Month: March 2010

From my diary – Chrysostom and Eusebius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just spent a busy couple of hours writing emails to people who host copies of Chrysostom’s Sermons against the Jews online, asking them to update the page with the extra material I’ve had translated.  Paul Halsall is going to update the Fordham site, which is probably the parent of many of the others.  No replies back yet, but I am hopeful.  In some cases the material had been posted to fora, and all I had to do was register and reply to the post.

Menwhile I’ve been making progress with the Greek text of Eusebius Gospel problems and solutions.  Now I have this all in unicode, it’s a much better proposition to deal with.  I need to spend some time working it over, tho.

One nice bit of email today: from a medievalist interested in Porphyry’s Isagogue who discovered the reference to it in Abu’l Barakat’s catalogue of Arabic Christian literature.  He found the latter on my site, because I’d had it translated and put online.  It’s nice when my endeavours visibly help others!

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Chrysostom, Against the Jews homily 2 (missing part) is now in English!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Ever since the eight sermons against the Jews by the 4th century writer John Chrysostom were published, men have noticed that sermon 2 is only a third of the length of the others, and speculated that some of it is missing.  The missing portion was discovered in a manuscript on Lesbos a decade ago and published, but no English translation has ever been made of it.

One now exists, and it is here.  I commissioned it and own the copyright, but I make the translation public domain.  Do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial. 

Now to communicate with the owners of copies of the Eight Sermons online, and try to persuade them to host the missing chunk as well!

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Note on Google Street View and maps

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Google Street View has rolled out across the UK.  I’ve just found a curious inconsistency between the Street View images and the Satellite maps.  Here is King Edward VI School (as was) in Stafford, originally founded as a grammar school, and the satellite shows the school, and to the left, the school playing fields, surrounded by mature trees.

 kess

But the road and the item in the middle of the playing fields tells the story: “Tesco Stores”.  Looking on Street View down that road, across the playing fields, I see this:

kess2

The local authority has sold the playing fields to the supermarket developer, leaving the Gothic school perched incongruously on the corner.  

But … Google has recorded this piece of history.

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Typing in unicode Greek

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just come across this site which allows you to type in ASCII — A)\ etc — and converts what you type on the fly into unicode Greek.  It’s fast, neat and effective.

And better yet — it’s all done in Javascript, which means if you save the .htm page locally, your local copy will work too!

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Recent studies on the Coptic catena of de Lagarde?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Looking at the summary of information on catenas on the gospels in Di Berardino’s latest volume of Quasten’s Patrology, I notice an intriguing couple of entries:

E. J. Caubet Iturbe, La Cadena arabe del Evangelio de san Mateo,1 Texto; 2 Version, Vatican City 1969-1970.

and

E. J. Caubet Iturbe, “La Cadena copto-arabe de los Evangelios y Severo de Antioquia”, Homenaje a J. Prado. Miscelanea de estudios biblicos y hebraicos, ed. L.Alvarez Verdes, E.J. Alonso Hernandez, Madrid 1975,421-432.

Now I recall from Graf’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur 1, p. 318, n.1 and p.481-2, that the Coptic catena on the gospels published by Paul de Lagarde also exists in an Arabic version in the Vatican.  I came across this reference while searching for material by Eusebius of Caesarea in Arabic.  He’s listed in Abu’l Barakat’s catalogue:

Eusebius of Caesarea: He has explanations on passages of the holy Gospels and other separate religious treatises.

which Graf discusses, referring to a catena with 6 passages from Eusebius on Matthew and material from Severus of Antioch on Luke.  Page 481f discusses an “anonymous gospel catena”, which turns out to be that of Paul de Lagarde.  I’m not sure I’ve read the entry before.  Written in Bohairic, and almost certainly based on a Greek catena now unknown, H. Achelis dates the catena before 888 AD.  The manuscript used by de Lagarde is incomplete, however.   The manuscript turns out to be Vatican Arab 452, and most of the scholia are at least under the name of Eusebius.  A long quotation from Luke, and five chunks on Matthew, are ascribed to Eusebius, or so Graf says.

