Month: October 2011

Plato says “Be kind”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Following the links on other blogs usually leads you to tedious nutters, although not the ones that lead here.  Obviously.

One such spin of the chamber on the roulette revolver brought me to the Bloggess blog, and this delightful post.

A friend of mine was being hassled by assholes, so I made him this card.  It’s a quote by Plato.  But updated for our times:

The original links through to a greeting card version.

You all know how I feel about “quotations” that don’t have a reference on them.  They’re usually bogus.  Nor am I the first to question this one: Quote Investigator did some digging, although he didn’t get anywhere really. 

A search on Google Books indicates nothing before the late 90’s.  Some thought it was by Philo of Alexandria.  The real origin, I fear, is lost.

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Jesus in the Greek Magical Papyri

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email this morning asks about the probable date of the exorcism spell in the Paris magical codex (PGM IV, lines 3007-86 and 1227-64) which references Jesus, and quoting a 2006 article on Hypotyposeis by Andrew Criddle (which itself seems to have been replicated around the web).

…lines 1227-64 of this papyrus [contain] another Exorcism with the invocation Hail God of Abraham Hail God of Isaac Hail God of Jacob; Jesus Chrestos the Holy Spirit the Son of the Father who is above the Seven who is within the Seven. Bring Iao Sabaoth may your power issue forth from him NN until you drive away this unclean daimon Satan who is in him.

 I find in Twelftree, In the name of Jesus: exorcism among early Christians, p.263, n.172, a statement:

Although it is generally agreed that this papyrus dates from the fourth century CE, its contents are more likely to come from the second century CE.[172]

The author cites Andre Jean Festugiere, La revelation de Hermes Trismegiste, (1949-54), vol. 1, p.303, n.1 in support of this, but he also refers to Eugene N. Lane, On the date of PGM IV, Second Century 4 (1984), p.25-7, who argues from the presence of menoturanne on line 2664 that this is a reference to Attis Menotyrannus.  The title (of unknown meaning) Menotyrannus appears only in inscriptions, and these date between 374 and 390, and therefore argues that PGM IV must have been composed after ca. 380.  

My own, amateur, opinion on Lane’s argument is that since the title is of unknown meaning, we cannot say with certainty that it is intended to refer to Attis only — what if it means something like Invictus? or Almighty?

It seems to me that the magical texts are not the kind of text that is transmitted unchanged.  It is entirely possible that a copyist would lace the text with new “names of power”.  These are not literary texts, after all — the owners and copyists are people in search of concrete results.  The texts range in date from the 2nd century BC to the 4th century AD, and the copies we have seem to have belonged to a 4th century priest in Thebes (modern Luxor).

When would “Jesus” be considered a name of power?  The New Testament refers in Acts to Jewish magicians trying to use his name in this way, and coming unstuck!  But in general Jesus was a disreputable figure in the Roman world.  The vicious attack on him by the pagan Caecilius in the Octavius of Minucius Felix indicates that a crucified lower-class fakir was not someone that a reputable Roman took seriously.  The same attitude may be seen indirectly in the early heresies, which all invented stories that Jesus was not really crucified, but was replaced by a phantasm or something like that.  This is the heresy known as Docetism.  Indeed Tertullian in De Carne Christi 5, 4 also attests the problem, addressing Marcion — a docetist — when he says that it is precisely because the death of Christ is disreputable that  it must be true, rather than a made-up story.

This attitude wanes, however.  By the fourth century the Christians are so numerous, and their character so well known, that pagan attacks of this kind become perfunctory.  But on the other hand Christianity was so well known, and so much a solid threat to all magic and paganism, that it is a little hard to see “Jesus” being tossed into a syncretistic stew as a random power-name.

Some may remember the famous passage in the Historia Augusta (Life of Alexander Severus, 29), where syncretism is described, and the emperor has a chapel containing statues of the gods, and Moses and Jesus.  The HA is a fake; but a fake with earlier sources, and the attitude described is just that of the early 3rd century.

I would myself, therefore, tend to suggest that the text in its current form perhaps dates from that time.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The sales figures for September for my book — Eusebius of Caesarea, Gospel Problems and Solutions.  Text and translation.  Get yours from Amazon now! — have arrived and are acceptable.  For a change most of the sales were in the UK.  More acceptable still is the first chunk of payments.  Lightning Source, the distributor, delay these for three months, so this is the first money that I have seen from Amazon.

