Month: August 2011

Notes on Libanius, his manuscripts etc

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In his panegyric oration on Antioch, Libanius tells us that he has delivered more orations and declamations “than anyone”.  The extent of his surviving work tends to bear this out.  He was very popular as a stylist during the Byzantine period, and more than 250 manuscripts of his collection of letters (or portions of it) survive.  The three best copies date from the 11th century: Vaticanus gr. 83 (V), the most complete of the three, Vaticanus gr. 85 (Va) and Leidensis Vossianus gr. 77 (Vo).

1544 letters have reached us, all composed between 355-365, and 388-393.  The gap in the middle marks the reign of Valens, whose suspicions of everyone made it too dangerous, most likely, for Libanius as a pagan and friend of Julian to preserve copies of his correspondence.  The rate of survival is one letter every three days for that period!  Nor were these casual compositions — many were written to be read out.

But much that Libanius wrote is unreadable today.  Partly this is because his rhetorical style is out of fashion, and the personal details that might allow us to use his letters as a window onto his life, or the historical details that would make the orations and declamations of historical interest, are few and allusive.  Since I bought two TTH volumes at the conference last week, I have been unable to read into them.  Indeed I have resorted to the last ploy of the desperate — leaving a copy of the selected letters in the bathroom, to read while washing my hands!

The critical edition of Libanius’ works is that by R. Foerster in the Teubner series, between 1903 and 1927, in 12 volumes.  I have been able to find some of these on Google books, and a few more on Archive.org.  I have vols.1-7, 9 and 10.  The others I could not locate, although they should be out of copyright.

There is a two volume Loeb edition of his autobiography and selected letters, by the late A. F. Norman, but this I have not seen.

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A maxim by Libanius, on the love of learning and literature

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I think that I would have followed Odysseus’ example and spurned even marriage with a goddess for a glimpse of the smoke of Athens. — Libanius 1

1. Oration 1, 12. Given in Selected letters of Libanius: from the age of Constantius and Julian, tr. Scott Bradbury, Liverpool, 2004, p.49, n.58.

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How far back is “living memory”?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At political blog CrashBangWallace, the answer is “quite a long way”.  He writes that the great events of history are within touching distance.

In one of these pleasingly highbrow moments which proves that the internet is not just about videos of cats and moon-walking budgies, a clip has gone viral on Twitter today showing a 1956 TV appearance of the last surviving eye witness of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination:  <video>

By that time the man in question was 96, an impressive achievement for a lifelong pipesmoker born in the mid-19th Century.

The video itself is an interesting historical curio, but the message it carries is even more interesting. We tend to think of history as being distant – particularly that history which is not recorded in colour or even in film or sound. In reality, though, it’s remarkably close.

I’m told that as a small child I met a lady in her 90s who had when a small child herself met someone whose father fought at the Battle of Waterloo. That’s three degrees of separation between me in the 21st century and a British soldier in 1815. Similarly there must be quite a number of people still living who met the gentleman in the Lincoln video.

Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, which is now 146 years ago.

It makes you think, doesn’t it?

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Rather busy with the chores of life this week.  But last night I was able to acquire some books on ancient Persian religion, and the texts in which they are preserved. 

I’ve been looking through some of them.  The key fact, however, is that most of the literature is very late.  The Avestan texts do not seem to have been written down until well into the Sassanid period, in the 5th century A.D., using a specially contrived alphabet, in order to create the now-lost “Great Avesta”, once present in every fire temple and destroyed by the Moslems.  About a quarter of Avestan literature now survives, and the oldest manuscript is 12th century.

I was struck by how little they say about Mithra, or Mitra, and how little information they give us about this pre-Zoroastrian deity, incorporated as a servant god to Ahura Mazda.  It ought to be possible, relatively easily, to compile a collection of all the literary and non-literary material relating to this sub-deity.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This evening I had another go at the web version of Brockelmann’s notes on the authors who give the history of Mohammed.  It is a mark of how bad Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur is, as an organised source for information, that I have still not managed to get the stuff into some format that I can upload.  The way in which the second edition refers to the supplement to the first, and the supplement to the first supercedes what is written in the second edition, is almost impossible to handle.

