

The volume contains translations of the following texts, which are translated from the following sources.

  • On the Captivity of Frumentius (from Rufinus, Church History, book 1, c. 9; PL 21: 478-480)
  • The Life of Saint Moses the Ethiopian (from Palladius, The Lausiac History, c. 22; PG34:1063-70)
  • The Sayings of Abba Moses (from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers/Apophthegmata Patrum – Alphabetical Collection; PG 65:281-9)
  • The Life of Saint Pantaleon the Recluse (CSCO 26, Scriptores Aethiopici 17, 39-56)
  • The Martyrdom of Saint Arethas (in 9 chapters; BHG 166-166b; Anecdota Graeca 5 , Paris (1883), p.1-62.)
  • The Life of Saint Jared the Melodist (CSCO 26, 3-21).
  • The Cannibal of Kemer.

The first of these tells the story of how Christianity came to Ethiopia, and is therefore an excellent introduction to the rest.  The next two, about Moses the Black, relate to life in Egypt, but are probably an inevitable inclusion.

The remaining texts will be less familiar.  The Life of Saint Pantaleon is a 15th century Ge`ez text, for which a reader must otherwise consult the modern Latin translation of Rossini.

The Martyrdom of Saint Arethas and his companions – the martyrs of Najran, ca. 523 AD – is a Greek text.  It records the war of the Christian Ethiopians against the Jewish Himiyarite king responsible.  It makes use of earlier texts extant in Syriac, and makes a very welcome addition to the literature for this period.

The Life of Saint Jared (or Yared) the Melodist is a Ge`ez text of unknown date – the saint is 6th century -, but considerable length.  It is a very useful thing to have.  The editors have perforce abbreviated it, and they have included E. Wallis Budge’s translation of the corresponding portion of the Ethiopian Synaxarion.  This interesting figure seems to have begun the musical tradition of the Ethiopian church, and created a system of musical notation.

The Cannibal of Kemer is an extract from the Book of the Miracles of Our Lady Mary.  This is an Ethiopian translation of an 11th century Coptic text.  The version given here is that of Budge, somewhat modernised, rather than a new translation.

The translation style is perfectly good and clear.  It is sometimes a little stiff – “Jared sojourned in Aksum” is perhaps not a phrase found in current use – but probably from following the text particularly closely.  Anybody who has had to work with dictionaries will know that the need for an exact equivalent often has this effect, where an older English had a word, but modern English does not.  It’s probably right to stick with the older word.

For some of the texts, the footnotes are extensive, and very useful to the general reader.  Few of us will be familiar with any of the context, after all.  These are admirably done, identifying unfamiliar people and places, and referring to other texts.  For others the notes are fewer – the Life of Pantaleon is much more annotated than the Life of Jared, for instance.  But I do not think this will trouble the reader.

Something that is missing in the book is running titles.  This is consistent with the style of the series, but in an anthology, it makes it harder to find particular texts.  I suspect that copies of the book will get corners folded down, or sprout postits, at the start of each text.

The 23 page introduction assumes no knowledge of the origins of the Ethiopian church, and therefore stands as a useful primer for newcomers.  The statements made are all carefully referenced, and so, in a short space, it gives a vast amount of useful information.

As in other volumes, the short bibliography is at the back.  At the front there are two nice and very necessary maps of the region, and of the location of important Ethiopian monasteries.

All in all this volume is a success.  It gives us texts in English that we did not have before.  It collects useful material.  May it sell well and bring knowledge of Ethiopia to many.

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Review: A translation of the “Life of Saint Bede” (BHL 1069) from Scriptorium Press

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Scriptorium Press have kindly sent me two of their volumes for review.  The first of these is the Life of Saint Bede the Venerable (72 pages, C$12).  ISBN 9798869903341.  I wrote some notes on this before my injury.  The other is Saints of Ethiopia (140 pages, C$16).  ISBN 9798300901172, and unfortunately a review of this will have to wait.

The Bede book is published using Amazon Createspace.  The title page gives the authors as Anthony Pavoni and Evangelos Nikitopoulos.

It is not clear to me who is the intended audience for the volumes of this series, which consists of translations of hagiographical texts.  This is not a series aimed at academics, like the Sources Chrétiennes.  I suspect that it is aimed at a devotional audience.  But it is very useful for everyone to have them, especially as here where the translation is the first.

The “Life of Bede” is a translation of BHL 1069, a hagiographic text of the late 11th century.  The editors do not make clear what Latin text they used, but they list an edition of the text of J. A. Giles in their appendix.  I would advise the editors to add a note at the end of their introduction – maybe a translator’s preface – specifying exactly which text they used.