A correspondent from Germany interested in Coptic studies has emailed me the Arabic text of the life of Samuel of Kalamoun, in PDF form.   This is Anthony Alcock’s publication, The Arabic Life of Anba Samawi’l of Qalamun, Le Museon 109 (1996), p.321-345.  The text was edited from a manuscript written on … 29th September 1945 AD!  We forget, I suspect, that hand-copying texts is something that goes on even today, and was certainly going on in the Arab world until the photocopier era.  It was printed from the mss. of the Franciscan Center of Christian Oriental Studies in Muski in Cairo.

The editor remarks that this vita survives in Coptic, and also in Ethiopic.   The Arabic version is closer to the Ethiopic, naturally enough, as the Ethiopic probably derives from an Arabic version.

I got the PDF’s on Tuesday, but only today realised that this included an English translation!  Wonderful!

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Delving in the Analecta Bollandiana

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A post in an online forum queried whether an English translation existed of the “Halkin Vita” of Constantine.  I had never heard of this item, but a little searching revealed that it is a medieval Greek Saint’s “Life”, mostly fictitious, of the Emperor.  A reference to a medieval patriarch dates it to after the iconoclast disputes, and it is apparently extant in a single 13th century manuscript from Patmos, and was published by F. Halkin in volume 77 of Analecta Bollandiana, that great repository of scholarly editions of obscure hagiographical literature.

Hagiography is a funny business.  It’s not history, nor biography.  It is a genre of its own, which arose in the late 4th century, and is primarily related to folk-tale.  There is quite a spectrum of material.  At one end, a “saint’s life” may be entirely fictitious, for instance, and told mainly because it is interesting to hear.  At the other end, we find “lives” which are full of details which are plainly derived from an eye-witness.  Because it is a genre, the form of the tales is quite rigid in some ways, and standard incidents — the props of the genre — can be recognised by comparing texts. 

The process of recognising material of historical value has exercised scholars, and the Bollandist scholars in particular have published considerable amounts of material for some centuries, although, like most people, I have never read a word of their work.  There is a perceptible tendency, unfortunately, to simply assign all supernatural material and all homiletic material to the category of “folk tale”, and then to presume that the secular remainder may have some historical value.  The risks in this approach are obvious — why do we suppose that a writer cannot invent plain details as well as marvellous?  But how to proceed, when we are asking a question of a text which it is not designed to answer?

Unfortunately I could not access Halkin’s publication, which I suspect was accompanied by a French translation.  A number of older volumes are on Google  books.  Volume 16 (1897), for instance, is here (US readers only, thanks to the usual greed of European publishers). 

This volume opens with a martyrdom (“Acts”) of a certain Saint Dasius, preserved in ms. Paris graecus 1539 of the 11th century.  The article is by Franz Cumont, the founder of Mithras studies, and opens with interesting remarks about how the Saturnalia was celebrated.

From the first words, we find some very curious notes on the Saturnalia which are certainly authentic.  The soldiers in the garrison at Durostorum, the anonymous author says, had the custom, during the festival of Cronos, which they celebrated each year, to set up a mock-king.  Wearing insignia denoting his rank, this person went out at the head of a numerous procession, and in the town gave himself up to every species of excess and debauchery .  The license permitted on this occasion was treated as a special “gift” of Saturn, of whom the ephemeral king was treated as an terrestrial image.

These details agree with what profane authors tell us about the Roman Saturnalia.[1]  In each society a “king”, under some such name, presided at the festival, and helped things along by giving as ridiculous as possible orders to his “subjects”, and, just like the editor of our “Acts”, Lucian speaks of behaviour, for which Saturnalia was the pretext, as a “gift” of the relaxed sovereign of the Age of Gold, who every year regained his power for seven days.[2]  All these details from our text are therefore of an indisputable authenticity.

After which, I admit that I was rather curious to read the text itself.  Sadly, in compliance with a vile custom not yet quite extinct, the editor provided no translation.  Oh well.

But returning to the Analecta Bollandiana, isn’t it a shame that the scholarly publications of this recondite branch of knowledge remain offline?  For only a few libraries can possibly hold that journal, and those libraries are open only to academics.  Few of the latter will be avid readers of the AB, I suspect.  Of course the publication makes money for the press, and, I would hope, at least something for the Bollandists themselves.

But wouldn’t it be a much better idea to go electronic, and make the material available online to us all?  Would the Bollandists be a penny worse off?  Somehow I doubt it.

