German researchers preparing “Qur’an: The Critical Edition”
This is a serious business. A team of researchers at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences is preparing to bring out the first installment of Corpus Coranicum – which purports to be nothing less than the first critically evaluated text of the Qur’an ever to be produced.
What this means is that the research team is in the process of analysing and transcribing some 12,000 slides of Qur’an mansucripts from the first six centuries of the text’s existence. Once that is complete, the way is open to producing a text that annotates and, presumably, provides some sort of exegesis on the differences found in the early manuscripts.
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The Potsdam-based team of Corpus Coranicum have so far concentrated on Suras 18 to 20, and are due to produce a first slice of the final product from that in the next few weeks. The whole book is meant to take until around 2025.
UPDATE: The English language site seems to be down but the Google cache contains the following, seemingly from an old update:
Welcome to the Corpus Coranicum
The project “Corpus Coranicum” contains two unworked fields of qur’anic studies: (1) the documentation of the qur’anic text in his handwritten as well as orally transmitted form and (2) a comprehensive commentary which elucidates the text within the framework of its historical process of development.
Because of the ambiguity of the early defective writing system of the Qur’anic manuscripts, a strict separation of the data on the one hand provided by manuscripts and on the other hand transmitted via the tradition of recitation is recommended. The documentation of the Qur’anic text will provide a documentation for both traditions and compare them afterwards.
The planned commentary focuses on a historical perspective, the Qur’an seen as a text which evolved through the period of more than twenty years, thereby getting formal and content-related differences through abrogation and re-definitions within the text. Furthermore, the commentary is based on an inclusion of the judeo-christian intertexts and looks at the Qur’an as a document of the Late Antiquity. “Corpus Coranicum” is in the early stage of its development; the first results are planned to be published online in 2009.
That shows a very sensible approach. You eat an elephant a little at a time. Rather than working on a Koran text as such, work on the early witnesses to the text, the physical remains, the unvocalised scripts, and find out what we actually have from that period and what it says.
A note in LT-ANTIQ drew my attention here. A PDF at the foot of the page not merely lists the manuscripts of some of the commentaries of St. Jerome on scripture but discusses how the editions are being prepared for maximum clarity, what font is used, what forms of quotation marks, etc.
I’ve been converting a load of Greek text into unicode using Greek transcoder with much success. But I ran across a glitch. Depending on the option chosen, the accents can all end up to one side!
The option responsible is this one, “Use composing characters”.
I checked that, and I should not have done; it caused off-centre accents. But what on earth does it mean?
A hunt around the web reveals that you can do all those accents in one of two ways. Firstly you can use a character that includes them all inside the character. Alternatively you just type ‘alpha’ followed by the accents, and the browser and editor should render them all correctly as one letter with some accents on the top. The former is called “using precomposed characters”; the latter “using composing characters”. The latter does not work very well, as applications don’t support it. This TLG PDF says more.
I’ve also noticed that on XP the WINWORD executable tends to hang around in memory after you exit a document. If you copy the .dot files for Greek Transcoder into the Application Data\Microsoft\Word\Startup directory, they are only picked up when the WINWORD executable starts, so get ignored in this case. I’ve had to manually terminate it to get the utility to appear.
Today I received an email from a Romanian gentleman, asking about the translation of the lost passage by John Chrysostom from Oratio 2 adversus Judaeos, which I commissioned and then gave away recently. He wanted to make a translation into Romanian. So he asked what I paid the journal, in which Wendy Pradels published the Greek text with notes and German translation, for permission to have that English translation made. I replied that I paid them nothing; there was no money in all this, and any claim to own a text by a man dead 16 centuries might be valid in some benighted lands but hardly in the USA.
But it led me to muse on the likelihood that any academic publisher would try to sue out a claim to copyright in such a case. It would hardly be sensible, in my opinion; why sue over what has no commercial value?
While in bath, tho, my sense of humour took hold, and I took to wondering what questions one could ask in court. Copyright only vests in “original, creative works.” So…
“M’Lud, can the plaintiff tell us which specifically which words in the first line are NOT by John Chrysostom?”
“Would you give us a list of the differences between the text printed and the text composed in 400 AD by John Chrysostom? If you cannot list the portions which are an original creative work by yourselves, on what possible grounds can you claim that any of it is by you?”