It is an interesting sight, therefore, to see this in the modern bibliography, and no mention of de Lagarde’s publication.

Is it possible that Iturbe published a critical text of the Arabic version of the catena?  It looks very much like it.  I wish I could obtain the article and see what he says.

UPDATE: After typing those words, I started searching for the book in Google.  Slightly amazing to find my site listed, and this article listed, less than a minute after I pressed save.  Is Google really watching these words that intently!?

I find in COPAC more details of the book:

A compilation of patristic commentaries, with the text of the Gospel, in the Arabic of Codex Vaticanus ar. 452 and in a Spanish version.

which also aligns with my understanding.  Another states:

Studi e testi 254-5.  Half title: Cod. vat. ar. 452, ff. 6-135. Originally presented as the editor’s thesis, Pontificia Commissio Biblica. Based on a Coptic version entitled: Ermēnia n̄te pieuangelion ethouab kata Matheon. cf. the editor’s introd., v.1, p. [li]-liv; H. Achelis. Hippolytsudien. 1897. p. 163-169. Originally presented as the editor’s thesis, Pontificia Commissio Biblica. Arabic text; Spanish introduction, notes and translation.

So there we have it.  This is indeed a critical edition of the Arabic catena.  The next question is whether I obtain this and include it in the Eusebius!  For there is a copy available for sale online…

UPDATE 2: I cannot resist.  It would be cheaper to order the books by ILL, and copy them, etc; but it is far easier to just buy the things. 

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More on Abu’l Makarim

Posted on by Roger Pearse

evettsIt’s been a while since I wrote about the 13th century Arabic Christian history once ascribed to Abu Salih the Armenian and today to Abu’l Makarim.  But a friend has sent me a new article on the subject, by Mouton and Papescu-Belis, in Arabica 53, p. (2006), which discusses the unique manuscript.

B.T.A.Evetts in 1895 published part of this text from Paris Arabe 307 with an English translation.  Coptic monk and bishop Fr. Samuel published the rest in 1984 in four volumes.  His manuscript is now Munich Arabicus 2570, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.  An English translation of the new material, undertaken by a collaborator, is apparently not that reliable.  But Fr. Samuel’s own corrections are in the main sound.

The combined manuscript was originally 365 folios in length, disposed into 37 quires.  The first 21 quires are in the Munich ms, and the last 16 in the Paris ms.  The two quires 21 and 22, where the manuscript was broken in half, are mostly missing as the leaves became detached.  The manuscript seems to have been written in 1338 AD (explicitly stated in the Paris ms.); the work itself refers to no event later than 1220.  It is possible that later events were written by a continuator.

The Munich ms. contains descriptions of monasteries and churches in the north of Egypt, as far as Cairo; then those of the Near-East.  The Paris ms. contains the same material for Egypt south of Cairo, into Nubia, and the rest of Africa.

The remainder of the article discusses the description of the monastery of Mt. Sinai and its environs at the period of composition.

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Chrysostom against the Jews — online copies

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Once we have a final version of the missing portion of Chrysostom against the Jews, I need to make sure that it is added to the copies of the defective text that are around online.  Of course that means I need to know where they are.  A google search provided quite a few links:

The first is undoubtedly the most important; many of the others derive from it.   But I have yet to visit most of these.

Some of the more unusual sites in this list — and there are a few — can be difficult to communicate with, as their authors are either very eccentric or have developed a well-grounded fear of entrapment by their political enemies.   I cannot say that I am looking forward to the task of writing to all these sites and asking them to add the missing passage to sermon 2.  Doubtless some will ignore my email.

