The remarkable story of Grenfell and Hunt and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri is told by Peter Parsons in a delightful new book, The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish.2 Parsons, employed since 1960 with cataloging, deciphering and publishing the Oxyrhynchus Papyri under the auspices of the British Academy and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, is just the person to narrate this saga. His assembled chapters explore the workings of the city of Oxyrhynchus, the presence of the empire and the imperial cult, the Nile and its rhythmic effects, economic matters, personal life, the literary predilections of its citizenry, ancient bureaucracy, the use of medicine and magic to cope with accident, disease and distress, and the city’s late-antique Christian legacy. Parsons introduces us to all of it with great erudition and expert commentary and a welcome sense of humor.
Month: March 2011
The Archko volume is on the loose again! Everyone under the table!
Curses, curses. The Archko volume is loose again. This evening I found a bunch of posts on various fora around the web, all referencing it to show that Jesus was white. It seems an unnecessary effort, surely, given that we all know that God is an Englishman.
The Archko volume appeared in 1884 edited by a certain Rev. W. D. Mahan of Boonville in the USA under the title “Archaeological writings of the Sanhedrin and Talmuds of the Jews: Taken from the ancient parchments and scrolls at Constantinople and the Vatican at Rome: Being the record made by the enemies of Jesus of Nazareth in his day.” At the foot of the title page are the revealing words “Published for the author by Perrin and Smith, Book and Job Printers…” — in short, it was self-published. The contents are interesting:
Chapter I.—A short sketch of the several books of the Talmuds, with Historical References, 5
Chapter II.—Dr. Rubin’s Letter, as taken from the “Brunswicker,” Dr. Mclntosh’s Letter to the People of America, and Rev. W. D. Mahan’s Letter from Rome to his family, 24
Chapter III.—Eusebius’ History of the Emperors of Rome. Constantine’s Letter in Regard to having Fifty Copies of the Scriptures Written and Bound for Preservation, – 32 Chapter IV.—Jonathan’s Report of his Interview with the Shepherds of Bethlehem; also, Letter of Melker, who was Priest of the Bethlehem Synagogue when Jesus was Born, 37
Chapter V.—Gamaliel’s Report of his Interview with Joseph and Mary in Regard to their Child Jesus; also, of his interview with Massalian, and Mary and Martha, – – 55
Chapter VI.—Caiaphas’ Report of the Sanhedrin, giving his Reason for the Execution of Jesus of Nazareth, – – 76
Chapter VII.—Caiaphas’ Second Report in Regard to the Resurrection of Jesus, —— 100
Chapter VIII.—Eli’s Story of the Magi, – – – 113
Chapter IX.—Acta Pilati, or, Pilate’s Report of the Arrest, Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus, – 201
Chapter X.—Herod Antipater’s Defense Before the Roman Senate Concerning his Conduct at Bethlehem, – – 231
Chapter XI.—Herod Antipas’ Defense Before the Roman Senate Concerning his Execution of John Baptist, and Other Charges, – – – – – – – 240
Chapter XII.—The Hillel Letters Regarding God’s Providences to the Jews, ——- 247
Mahan opens his book with the following words:
Believing that no event, of as much importance as the death of Jesus of Nazareth was to the world, could have transpired without some record being made of it by his enemies in their courts, legislations and histories, I commenced investigating the subject. After many years of study, and after consulting various histories and corresponding with many scholars, I secured the assistance of two learned men—Drs. Mclntosh and Twyman—and went to the Vatican at Rome, and then to the Jewish Talmuds at Constantinople, incurring a risk of my life as well as expending a good deal of money. As a result, I have compiled the following book, which will be found one of the most strange and interesting works ever read. It may appear fragmentary, but the reader will remember that it is the record of men made nearly two thousand years ago.
Mahan found himself with a best-seller on his hands, and was quickly making good money. But his success attracted questions. Other clergymen in Boonville wrote querying how he could possibly have made any such journey, given that he had only left Boonville for a couple of months. Others questioned how it was that “Eli and the Story of the Magi” was at points word-for-word identical with the 1880 novel “Ben Hur”. In the end Mahan was brought before a church court, convicted of forgery, and suspended for a year; and he passes out of the light at that point.