I’m making progress, tho, although I have spotted yet another area where a bit from the supplement needs to be translated and included.  It is almost impossible to reproduce what the GAL contains, tho.

I’ve also been making an effort to work with Microsoft’s Expression Web4.  It’s a lot like Dreamweaver; and, like Dreamweaver, the WYSIWYG editor is rather substandard; much less good than Microsoft FrontPage.  Unfortunately FP2000 won’t handle unicode characters very well, and the Brockelmann is stuffed to the jawline with overscores and dots and funny characters!

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Some notes on the Von der Goltz codex of Acts, Paul’s letters, and the catholic letters

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Codex 184.B.64 of the monastery of the Laura on Mt. Athos was one of the manuscripts examined by von Soden and von der Goltz in a trip to the mountain in the winter of 1898.  The presence of subscriptios to the letters of Paul, and scholia, caught the attention of the latter, who published an article about it in TU 17.4 in 1899.  He was able to collate the ms. and to copy the old scholia.

The manuscript itself is 10th century, and bound between two boards, with brown leather covers.  It contains 102 parchment leaves, each 23 x 17.5 cms in size.  The written area is 17 x 11 cm, and has 35 lines.  The ms. contains Acts, Paul’s letters, and the catholic letters.  Each quire is of 8 leaves.  The first sheet is a later replacement, and two quires are missing from the beginning, which perhaps contained some form of introductory matter.  Originally a copy of Revelation followed.  The text is written in an early minuscule, and the scholia in a careful semi-uncial.  The chapters are numbered.

The manuscript was thoroughly revised by a later hand which also erased to some extent the majority of the ancient scholia and marginalia, and added the Euthalian chapter numbers.  But there are also traces of large red letters under the “original” text, suggesting that it too is a palimpsest.

Von der Goltz does publish the scholia, without translation.

 

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The literary remains of Shenoute of Atripe

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Coptic literature is an under-studied area for most of us.  But today I have been finding out that significant work has been done in the last decade on an important figure of the 4th century, Shenoute of Atripe, the leader of the White Monastery at Panopolis.

For this we have Stephen Emmel to thank.  It seems that he has undertaken the painstaking task of recovering the works of this central figure, and has revolutionised the field.  It is unfortunate that none of this is online; but this blurb to Stephen Emmel, Shenoute’s Literary Corpus, Peeters (2004), in 1006 pages (!) tells the story.

… Stephen Emmel’s reconstruction of the literary corpus of Shenoute, monastic leader in Upper Egypt from 385 until 465, and Coptic author par excellence, marks the beginning of a new era in Shenoute studies.

On the basis of about one hundred parchment codexes from the library of Shenoute’s monastery, pieced together from nearly two thousand fragments scattered among some two dozen collections, Emmel demonstrates that Shenoute’s corpus was transmitted in two multi-volume sets of collected works, nine volumes of Canons and eight volumes of Discourses.

At the core of his study is a description of each reconstructed codex, demonstrating the organization and coherence of the corpus as a whole, followed by a survey of its contents in which nearly 150 individual works are catalogued. A research-historical and methodological introduction, tables, concordances, and an extensive bibliography …

I can already see references to “volume 4 of the discourses”, etc, when sermons are referenced.  Effectively this acts as a clavis or index to Shenoute’s works.  The book is, unfortunately almost $200, so unaffordable to the rest of us.

It would be good, surely, to have a list of his works at least, online.

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Alice Whealey, SBL 2000 paper on the Testimonium Flavianum

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the most accessible resources on Josephus and the Testimonium Flavianum has always been a paper delivered in 2000 to the Society of Biblical Literature conference by Alice Whealey.  For years it sat at http://josephus.yorku.ca/pdf/whealey2000.pdf but this link is now dead.

Rather than lose it — I needed to refer to it this evening and couldn’t find a copy! — I’ll place a copy on this site.  Where the SBL papers that used to be on the josephus.yorku.ca site now are I do not know.

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The shifting, sifting sands of what is normal on the internet

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Reading the Cranmer blog this evening, I find that the good archbishop has been obliged to place some limits on who can comment.