John Allen Giles produced a complete edition of the works of Bede in twelve volumes during 1843 and 1844, and this is the edition reprinted in the Patrologia Latina.  The Vita Bedae appears in volume 1 (1843), pp. cxliii-clx.  The only footnote tells us that the text is almost entirely a reprint of the text printed by John Smith in his 1722 edition of the Historia Ecclestiastica, pp.815-822, because Giles says that he collated it against a British Museum manuscript.

This Dr Giles led a rather curious life.  Although an amiable person, his life included a jail sentence for falsifying a church register out of an unwise kindness to an unfortunate maidservant.  The DNB gives the story.  Much of his work was done in haste for cash, and critical opinion of it is low.   There is still a need to collate the eight manuscripts and produce a critical edition of the text.  At least one of these, Durham Cathedral Library B.II.35 is online, and the text begins on fol.119r.  But this is outside the scope of the series.

Durham Cathedral Library B.II.35, fol. 119r – excerpt, showing start of the Vita Bedae

The book begins with an introduction to Bede, useful to the general reader.  Indeed the book itself would fit well in a church bookstall, perhaps at Durham Cathedral.  The translation itself is pages 37-61.    The account by Symeon of Durham of the “Translation of the Relics of Bede” is pp.62-5, followed by a list of English titles of the works of Bede, and a short bibliography.

The translation itself is clear and readable.  But any reviewer of a new translation from anything but a major academic publisher will face a novel, and awkward question: is the translation genuine, or the product of AI?  This is an unwelcome new problem.

The only way to assess this was to translate a portion of the text myself, and also to see what AI and Google Translate made of Giles’ Latin.  This I did, for the first page of the text, and I found that the translation was generally accurate, and it displayed no traces of AI-generated language.  I had intended to do further sampling, but my injury has made this impossible at this time.

So… this is a useful item indeed.  The price is cheap, the translation is serviceable.  Well done them!

I attach a word file of the Latin text of the Giles edition, in case it is of use to others:  Vita Bedae BHL 1069 Giles 1843 (.docx)

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J. A. Giles, “Complete works of Bede” – links to all the volumes

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Google books does not handle series of volumes very well.  It can require real determination and effort to locate the volumes of a series.  This afternoon I have had to do just this, in order to locate the 12 volumes of the 1843-4 edition of the works of the Venerable Bede.  These were edited by the Rev. John Allen Giles (“J. A. Giles”), whose Dictionary of National Biography entry is quite fun reading.  He was clearly rather an oddball, whose career was eccentric.  His works were written mainly for money, in great haste.

On 6 March 1855 Giles was tried at the Oxford spring assizes before Lord Campbell, on the charges of having entered in the marriage register book of Bampton parish church a marriage under date 3 Oct. 1854, which took place on the 5th, he having himself performed the ceremony out of canonical hours, soon after 6 a.m.; of having falsely entered that it was performed by license; and of having forged the mark of a witness who was not present.

He pleaded not guilty, but it was evident that he had committed the offence out of foolish good nature, in order to cover the frailty of one of his servants, whom he married to her lover, Richard Pratt, a shoemaker’s apprentice. Pratt’s master, one of Giles’s parishioners, instituted the proceedings.

Giles spoke on his own behalf, and declared that he had published 120 volumes. His bishop also spoke for him. He was found guilty, but strongly recommended to mercy. Lord Campbell sentenced him to a year’s imprisonment in Oxford Castle. His fate excited much commiseration in the university, and after three months’ imprisonment he was released by royal warrant on 4 June (Times, 7 March and 7 June 1855).

At that date the University of Oxford was primarily a training establishment for Anglican clergy.  No doubt the fellows of the university had a word, not out of any love for Mr Giles, but rather to ensure their own rights and liberties.  It does not seem that the episode was held against him, and he was appointed a couple of years later to a curacy.

In Gerald Bonner’s Church and Faith in the Patristic Tradition: Augustine, Pelagianism, and Early Christian Northumbria (1998), we read the following words about Mr G.’s editorial efforts.

I am going to discuss Bede’s commentary of the Apocalypse, and here I must warn you of a difficulty which at present confronts any student of Bede’s theological writings: the unsatisfactory character of our available texts. For most of these we have to rely upon the labours of the Rev. Dr. J. A. Giles, an indefatigable but undiscriminating editor, in whom energy was not tempered with discretion.