Some years later a “revised” version appeared. Thoughtfully it omitted “Eli and the story of the Magi”, and gathered the various notes which Mahan had prefixed to each text to form a new introduction. It seems to have been the work of a bookseller’s clerk, as no new material was added, and certainly booksellers of a certain kind have profited mightily from it since. Mahan perhaps thought to emulate the sort of fiction that Rider Haggard was writing in the same period, but did so too ineptly for his own good. The cynical bookseller merely sought cash by exploiting the credulity of rural Christians in the USA.
So the book is a fake. It’s one of the rash of pseudo-gospels composed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. E. J. Goodspeed, who studied the New Testament Apocrypha, grew weary of students appearing with these things and wrote a book Strange New Gospels about them. I placed it online here, and you may read about the Archko volume accordingly. He later revised the book as Modern Apocrypha. Per Beskow produced a further volume of the things, under the title Strange Tales about Jesus.
When I came onto the web 13 years ago, the Archko volume was being produced by unwary believers as evidence of Jesus. I myself obtained a copy of the first edition (1884), and also of the second edition, as this was the only way to access such things. Today we have Google books, so the curious may find the original text here, and the revised “second edition” from 1896 here. A search in Google books will find newly printed copies for sale with cynical publishers’ blurb such as:
Ongoing debate over this classic work’s authenticity makes this book an engrossing read for those interested in judging for themselves.
Fortunately these things have largely vanished from the web, and so I have not had to spend any time on it for years. But … it’s baaack.
Be prepared to explain, politely and inoffensively, that it’s a scam.
Eusebius update
Earlier this week I posted an advert at Student Gems. It read:
I’m publishing a rather dull academic textbook. It’s going to need a nice dust jacket to sell it. I need someone to design me one.
Something like a picture of the Greek islands and some text.
I’ve had about 10 responses. Four of them seem like people who know what they are doing and would be usable, and I have messaged them some more details:
The book is an edition and translation of Eusebius of Caesarea’s “Gospel problems and solutions” (=Quaestiones ad Stephanum et Marinum) Greek text + translation ditto Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic fragments.
I’m being influenced by the dustjacket for the following book:
http://www.eisenbrauns.com/item/FREONOMAS (left)
where the cover made *me* buy it, and I never do buy books.
My thinking is for a photograph as cover, with the author name and title on it. Something like the following photo:
http://www.vidasvillas.com/index_files/page20_1.jpg
(I want to avoid pictures of ruins, I think).
I’m open to other ideas, of course.
It will be interesting to see what comes out of this.
Meanwhile I have been looking for a licensable cover image. No luck so far, tho. Shutterstock.com seem to have the right sort of stuff. I haven’t quite seen one I like.
James of Edessa (d.708) – letter on the genealogy of the Virgin Mary now online
The Syriac scholar bishop James of Edessa, who continued the Chronicle of Eusebius and introduced Greek vowels into West Syriac, has left us a number of letters in a 10th century manuscript in the British Library, ms. Additional 12172. Several of these were published by Francois Nau in the Revue de l’Orient Chretien between 1900 and 1903, together with a French translation. One of these is the letter to John the Stylite on the genealogy of the Virgin Mary.
A correspondant wrote to me about this. Since a lot of people seem not to know French, I have run Nau’s translation across into English and uploaded the result here. The output makes no claim to scholarship. It’s only merit is that it exists, and so makes James’ thought accessible to the 2bn people for whom English is a first or second language.
I’m not sure that many people care about patristic statements about the genealogy of the Virgin Mary. These are usually based on material obtained from the apocrypha, of no historical value. In fact James is too good a scholar to do this. He attacks the practice, and advises his correspondent instead to use logic and reason.
But the real interest of the text is elsewhere. James died in 708 AD, which means that he lived in the first century of Moslem rule. His statements about what early Moslems thought about the Virgin Mary, and about Christ, are therefore of considerable interest to those attempting to look behind the statements of Moslem writers, which tend to rely on sources which are themselves later than this.
