The first review of the Eusebius Gospel Problems and Solutions book by David Miller, Adam McCollum, Carol Downer and friends, edited by me, has appeared here at Bryn Mawr. It’s very kind and rather encouraging!
Roger Pearse
Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
Great!
Sounds like a quite thorough review.
I really do intend to buy a copy.
Yours in Christ,
James Snapp, Jr.
It was also reviewed in the recent April 2012 issue of Journal of Theological Studies by Paul Foster.
I have just seen the JTS review — they have not sent me a copy — and of course I agree with Paul entirely. Someone should do just that, and critically edit all the material. Let’s hope that the publication does indeed have that effect. It is, at least, “serviceable”, which is all I hoped for.
@Wieland, it does! Deeply impressed that the reviewer knows all those languages bar Arabic! Wow.
Pieter van der Horst is no slouch. Great stuff. You can even extract a couple of sentences to use for a blurb.
I’m very grateful to him. It’s a great review.
Just read Foster’s review too. If your book stimulates work on a critical edition or scholarly analysis, that’s another win for you and the translators.
Exactly! I hope that it will. It so badly needs both.
Foster’s concluding remarks describe precisely what I have always hoped will happen! — that researchers will now do something serious about producing a reliable, critical edition of the remains, based on all available material, with translation. That’s what we’ve been waiting for since 1820, after all.
Here I’m just providing a translation (with facing reprint of the text translated), and the translation will be available online once the costs of translation have been recouped (or clearly never will be, whichever is the case). That way no-one will have an excuse for not being able to see the problem.
But one purpose of this was always precisely to kick off a “virtuous circle” of research and interest, by making the text much more widely accessible.
I printed what that translation had to be based on at the moment, because that text is all there is, rubbish as that is. (De Lagarde didn’t print any translation of his coptic catena *at all*, which is shocking).
So … scholars … go to it!!!
In the mean time, we’ve provided what Foster rightly calls a “serviceable” translation, that allows people to skim through the material and see what they have to work on.
Congratulations! And sorry about one of the typos he found, no doubt it was my fault!
Don’t worry: the book in general seems remarkably fault-free, mainly because David Miller went through it rather carefully. Your error (if it is such) is as nothing to the ones I made in the Latin.