“Would you tell us what the commercial value of this item was, when you purchased — as you believed — the copyright from the scholarly author? Did you pay any money at all for it?”
And so on.
I suspect, sadly, that courts are unimpressed by rhetoric unless it involves clever points of law. The layman who ventures into these waters does so at his peril, and indeed few of us ever do so unless cornered. As Auberon Waugh remarked, from bitter experience, “He who goes to court places himself in the hands of a ring of grinning rascals who will all run up costs as fast as they can until somebody has to pay.”
It’s probably easier and safer just to meet the plaintiff, shake hands with him, and then pitch him head first out of his office window, “accidental-like”. Would the fines for so doing be at all likely to reach the charges that any law firm would demand?
The serious point behind all this is that the relentless march of commercial interests taking a yard where the law granted an inch has reached the point of absurdity. Only the common sense exercised by publishers in the anglophone world is restraining them from foolishness of the sort feared by our Romanian friend; and outside that sunlit circle of generosity and mutual respect, there have been many examples of insane greed. We need to push back.
Genuine creative work should be protected by copyright, for the benefit of us all. Attempts to own the work of the ancients, by one subterfuge or another, should not exist in a civilised land.
One of the texts that is not online and really should be is the legal compedium assembled in the reign of Theodosius II in 450 AD and known as the Theodosian code or Codex Theodosianus.
The work was compiled from earlier collections of imperial edicts, or rescripts as they were known. These took the form of a letter from the emperor to some official, usually a proconsul or prefect. The compilation provided a systematic list of things proscribed or permitted.
The work was translated by a certain Clyde Pharr back in 1954 for Princeton University Press. That means that it could be out of copyright in the US; unfortunately it is not.
The most interesting portion of the code is the last book. This consists of the rescripts on religious matters issued by Constantine and his successors, which progressively made Christianity a privileged religion, then the state religion, and then prohibited other religions aside from Judaism. The tone of these rescripts is often violent, as is often the case with the edicts of later emperors. Pharr’s introduction points out rescripts which indicate the powerlessness of these emperors, and their repeated and futile attempts by ever heavier penalties to get their will enacted by the imperial bureaucracy.
Such interesting material is always likely to find its way online in unauthorised form. Today I found a site with a substantial chunk of that book 15 here. I’m not sure whether it is complete, tho.
From archaeologist Rodolfo Amedeo Lanciani, The destruction of ancient Rome: a sketch of the history of the monuments, p. 36 f. (here):
To what use the temples were put immediately after the expulsion of their gods, we do not know; but it is certain that they were not occupied by Christians, nor turned into places of Christian worship. This change was only to take place two centuries later, when the scruples about the propriety of worshipping the true God in heathen temples had been overcome. In the year 600, Pope Boniface IV asked the Emperor Phocas for the temple which was called Pantheon, and turned it into a church of Mary the Virgin ever blessed.” Two periods, then, may be distinguished in the converting of pagan edifices into places of Christian worship, one anterior to the year 609, the other following that date. During the first, civil edifices alone were transformed, partially or completely, into churches; such were the Record Office, which became the church of SS. Cosmas and Damian, and the round market on the Caelian Hill, now S. Stefano Rotondo. After 609 almost every available building, whether secular or sacred, was made into a church or chapel, until the places of worship seemed to outnumber the houses.
This view, expressed by a 19th century archaeologist, is interesting. But is it true?
Wieland Wilker kindly sent me a copy of Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the transformation of the book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea. This arrived on Friday, and I read through it over the weekend.
The first thing to strike me was the absence of footnotes. That’s because they had all been banished to the end. This habit of American publishers is a nuisance to the reader. It necessitates flipping to and fro the end of the book. Doing so is weary; consequently it is impossible to glance at the note while reading more than once or two.
The book also places two further difficulties in the way of the critical reader.
Firstly the numbering of the endnotes is broken up by chapter. In order to find a note, therefore, I have to memorise both the endnote number (23) and the page on which it appears (15).
Secondly, once you have found your note, it will not infrequently have a reference in the form “BLOGGS, 1997, p.123”. Now unless you have memorised the bibliography, this may not take you further forward. To get an idea of which book is being referred to — a study? an edition? a paper? — you must then locate the bibliography, hunt through that, then return to the note, reread that now you know what the book is, and then return to your place in the book.