My correspondent was assembling a collection of early non-Moslem sources on the history of Islam. He came across mention of the text in a revisionist history by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism, Cambridge, 1977. The book itself is now very hard to find and very expensive to buy, but thankfully someone has created a PDF which I found on the web.
On page 11 it makes the following statement:
The most interesting attestation of this recognition occurs in a letter of Jacob of Edessa (d.c. 708) on the genealogy of the Virgin: 17
“That the messiah is of Davidic descent, everyone professes, the Jews, the Mahgraye and the Christians … That the messiah is, in the flesh, of Davidic descent … is thus professed by all of them, Jews, Mahgraye and Christians, and regarded by them as something fundamental … The Mahgraye too … all confess firmly that he [Jesus] is the true messiah who was to come and who was foretold by the prophets; on this subject they have no dispute with us, but rather with the Jews. They reproachfully maintain against them … that the messiah was to be born of David, and further that this messiah who has come was born of Mary. This is firmly professed by the Mahgraye, and not one of them will dispute it, for they say always and to everyone that Jesus son of Mary is in truth the messiah.”
Nau’s translation confirms all this, although Crone and Cook translated directly from the Syriac, as their preface makes plain.
Regular readers will know that I am not in favour of revisionism as a general rule, as it often seems to be contrived for non-scholarly purposes. On the other hand we have to ask whether Cambridge University Press would dare to publish such a book today. Somehow I have my doubts; and this may provoke some to adopt the ideas contained in it, merely to push back against the censors. But let’s keep a balance. Let’s not fall into the pitfall of endorsing nonsense, merely because the object of the attack is one that we are instructed may not be discussed except in terms of warmest approval. Rubbish is rubbish, even when condemned by a censor.
I hope the translation of James will be of use, either way, to others.
Greek mechanical typewriter?
Eusebius update
Bob the typesetter has now emailed me the book in .rtf form. When the translation goes online, this is what will be used to make the htm files. The rtf’s of the native languages will also get used, I suspect, probably by later editors. So this stage of the book is done.
I’ve put out an advert for a cover designer, and got a dozen replies. These I need to reply to, and sift through. At least one of these has done work with Lightning Source before.
The cover image I had in mind is proving more difficult. My email to the website where it appeared has not elicted a reply. So I may need to locate a licensable image.
I’ve never done anything like that, so will have to investigate.
A saying of Musonius, quoted by Aulus Gellius
From my diary
I’m stuck at home with a headache-inducing virus still, and getting very bored and frustrated. Unfortunately I can’t do much without setting it off again. Health is something we all take for granted, until we lose it! I’m not being paid while I sit here, so I urgently want to go back to work.
I saw a news story today about a woman who stood behind a policeman and said “bang bang”. She was promptly arrested and charged with a public order offence. Thank heavens she didn’t say “poof poof”, eh?
Yesterday I encountered Nonius Marcellus, the late Roman dictionary writer. While trying to locate the text and understand what I was dealing with, I ended up rewriting the Wikipedia article on Nonius Marcellus, and adding lots of the data I found. After all, if I found it useful, probably others will.
Aulus Gellius thought of his own work as being divided into “chapters”
Book 11, chapter 9 of the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius is a tale from the lost author Critolaus. It relates how Demosthenes accepted a bribe not to speak against the Milesians. Chapter 10 begins as follows:
10. Quod C. Gracchus in oratione sua historiam supra scriptam Demadi rhetori, non Demostheni, adtribuit; verbaque ipsius C. Gracchi relata.
1. Quod in capite superiore a Critolao scriptum esse diximus super Demosthene, id C. Gracchus in oratione, qua legent Aufeiam dissuasit, in Demaden contulit verbis hisce…
10. That Gaius Gracchus in a speech of his applied the story related above to the orator Demades, and not to Demosthenes; and a quotation of Gracchus’ words.