In a review of another of Giles’ ventures – his edition of the correspondence of Thomas Becket – the English historian E. A. Freeman observed, with the devastating candour of the Victorian reviewer: ‘We suppose we must allow the praises of zeal and research to a man who has edited, translated, and written more books than any other living English scholar. But really we can give him no other praise,’ and he went on to emphasise his point by remarking: ‘The Letters [of Becket] of course are invaluable; at least they will be when anyone shall be found to edit them decently.’[1]

It would be unkind to apply Freeman’s verdict to Giles’ edition of Bede without qualification. His edition – at least so far as the commentary on the Apocalypse is concerned – is sufficient for practical purposes. Unfortunately, for any detailed study of the text it is unsatisfactory, not only because it lacks any reference to original manuscripts, but also because no attempt is made to indicate the sources used by Bede, which would help us to estimate both the range of his reading and his personal contribution to the commentary. Giles’ edition appeared in 1844. It was reprinted by the Abbé Migne in 1850 in the Patrología Latina, and no one familiar with Migne’s editorial practice will suppose that Giles’ text underwent any particular improvement at his hands. The Migne edition, which is in effect Giles’, is the text most readily available today, and it is high time it was replaced.

Bonner indeed gives an example of Mr. G’s curious editing:

‘Bestiam sanctus Augustinus impiam civitatem, imaginem vero eius simulationem eius (avis [sic!] ed. Giles), fallaci imagine Christianos, characterem autem notam criminis interpretatur, quam adorari, et subiici ei, et consentiri, dicit’ PL xciii, 175 C.

While in Archaeologia Aeliana N.S. 16 (1894), p.82, we read a note on Bede’s Life of Cuthbert:

Patres Ecclesiae Anglicanae: Miscellaneous Works of Venerable Bede, ed. by Dr Giles (1843) VI, p. 357….

3. ibid IV, p. 202 No trust should be placed in the English translation added by Dr Giles.

But no doubt Mr. G. simply printed whatever some manuscript said, or seemed to say; and laboured nothing over the translation.  As you would, if you had to write for a living.

Here are the volumes of Giles’ The Complete Works of Venerable Bede, on Google Books:

The Giles volumes were reprinted in the Patrologia Latina volumes 90-95.  Thankfully most of this material has now been replaced by the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina volumes.

Volume 1 of Giles’ edition also contains the text of various medieval “Lives” of Bede, including BHL 1069, the “Vita Bedae” in the Scriptorium Press volume to which I referred a couple of days ago.  I don’t think that these have been edited since.  But more on that in my next post.

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The Sermons of Pope Leo I (Leo the Great) – A Bibliographical Note

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent drew my attention to an English translation online of sermon 25 of Pope Leo I, or Leo the Great.  This appears on the Paths of Love blog here.  He noticed that it was not among the selection of sermons included in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collection, and asked whether it was genuine.

The sermons of Leo the Great were published in a modern critical edition by A. Chavasse in the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (CCSL) from Brepols in 1973 (numbers 138 and 138A).  This was not titled something normal like “Sermones Leonis Magni” or something of the sort – “Sermons of Leo the Great.”  Instead the – evidently deranged – editor chose to call  his volume, “Sancti Leonis Magni Romani Pontificis Tractatus Septem et Nonaginta.”  The two volumes contain 96 of these “tractatus” (plural), i.e. “sermons;” or at least, 96 is the highest number in the index at the end of the second volume.

An idea of the contents of volume one is as follows:

I. La transmission des sermons de saint Léon
II. Chronologie et circonstances des sermones
III. Établissement du texte
IV. La présente édition
TRACTATVS
I–V: Pour l’ordination de saint Léon et son anniversaire
VI–XI: De collectis
XII–XX: De ieiunio decimi mensis
XXI–XXX: De natale Domini
XXXI–XXXVIII: De epiphania Domini

The lengthy introductory material in French is extremely detailed.  But the novice reader had better avoid it until he has some understanding of the manuscript tradition.

It seems that early editions of the Sermons were mainly taken from homiliaries, medieval collections of sermons adapted and reordered for liturgical use.  This includes the Ballerini edition.  But proper manuscripts do exist, and need to be used.  There seem to be three families of manuscripts, labelled A, B and C.

Unfortunately our insane editor begins his volume by assuming that only experts in the field will be reading his book.  So instead of giving an introduction, to orient a non-specialist, he plunges straight into immense detail.

I’m sure that many of us remember, from university, reading some massive tome and trying to extract from it the half-page of information that was all we actually required?  I certainly do, and indeed occasionally I still have nightmares featuring such a task.