It’s obvious why the book is so arranged; it is very convenient and concise for the author and publisher. But it is rather a problem for the reader. I wish that publishers in the US would avoid these habits.
But on to the book. Grafton’s prose style is a fluid as ever and the book slips down easily. The view expressed is that we all owe rather more to the innovations in book design required for the Hexapla of Origen and the Chronicle of Eusebius than is generally realised. The argument is made well, and is one that I have long wished to hear made. The description of the Hexapla is very clear, and I read it with deep attention, while cursing my inability to glance at the bottom of the page to see the footnotes and assess the data behind the claims.
The authors also make the valuable point that Eusebius’ innovation of verbatim quotation was itself a useful innovation. The links that Grafton makes with the activity of renaissance scholars are also useful and interesting.
Another very useful aspect of the book was how G&W related the activity of Origen, supported by the private sponsorship of Ambrose, to the way in which freelance teachers of philosophy operated in the period. This must be the right approach to take, and such links must be illuminating. A letter of Origen in which he describes how Ambrose kept Origen’s nose to the grindstone in his enthusiasm was new to me, and most interesting!
The plates are good, although the quality of images supplied by some of the institutions is risibly poor. The book came out in 2006, at which time many manuscript libraries were waging a die-hard campaign to prevent access to their collections. I think really the page images need to be in colour, and there seems no reason technically not to do this now.
The content of the book is mainly an essay of interpretation. To cover the ground, the authors reply mainly on the secondary literature and reflect the consensus of US-based scholarship without too much discussion. The breadth of the topic necessitates some such approach, indeed. This is handled well, and there is certainly a need for such books. The translations that are given of some texts are fresh and readable.
But the approach also means that sometimes a view is expressed without any backing other than a scanty reference, if that. Some of the views so skipped over are very controversial, as anything to do with christian origins tends to be. Do we wish to be told, as fact, that the gnostics were Christians, for instance? The apostles did not think so, the Christians did not think so, modern Christians do not think so. This idea seems to me to reflect more the desire of the Selfish Generation to evade the moral teaching of Christianity than anything in the historical record. But doubtless Dr. G and W just picked this nonsense up from their sources. In view of the tendency of said Generation to promote daft ideas by incessant reiteration, we must always check whether some agenda is being promoted when we read stuff from US sources.
Another bit struck me as unintentionally funny. At one point the book offers as fact the theory that Demetrius, the enemy of Origen, was in fact the first Bishop of Alexandria. This contradicts the sources, which tell us of an episcopate beginning with St. Mark. The idea that in fact Mark created some form of presbyterate, or whatever, is of course possible; but our sources do not say so. But G&W treat this theory as fact, with the odd result that they are forced to describe the statement of Eusebius as “the conjectures of Eusebius”. That is, the primary source written a century later around 100 miles away is “conjectures”, while a theory contradicted by the data written 2,000 years later by someone in a culture which possesses no more than 1% of the ancient literature is fact. Really? That seems quite unlikely to me!
When nonsense is offered as fact, and fact is described as conjecture, there is always a reason. To debunk the idea of a succession of bishops is a standard of anti-Catholic literature. The agenda of those who control university appointments peeks through again.
We mustn’t pillory G&W for this sort of thing, tho. This is what happens to any of us when we don’t stick close enough to the data, and spend too much time with the secondary literature. Doubtless the authors repeated the stuff in good faith.
Overall verdict? A useful book. I imagine it is aimed at undergraduates. It must raise the reputation of Origen and Eusebius in that audience, and also connect these authors with their late antique milieu. Both objectives are praiseworthy.
Electronic texts are wonderful things. But you always wonder how accurate they are. I now have the Greek portions of Eusebius Gospel Problems and Solutions in unicode in Word format. But I can already see errors.
I’ve advertised for someone to read through it, and correct it against the printed editions. It will be interesting to see what the response is like.
I’ve also noticed that on XP the WINWORD executable tends to hang around in memory after you exit a document. If you copy the .dot files for Greek Transcoder into the Application Data\Microsoft\Word\Startup directory, they are only picked up when the WINWORD executable starts, so get ignored in this case. I’ve had to manually terminate it to get the utility to appear.