1. The story which in the preceding chapter we said was told by Critolaus about Demosthenes, Gaius Gracchus, in the speech Against the Aufeian Law, applied to Demades in the following words…
At the end of the preface, we find also these words:
25. Capita rerum quae cuique commentario insunt, exposuimus hic universa, ut iam statim declaretur quid quo in libro quaeri invenirique possit.
25. Summaries of the material to be found in each book of my Commentaries I have here placed all together, in order that it may at once be clear what is to be sought and found in every book.
We learn a great deal from this about how a second century author with a collection of miscellaneous material organised it.
Caput is being used somewhat flexibly, but here we see it used both to indicate the summary of the content of a self-contained portion of a book — a chapter title, if you like — and also for that self-contained portion itself. We might say “passage”, but there seems no special reason not to say “chapter” and “chapter title / summary”.
This tells us that Aulus Gellius himself organised his work into capita — chapters. Also that he composed these capita — chapter summaries. We may speculate that a literary slave may have been used to compose these, as Cicero had Tiro do work for him, and Josephus used Greek ammanuenses to give polish to his works. But there seems no need to suppose this.
On reading the Loeb, I thought at first that we also knew that these capita (chapters) were numbered at some point. If we look at book 8 in the Loeb, we find under the chapter summaries (capita) in a couple of cases small excerpts from the lost text. These, of course, have been extracted by editors from quotation by later authors, who must have specified the numeral of the chapter. So chapter 3 has a fragment.
3. Quem in modum et quam severe increpuerit audientibus nobis Peregrinus philosophus adulescentem Romanum ex equestri familia, stantem segnem apud se et assidue oscitantem.
Et adsiduo oscitantem vidit, atque illius quidem delicatissimas mentis et corporis halucinationes.
3. In what terms and how severely the philosopher Peregrinus in my hearing rebuked a young Roman of equestrian rank, who stood before him inattentive and constantly yawning.
. . . and saw him continually yawning and noticed the degenerate dreaminess expressed in his attitude of mind and body.
But what does the actual source say? Well, the Loeb note on the fragment says:
This fragment is preserved by Nonius, II, p121, 19, s.v. halucinari.
That’s not very helpful, is it? I must admit that the over-brevity of Loeb references always annoyed me! What normal person could follow such a reference? Even I don’t know who “Nonius” is, and I have a better grasp of ancient literature than almost anyone not professionally active. Which work, which edition, I wonder, is meant?
But the mention of a work at the end suggests a dictionary compiler, and a search brings first the Wikipedia article for Nonius Marcellus, a 4-5th century grammarian, then W.M.Lindsay’s 1901 article, and then Muller’s 1888 edition: vol. 1, and vol.2. Finally Lindsay’s 1903 Teubner, vol. 1, vol. 2 and vol. 3. All I have to do now is track down the reference, and even so, it is still nearly impossible.
After two hours struggle, I find that the correct reference is book 2, which is in vol. 1 of Lindsay, in the section under H (which is NOT in alphabetical order), Lindsay p. 175. At the head of this page are some gnomic numerals “121. 122 M.” The “page” is therefore a reference to some elderly standard edition. This reads:
HALVCINARI, aberrare et non consistere atque dissolvi et obstupefieri atque tardari honeste veteres dixerunt, ut est (cf. Gell. VIII, 3): ‘et adsiduo oscitantem vidit atque illius quidem delicatissimas mentis et corporis alucinationes’.
But this gives no textual link to Aulus Gellius. So my initial impression here was mistaken. Possibly some of the other fragments will give us more information, but I lack the time to pursue this now.
There is more we could learn, if we knew more about the textual history of this collection of all the capita, immediately following the preface. Because book 8 of the Attic Nights is lost. Yet we do have the capita for book 8. This means that either the collection of all the capita was transmitted at the correct place; or, that the collection of capita circulated independently.
All this is valuable information on the way in which ancient authors worked. They did have chapters, if they chose. They did have chapter titles, if they chose. They did have chapter numbers, if they chose.
So is there really any case for denying the authenticity of any transmitted chapter divisions, numerals, and headings, unless we find multiple different ones in the manuscripts? If so, what is it?