This is one of those unhelpful volumes.  On the very first page of text, it dives into detail from the second paragraph onwards, giving no orientation whatever to the newcomer. Indeed this “avant-propos”, “introduction” consists entirely of an attack on the Ballerini edition (Venice, 1755).  The Ballerini text is the text reprinted by J.-P. Migne in his Patrologia Latina 54, cols. 141-468, and so this was the standard text before Chavasse.  But this should have appeared much later in the volume.  The point made is that the Ballerini brothers based their edition on the homiliaries, not on the manuscripts of the “straight” text.

An English translation of the whole series of sermons has appeared in the Fathers of the Church series, 93 (1995), taken from the CCSL text.

There is a French translation in the Sources Chrétiennes series, SC 22, from 1947.  At that early date the editors of this now august series had few ambitions beyond producing cheap paperbacks with parallel Latin and French.  They reprint the Migne text from the PL.  Curiously they reorder and renumber the sermons according to their own scheme.

Sermon 25  is one of the ten sermons delivered at Christmas.  It is perfectly authentic.

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Did the New Testament influence the text of the Greek Old Testament?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the course of writing my last post, I came across a curious quotation, which I give as follows, although I have overparagraphed it.  The discussion is about to a “long quotation” in Romans 3:10 f., “made up of a number of passages taken from different parts of the O.T.”:

As a whole this conglomerate of quotations has had a curious history. The quotations in N.T. frequently react upon the text of O.T., and they have done so here: vv. 13-18 got imported bodily into Ps. xiv [xiii LXX] as an appendage to ver. 4 in the ‘common’ text of the LXX (ἠ κοινή, i.e. the unrevised text current in the lime of Origen). They are still found in Codd. ℵa B R U and many cursive MSS. of LXX (om. ℵca A), though the Greek commentators on the Psalms do not recognize them.

From interpolated Mss such as these they found their way into Lat.-Vet, and so into Jerome’s first edition of the Psalter (the ‘Roman’), also into his second edition (the ‘Gallican,’ based upon Origin’s Hexapla, though marked with an obelus after the example of Origen. The obelus dropped out, and they are commonly printed in the Vulgate text of the Psalms, which is practically the Gallican.

From the Vulgate they travelled into Coverdale’s Bible (A.D. 1535); from thence into Matthew’s (Rogers’) Bible, which in the Psalter reproduces Coverdale (A.D. 1537), and also into the ‘Great Bible’ (first issued by Cromwell in 1530, and afterwards with a preface by Cranmer, when it also bears the name of Cranmer’s Bible, in 1540.  The Psalter of the Great Bible was incorporated in the Book of Common Prayer, in which  it was retained as being familiar and smoother to sing, even in the later revision which substituted elsewhere the Authorized Version of 1611.

The editing of the Great Bible was due to Coverdale, who put an * to the passages found in the Vulgate but wanting in the Hebrew. These marks however had the same fate which befell the obeli of Jerome. They were not repeated in the Prayer-Book ; so that English Churchmen still read the interpolated verses in Ps. xiv with nothing to distinguish them from the rest of the text.

Jerome himself was well aware that these verses were no part of the Psalm. In his commentary on Isaiah, lib. XVI, he notes that St. Paul quoted Is. lix. 7, 8 in Ep. to Rom., and he adds, quod multi ignorantes de tertio decimo psalmo sumptum putant, qui versus [στίχοι] in editione Vulgata [i.e. the κοινή of the LXX] additi sunt et in Hebraico non habentur (Hieron. Opp. ed. Migne, iv. 601; comp. the preface to the same book, ibid. col. 568 f.; also the newly discovered Commentarioli in Psalmos, ed. Morin. 1895, p. 24 f.).

I came across this in something called “Romans (International Critical Commentary)” online here.  But it actually comes from W. Sanday and Arthur C. Headlam, A critical and exegetical commentary on the epistle to the Romans (1902), p.77-8, on Rom. 3:9-10. (Online here).

It is not at all improbable that such things should happen.  But this is now very old scholarship.  There must be more recent studies of this phenomenon in the 122 years that have passed since.

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Baffled by a liturgical psalter

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just come back from a few days away, staying in an Anglican nunnery.  My girlfriend wanted to attend a retreat there, and my role was to act as chauffeur, factotum, and otherwise to stay out of the way.  Which I did.

I did attend one service, and found myself reading responses from a modern ring-bound book of psalms.  Here is a picture of psalm 1 in that book.

Modern ring-bound psalter

The asterisk in the middle of the line marks a long silent pause, which kept catching me out; and the two sides of the congregation read alternate lines.

Inevitably I found myself wondering what I was looking at.  Often behind modern prayer books there lurks the ghost of very ancient Latin versions.  I already knew that in the Anglican world, the psalter is not from the King James Bible, but rather from Miles Coverdale’s “Great Bible” of 1540 as suitably amended by Cranmer, and this, in a revised form, appeared with the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.  The people were used to it, and it read more smoothly, and so it was retained.  This decision was made in the Savoy Conference of 1661, apparently.