His Grace is now forced to devote more time each day trying to stem the tide of offensive and irrelevant comment than he is able to dedicate to each morning’s missive. When one is forced to spend the first hour of one’s day not in the crucial contemplation of religio-political issues but in the cleansing of the temple, it is evident that something must change. …

His Grace has attempted to make his blog a bastion of free speech, but there are those who are intent on hijacking every thread for their own malignant and malicious purposes. When he has directly emailed the perpetrators and politely asked them to desist, he receives insult, invective, and condemantion that he is not prepared to tell ‘the truth’. …

His Grace has therefore decided to ban all ‘anonymous’ comments, thereby forcing all communicants to register a Google account (pseudonymous, if preferred) before they may contribute to a discussion thread. Should individual accounts thereafter prove irritating or offensive, it is easier to identify the individuals (who sometimes post under a plurality of ad hoc identities) and ban them. …

His Grace will hereafter monitor any progress and prays that it will ameliorate his happiness and general well being. Should there be no improvement, he will not hesitate to take more drastic action, however terminal: he is not averse to silence or cessation.

This is a sad day, but evidently a necessary one, and “His Grace” has acted with moderation and restraint.

We have all been used to presuming that everyone on the internet is basically a decent human being.  In the past, being smaller in number, this was largely true.  Even the hackers really meant no harm.

But the internet has grown to include all sections of society.  And in every society known to man, there are criminals.

A pedant might say that a criminal is someone who breaks a law which a powerful man has chosen to impose on a society.  But this is to get things backward.

A criminal is a man who preys on his fellow men.   He is the kind of man who will do whatever he likes, regardless of the injury caused to others, simply because he wishes, or it gives him advantage of some kind, or for any other reason.   Such human beasts have always existed, and any society tries to protect its members from them, by various means.  They are destroyers, creating nothing and wrecking for any purpose and none.

Perhaps the time has come to recognise that the criminals are now well-established on the web.  We have all tolerated the troll; although trolling is clearly a moral wrong in most circumstances, as it violates the principle of “do not do to others what you would not like done to you”, in that it causes upset at the very least. 

But this tolerance of wrong-doing is now being used by much worse people.  There have been vulnerable teenagers driven to suicide by campaigns of bullying and harassment online.  I myself experienced a vicious assault of the same nature, designed to seize control of the Mithras article in Wikipedia, evidently without the slightest concern for right or wrong or anything but the culprits’ own base wishes.  Fortunately I’ve been online a long time, and maintain emotional detachment; but that these people meant to do me injury, to hand out a beating in order to steal the fruits of my labour, is not remotely in doubt.

Perhaps we need to stop thinking about “harassment”, about “trolling”, about “bullying”, and start thinking of this as what it is — assault.  It is a form of battery, exploiting the most powerful and engaging form of communication known to man to inflict pain and misery.  It is a criminal act.

One obvious cure for it is to require everyone using the internet to register, and to write and post under their own name.   Few of the criminals above would care to have their conduct under their own name. 

At present the effect of allowing the criminals to rampage unchecked is that using your own name online is becoming rarer and rarer.  In Wikipedia fewer and fewer people do so, because it disadvantages them so, when faced with trolls who frequently change their identities or post under different names.  The same is true in nearly all the fora known to me.

Yet which of us would trust a politician with the power to control who has access to the internet?  To control what may, or may not be said?

These are difficult times.  I hope that some middle path may be found.  But that the criminals need to be dealt with … that is becoming ever more urgent.

UPDATE: A couple of hours later, I see a news report on Sky. An academic study reports that 35% of teachers have suffered some form of online abuse; and in a quarter of the cases, parents are responsible. 

One of the most prevalent types of abuse was through the creation of a Facebook group to be abusive about a particular teacher.

The report said there was evidence of pupils trying to establish fake Facebook pages in a teacher’s name, posting videos of teachers in class on YouTube, and setting up whole websites to be abusive about a single or group of staff.

The BBC version is here, and offers some horrifying details:

“Some parents view teachers as fair game for abuse,” Prof Phippen said.

“They use online technologies to hide behind while posting lies and abuse about their chosen victim.”

Intimidation, harassment … enough.  We’re talking about violence, and those doing it are criminals.