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  1. [1]Lucian, Saturn. 4; Cf. Tacitus, Annals, XIII, 15; Arrian, Epictetus diss. I, 25. ↩
  2. [2]Lucian, Sat. ch. 2-4↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A couple of snippets only.

Firstly, an email tells me that someone is producing audio versions of some of the ante-Nicene fathers, here.  Apparently they have backing music, which sounds unusual.  I have a vague idea that other people have done some of this, but it can only be a good thing!

Secondly, via Ancient World Online, I learn of a new site of dissertations online, the The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD).  I was unable to work out who and what and why from the corporate-speak on the site, but there are two search engines for it:

Scirus ETD Search
A comprehensive scientific research tool from Elsevier, Scirus ETD Search provides an advanced search that can narrow results to theses and dissertations as well as provide access to related scholarly resources.
VTLS Visualizer
This is a dynamic search and discovery platform with sophisticated functionality.  You can sort by relevance, title, and date.  In the current implementation, faceted searches are available by language, continent, country, date, format and source institution.  Additional facets, such as subjects or departments, can be added if desired.

Anything that makes these items more readily accessible is good.   Many, perhaps most dissertations are of limited value.   But they often contain unpublished translations, and so can be valuable long after the author has forgotten about them.

I’ve just done a search on “english translation”. 

This thesis [by C.R. Hackenberg, 2009] offers, for the first time, a complete Arabic-to-English translation of the debate between Nestorian Patriarch, Timothy I (a. 779-823), and Muslim ‘Abbāsid Caliph, al-Mahdī (r. 775-785). An analysis of the various editions of the Arabic and Syriac versions of the debate is included. The primary editions of the debate consulted for this thesis were Samir K. Samir’s critical edition of the Arabic text named MS 662 of the Bibliothéque Orientale à Beyrouth, and Alphonse Mingana’s edition of the Syriac text named Mingana 17 taken from the Convent of Alqosh in northern Iraq. In analyzing the various editions of the debate, the goal is to establish the primacy of the Syriac text in its relationship to the Arabic text. This analysis is largely based upon the existing work of Hans Putman. In the translation and analysis of the debate, significant differences between the Syriac and Arabic versions of the debate are noted. In addition to the translation and analysis of the debate, a general introduction to Timothy I and his accomplishments as Nestorian Patriarch as well as an outline of the proposed purpose of Timothy’s text during late antiquity and the medieval period are offered.

I downloaded it at once!  It is followed by a load of stuff of no special interest, including stuff about machine translation.  Then I found this:

A Critical Edition of Anastasius Bibliothecarius’ Latin Translation of Greek Documents Pertaining to the Life of Maximus the Confessor, with an Analysis of Anastasius’ Translation Methodology, and an English Translation of the Latin Text (Neil Bronwen, 1998)

Anastasius Bibliothecarius, papal librarian, translator and diplomat, is one of the pivotal figures of the ninth century in both literary and political contexts. His contribution to relations between the eastern and western church can be considered to have had both positive and negative ramifications, and it will be argued that his translations of various Greek works into Latin played a significant role in achieving his political agenda, complex and convoluted as this was. Being one of relatively few Roman bilinguals in the latter part of the ninth century, Anastasius found that his linguistic skills opened an avenue into papal affairs that was not closed by even the greatest breaches of trust and violations of canonical law on his part. His chequered career spanning five pontificates will be reviewed in the first chapter. In Chapter 2, we discuss his corpus of works of translation, in particular the Collectanea, whose sole surviving witness, the Parisinus Latinus 5095, has been partially edited in this study. This collation and translation of seven documents pertaining to the life of Maximus the Confessor provides us with a unique insight into Anastasius’ capacity as a translator, and into the political and cultural significance of the commissioning and dedication of his hagiographic and other translated works in general. These seven documents will be examined in detail in Chapter 3, and compared with the Greek tradition, where that has survived, in an effort to establish the codes governing translation in this period, and to establish which manuscripts of the Greek tradition correspond most closely to Anastasius’ (lost) model. In Chapter 4, we analyse consistency of style and method by comparison with Anastasius’ translation of the Historia Mystica attributed to Germanus of Constantinople. Anastasius’ methodology will be compared and contrasted with that of his contemporary John Scotus Eriugena, to place his oeuvre in the broader context of bilingualism in the West in the ninth century. Part II contains a critical edition of the text with facing English translation and historical and linguistic annotations.