But unless we do this, unless we reunite the lost portion of the text with all the copies we can find, we may be wasting our time.  We cannot be certain which copy of the text will be the ancestor of all the copies to reach the year 3,000 AD.  In so many cases, we know that a single copy ca. 800 AD is the ancestor of all our current copies of a text.  To fail to reunite the severed texts may be tantamount to wasting the rediscovery.

Our duty to the future dictates that the effort must be made.  Once I have the final version, I will make that effort.  Not because I agree or disagree with the sites above; but because we cannot tell which of them may provide the future with the text of Chrysostom.

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Google goes to Rome

Posted on by Roger Pearse

AP has this excellent news:

Google says it will scan up to 1 million old books in national libraries in Rome and Florence, including works by astronomer Galileo Galilei, in what’s being described as the first deal of its kind. …

Culture Ministry official Mario Resca says the deal will help save the books’ content forever.

Resca said the 1966 Florence flood ruined thousands of books in the Tuscan city’s library. He said digitizing books from before 1868 will help spread Italian culture throughout the world.

Google will cover the costs of the scanning of the books, all of them out-of-copyright Italian works, including 19th-century literature and 18th-century scientific volumes.

Well done, the Italians.  Suddenly we will all be able to read a whole load of material that no-one could ever see.

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Greek.ttf – the curse of pre-unicode Greek fonts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Once I signed an agreement with the Cerf to use their Greek text of Eusebius Gospel Problems and Solutions, I asked and received a copy of the text in electronic form.  This turned out to be a word file, with an attached font: greek.ttf.

How I cursed that file name!  Because it was clear that this was not a unicode font.  To use the file, I was going to have to convert the text to unicode.  It would help a lot if I knew which font that was!  I hunted around for that file name, and found (as you might expect) several candidates, none of which were the same.

This evening I had a stroke of luck.  I was preparing to write a program that would open the font and display all the characters, so I could see what was what.  But in Vista, when you open a font, you get a Properties option; and under Details there was information!

greek.ttf

This was gold!  The name of the author, Peter J. Gentry and Andre…, a version 1.0, and a date 1993.  A google search turned up a page of old fonts by Eric Pement.  There it was:

Ancient Greek (57 KB). GREEK.TTF, Greek, ver 1.000, © 1993 by Peter J. Gentry and Andrew M. Fountain. Requires this keyboard utility: KeyMan32 (381 KB)

A search on the author names reveals that they were the authors of WinGreek.  I wonder if, perhaps, this font is an early version of that?  With the same keyboard mapping?  If so, I am in great good luck, for WinGreek is widely known.

Installing the font creates “Greek regular” in my fonts directory.  This TLG Wingreek test page reveals that it is exactly the correct mapping.

The next stage is to try to find a converter utility.  And GreekTranscoder seems to fit the bill!  The commercial Antioch program can also import the stuff, and indeed this utility.  I’ll have to see if it works, but I feel very pleased with myself to have got so far!

UPDATE: GreekTranscoder worked brilliantly!  You had to copy the .dot files to the ~\startup, and make sure you had no WINWORD running silently in background, but it then converted everything with just one error.  The Jiffycomp utility did not do as well, and lost all formatting (italics etc).  I have made a donation to Greektranscoder.

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On the spend in Syria

Posted on by Roger Pearse

SyriaThe postman brought a guidebook to Syria yesterday, the first to reach me.  The first question I had was “What currency should I take with me?”  Because, of course, if I need to obtain some Venezualan bolivars or Swiss Francs or whatever, some warning would be helpful!

The answer seems to be a mixture of US dollars and Euros and British pounds is preferred.  Travellers’ cheques are useless apparently.  Credit cards may be used in high-end hotels (which I certainly hope to be staying in — my sense of adventure evapourates at 5pm).

Only a few weeks to go now.  I’m just starting to feel the first incipient twinges of the “I wish I hadn’t given myself all this trouble” feeling that I get before I go anywhere!   Of course that feeling has to be overcome, or I would never go anywhere.  These days I expect it, and don’t get worried about it.  Still wish I didn’t get that, tho.

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