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The letter of Dioscorus to Shenouda about heretical books

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Following on from Hugo Lundhaug’s paper on  Origenism in 5th century Upper Egypt: Shenoute of Atripe and the Nag Hammadi codices, delivered at the Oxford Patristics Conference, I wrote to him, asking about the sources: the letter of Archbishop Dioscorus of Alexandria, and a text by Shenoute himself.  Today I received an email from Dr Lundhaug, who wrote as follows:

Dioscorus’ letter to Shenoute is preserved in Coptic translation (from the original Greek, now lost) in four leaves of White Monastery Codex XZ. The first three of these were published by Herbert Thompson in his article “Dioscorus and Shenoute,” in Recueil d’études égyptologiques dédiées à la mémoire de Jean-François Champollion (BEHE 234; Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1922), 367–76. The last leaf was published by Henri Munier, Manuscrits coptes (CGAE 9201–9304; Cairo: Imprimerie de l’IFAO, 1916), 147–49. Thompson’s article contains an English translation of all four leaves. I use my own translation from the Coptic.

The Thompson article is online at Gallica here.  But better yet, if you download the PDF of the whole volume of the journal, you get a PDF which has been OCR’d, and bookmarks added to each article within it.  That is new, and well done Gallica!

I will scan and upload this text to the Fathers collection when I get a moment!

Meanwhile Dr. Lundhaug added a couple of extra snippets of wider interest:

By the way, if you are interested in the Gospel of Philip, I would like to direct you to my book, Images of Rebirth: Cognitive Poetics and Transformational Soteriology in the Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul (Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 73; Leiden: Brill, 2010), which contains a detailed analysis of this text.

It may perhaps also interest you to know that starting January next year I have funding from the European Research Council for a five-year research project along the lines indicated in my Oxford paper – looking at the Nag Hammadi Codices and their texts in the context of fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian monasticism.

I think this line of research must be promising, and will tell us a lot more about where the Nag Hammadi codices really appear from.

UPDATE: The letter of Dioscorus to Shenoute, concerning the Origenist monk, is here.

UPDATE2: Dr. H. adds:

In my paper I referred specifically to Shenoute’s “I Am Amazed” and “Who Speaks Through the Prophet”. The best edition of “I Am Amazed” is now Hans-Joachim Cristea, Schenute von Atripe. Contra Origenistas: Edition des koptischen Textes mit annotierter Übersetzung und Indizes einschliesslich einer Übersetzung des 16. Osterfestbriefs des Theophilus in der Fassung des Hieronymus (ep. 96) (STAC 60; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011).  There’s an English translation of most of “I Am Amazed” in Michael Eugene Foat’s 1996 doctoral dissertation from Brown University, “I Myself Have Seen: The Representation of Humanity in the writings of apa Shenoute of Atripe.” It is not complete, however, as it is based on Tito Orlandi’s edition of the text. There are also English translations of excerpts from “I Am Amazed” in Stephen J. Davis, Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and Divine Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Europe (Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
 
By the way, I also treat “I Am Amazed” and other texts by Shenoute in the recently published article “Baptism in the Monasteries of Upper Egypt: The Pachomian Corpus and the Writings of Shenoute,” in Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism in Early Judaism, Graeco-Roman Religion, and Early Christianity (ed. David Hellholm et al.; 3 vols.; BZNW 176; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 1347-80, as well as in several forthcoming articles.

As for “Who Speaks Through the Prophet”, it has not been edited and no reliable English translation exists. I rely on photographs of the manuscript evidence.

I have my own working edition of “Who Speaks Through the Prophet”, but since an international editorial team lead by Professor Stephen Emmel at the University Münster is currently hard at work editing the entire Shenoutean corpus there should be no need for me to publish an edition of it. I might publish a translation of it though. We’ll see.

By the way, if you need a link to info on my book, you can use this: http://www.brill.nl/images-rebirth
 
I will set up a website dedicated to my project in the not too distant future.

This is all very useful.  I confess that I’ve never had that clear an idea of what existed by Shenoute, but I shall look at this with more interest.

UPDATE: A Google search reveals that the new German edition of “I am amazed” — Contra Origenistas — runs to 387 pages, and includes the Coptic text and a German edition, as well as the Letter of Theophilus included in the treatise, which was also preserved in a Latin translation by Jerome.  Apparently comparison of the two version is interesting!

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