That’s the stuff!

After 9 pages, tho, I found that I needed some means to exclude all the Chinese stuff!  I tried the other search engine, with advanced, and excluding “chinese”.  Interestingly this gave better results.  Some of the theses are very old — there was one on Numenius by Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie.  There was a translation of portions of John Tzetzes’ letters and histories in another.  But I was much less sure whether there was actual material for download — the Tzetzes talked about “add to cart” rather than giving a link.  But returning to the first engine, and doing a similar search, I did find the Tzetzes here.  But the search engine then went wonky!

Very interesting, and deserving much investigation, I suspect!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Over the weekend I was thinking about the ancient information that has reached us about the cult of Mithras.  There is a considerable quantity of not-very-useful literary testimonies, but the majority of the material is inscriptional or in the form of reliefs and statuary.

All this was sparked by thinking about a depiction of the so-called “water miracle”.  This shows Mithras firing a bow, at what is presumably a rock, which then gushes what is presumably water.  The “presumably” comes because we have no literary testimony to this part of the myth, so we don’t quite know what we are looking at.  Yet it sometimes appears in the 10 panels of mythical events, appearing on either side of the tauroctony — the central depiction of Mithras killing the bull which appears in every Mithraeum — in the more elaborate examples of that sculpture.  So plainly it was of some importance.

This led me to wonder how one might find out what is, or is not, being depicted.  For all these pictorial bits of information, the best way to learn what they are is to compare examples.  So what we need for the “water miracle” is a collection of all the examples of the depiction, with locality and date etc.

I considered starting a collection of these.  One could start with Vermaseren’s Corpus of materials, and start trying to get photographs etc, which could be put online.

But then it occurred to me that, although this is a good idea, it is one before its time.  The British Museum has started to put its collection online, and limited photographs are already appearing.  Undoubtedly other institutions will do the same.  Meta-sites will spring up, making it possible to search more and more collections.  Minor collections will do likewise.  And at that point it will be possible to do this research relatively simply.

So I shall refrain, tempting tho it is.  For those of us whose eyes are larger than our stomachs, it will always be possible to dream impossible dreams!

In other news, I have had a demand from some UK government body for five copies of my book, to be delivered for deposit in the five copyright libraries.  Pity that wasn’t an order for five copies!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve done a little more OCR on the English translation of Ibn Abi Usaibia, but it is slow going.  Unfortunately I have had a cold for some weeks — symptoms are coughing and indigestion, curiously — which restricts what I can do in the evenings.  When I get well, it will be easier to spend more time on it.

Emails today were plentiful.

Two people have bought copies of the CDROM that I sell of the English translations of the Fathers.  One of these was in Japan, and has an address in Japanese characters.  That will be interesting to process!  The other had an invalid email address, forcing me to recheck it in Paypal and re-email him.

Another email was from a great-nephew of the French philologist, François Nau (d. 1931), Pierre Sabatier.  Nau edited and translated great quantities of Syriac and Christian Arabic texts, often in the Revue de l’Orient Chretien, whose volumes remain indispensable even now.  

Back in 2008 I created a Wikipedia article for Nau, and mentioned that a collection of his articles was due to appear in 2007.  Dr Sabatier discovered this, and emailed me, offering to help with any such volume, and regretting that I no longer contribute to Wikipedia.  Someone must have emailed me about that commemorative volume.  But, several years later, I don’t remember anything about it.  Nor did a search of my emails reveal anything.  So I posted something in the Hugoye list for Syriacists, to see if anyone knows. 

And … there!  Somehow, the evening is gone, and nothing achieved. 

Well, almost nothing: I did watch a bit of the new TV series Merlin, featuring the rather pre-Raphaelite-looking Katie McGrath as the evil sorceress Morgana…

Searching for an image to include revealed that the BBC employ some hilariously stupid publicity people.  The first one I chose and uploaded promptly vomited a load of copyright nonsense into the WordPress description — “only to be used in print, only after this date, special permission for internet yadda yadda yadda” — which effectually deterred me from using it. 

But … unless I mistake, surely the point of promotional pictures is to, erm, promote things?  And if you want to promote things, isn’t it rather counter-productive to deter people from using the promotional pictures?

Never mind.  Let’s instead admire Miss McGrath’s cheek-bones, as undoubtedly Dante Gabriel Rosetti would have done.

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