But where does this particular text come from? That’s a modern set of pronouns there.  Nor is this the text in the new “Common Worship” that is being introduced, for that begins with “Blessed”, not “Happy.”  But then this “Common Worship” is trying to get closer to the modern biblical text.

The book that I held in my hand contained no information as to its origins, no ISBN, no printer, nothing.  It was possibly from some ecclesiastical supplier, or even printed themselves from somewhere.

Next I went to the library and started looking at their collection of service books, in the hope of enlightenment.  I pulled down the 1980 Alternative Service Book:

1980 ASB Psalm 1

Well, it’s not this.  We’re still “Blessed.”  But there are now seven verses, not six; verse 3 has been split, and “It’s leaves also shall not wither” is a new sentence.

A modern reprint of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer was no more helpful:

1662 BCP

Again, we are “Blessed.”  The “Happy” version must be a modernisation from somewhere.  Here “His leaf also shall not wither…”

I then went online and found a copy of the 1540 Great Bible:

1540 Great Bible, Psalm 1

This is of course “Blessed”.  There are no verse numbers.  But “His leaf also shall not wither…” appears as a separate sentence.

Eventually I resorted to Google, and I found this page which contains exactly the text above, minus the antiphon.  It informs us that the version is from the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.  I found this online at Google Books here, on p.585:

1979 Episcopalian BCP

Psalm 1
Beatus vir qui non abiit

1     Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, *
nor lingered in the way of sinners,
nor sat in the seats of the scornful!
2     Their delight is in the law of the LORD, *
and they meditate on his law day and night.
3     They are like trees planted by streams of water,
bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither; *
everything they do shall prosper.
4     It is not so with the wicked; *
they are like chaff which the wind blows away.
5     Therefore the wicked shall not stand upright when judgment comes, *
nor the sinner in the council of the righteous.
6     For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, *
but the way of the wicked is doomed.

As far as I can determine, the preceding US Episcopalian prayer book was the 1928, which had the traditional “Blessed” and “His leaf.”

Like most people I know very little about the history of the prayer book, and indeed the history of liturgy.  It was news to me that Cranmer’s prayer books were basically a translation of the medieval “Sarum usage” prayer books, suitably revised for protestant ideas.  These also had a psalter.  Cranmer saved himself effort by using Coverdale’s existing translation.

Coverdale himself knew relatively little Hebrew, and inevitably this made him dependent on the Latin vulgate.  This rather unpleasant site – beware adverts – interleaves the Latin of Jerome’s translation of the Hebrew; the Latin of his translation of the Greek LXX; and the literal Douai translation.  Verse three in Coverdale is illuminated a bit by the comparison:

3.

et erit tamquam lignum transplantatum iuxta rivulos aquarum quod fructum suum dabit in tempore suo et folium eius non defluet et omne quod fecerit prosperabitur

et erit tamquam lignum quod plantatum est secus decursus aquarum quod fructum suum dabit in tempore suo et folium eius non defluet et omnia quaecumque faciet prosperabuntur

And he shall be like a tree which is planted near the running waters, which shall bring forth its fruit, in due season. And his leaf shall not fall off: and all whatsoever he shall do shall prosper.

“Folium” is singular, hence “his leaf.”

That was more work than it might have been!

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Scriptorium Press – A New Series of Translations of Hagiographical Texts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Scriptorium Press is a new publisher.  They started a year ago, and have a series of translations available, at very cheap prices.  Mainly these are of Greek hagiographical texts, which is wonderful to have.

None of the texts translated have previously been translated.

They are based in Canada, but their translations are available on Amazon.com also.

Titles include:

  • The Conversion of Saint Cyprian – The Unabridged Greek Acts  [BHG 452 – this is Cyprianus of Antioch]
  • The Life of Saint Nilus the Younger  [BHG 1370 – Nilus of Calabria]
  • The Life of Saint Bede the Venerable [BHL 1077]
  • The Life of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite – By Michael Syncellus [BHG 556]
  • Saints of the Old Testament – By Rabanus Maurus [Rabanus Maurus’ commentary on the Books of Ruth, Esther, and Judith]
  • The Life of Saint Simeon the Stylite – By Simeon the Metaphrast  [BHG 1686]
  • Saints of Ethiopia

For each text I have added where I could what I believe to be the correct BHG or BHL number, for ease of reference.

This is an impressive array of texts, all very much in need of more attention.  Buy them now!

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