Month: September 2012

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A little while back I started developing some PHP scripts to support the new Mithras Project pages that I intend to create.  Today I went back to look at these, to see if I could merge them into what I have been doing with a top-level menu.  And I found … that I don’t seem to have the latest version.  Oh rats!

I know that I created a version that worked.  It included automated tests as well.  But it isn’t here.  Nor is it on my travelling laptop.

I hope … hope … that I left a copy on my work machine.  Because I shall be pretty annoyed with myself if I have inadvertantly deleted it!

Meanwhile something jogged my memory.  Years ago I discovered an unpublished translation into English of Stephanos of Alexandria’s alchemical discourse 4.  It was made by Sherwood Taylor, who founded the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry and published discourses 1-3 in their journal Ambix.  I wrote to the journal’s modern editors, and offered them a copy.  Back in 2010 there was talk of publishing it in 2011.  I ended up corresponding with a certain Dr Jenny Rampling.  And … then I heard no more.

I’ve written asking for an update today.

UPDATE:  And Dr Rampling kindly wrote back this evening.  It seems that the item will not be published.  The labour involved in bringing the draft translation up to a standard publishable for 2012 was considered too great, particularly since it was based on a pre-critical edition.  The clincher was that, earlier this year, the editors learned that Stephanos scholar Maria Papathanassiou is actually preparing a critical edition of the discourses, together with commentary and French translation.

This last is excellent news, of course; I didn’t actually know that this scholar existed, and the new edition and translation will make the text much more accessible.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve continued to add contents to the page of Patrologia Graeca PDF’s.   I’m now moving into the period post 1000 AD, which means that I am now well out of my comfort zone.  This poses some problems, in that I have no idea what is important and what is not.  So writing a summary is difficult!  Still, onwards and upwards.  Up to vol. 121 so far.

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Latin translations by Anianus of Celeda of the Greek fathers in electronic form

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Chris Nighman writes:

A few weeks ago I uploaded digital transcriptions of Anianus’ Preface to his translations of Chrysostom’s Homilies 1-25 on the Gospel of Matthew and also the texts of Homilies 1-8 from Migne’s PG 58, 975-1058, onto the PGL Project website here.

Today I uploaded digital transcriptions of Anianus’ translations of Chrysostom’s homilies 9-15 on Matthew from the edition princeps published in 1503 at Venice on the PGL project website (http://web.wlu.ca/history/cnighman/PGL/page2.html).

If I can secure another internal grant to complete this transcription project, homilies 16-25 will follow sometime in the new year. Keep your fingers crossed…

This is an unusual project, and all the more valuable for it.  We tend to ignore the Latin translations of works by Chrysostom, and Anianus of Celeda is not a figure with whom most of us are familiar.  Yet his work is very early, and very informative on the early circulation of Chrysostom’s works.

And what a blessing to have this in electronic form!

I’d like to get translations of Anianus’ prefaces into English.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have updated the page of PDF’s of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca again.  I’ve added summary contents for each volume as far as volume 100.  That’s enough for the moment.  We’re already well into the iconoclast period, and the number of interesting works is diminishing very quickly. 

The contents information is a little quirky.  It isn’t possible, in the format on that page, to have a straight copy of Migne’s table of contents, useful though that would be.  The quantity of entries would drown the collection of links, which is the main purpose of the page.  Rather I have to abbreviate.  I have done my best, leaving writers whose output appears to be a single ascetical letter or a bunch of sermons or the like as just their name, and highlighting material of possible interest (at least to me).  I hope the information is useful and, as ever, provokes people to browse.

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A Coptic papyrus fragment and the idea that Jesus had a wife

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is a useful article here at Tyndale House by Simon Gathercole on this curious discovery of a 4th century fragment of papyrus with a Coptic apocryphal text on it.

I hope that the media attention may raise the profile of papyrology, and Coptic studies, and perhaps draw people into an interest in either of these disciplines.  Neither is particularly over-funded or over-well-known.  It’s a long time since Grenfell and Hunt had public money to go and look for papyri in Egypt.  Why shouldn’t there be a fund-raising drive to locate more such papyri today?

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The mystery of human nature: the determined evil-doer

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A party-political article by Andrew Klavan entitled Shame incidentally gave a splendid picture of one of the key problems of our age (and of every corrupt age):

Over the course of time, I have seen many people ruin and waste their lives. Good people, smart people, talented people who sacrificed the gift of existence to drugs, alcohol, bitterness, self-abuse, fear, and anger. In every case, always, I felt the root cause was unacknowledged shame.

At some point, these people had come to confront — as we all must — their cowardice, their weakness, their dishonesty, or their foolishness. Unable to accept the pain of an honest assessment of their brokenness, they turned their eyes away and practiced denial instead. In an attempt to avoid the agony of their shame indefinitely, they created whole new philosophies of life. If, for instance, they had backed down when they should have stood up, they declared nothing was worth fighting for. If they lied when they should’ve spoken true, they declared truth was an illusion. If they succumbed to desire when they should have resisted, they decided continence was a game for puritans and fools.

In order to feel justified within this new philosophy, they not only had to continue in the bad behavior that shamed them in the first place, they had to condemn any good behavior that held the mirror up to their secret self-disgust. This always involved them in blatant self-contradiction. The person who believed there was no truth would accuse others of lying. The person who said all sexual behavior should be accepted would declare chastity unacceptable. The person who believed tolerance was the highest value would find those who disagreed intolerable.

Ultimately their stratagems of self-deception destroyed their integrity, and their hidden shame festered and ate away…  well, everything; the whole joy of living.

This really does seem to be  a feature of our times.  Who cannot name various bold, determined people, utterly set on doing some mad and evil thing, and equally determined to ensure that no-one may express even the mildest opposition without risk to their reputation, their property, their livelihood or even their liberty?  The reader will be able to give his own examples of this kind of conduct. 

It affects Christians.  Indeed it accounts for the bitter hostility towards Christians and Christianity in the mass media, which conditions the reflexes of most ordinary people.   The author has the current round of Moslem violent protests in mind, and the craven attitude of the media towards them, when he writes:

The people who booed the God of love, now rush to the defense of a hateful Allah. The people who p***** on the Christ of redemption, now bewail the hurt feelings of a damnable Islam.

But there are so many examples one might mention. 

Probably few of us, reading this, have any temptation to this soul-destroying behaviour, because few of us have the power to do so.  But it is an evil, and we need to remember that behind these people is, as ever, a violated conscience.  It is pathetic, therefore, to accept the demands of these people; for they will hold us in contempt for doing so.  They know, and we know, that what they demand is wrong.   We must have the courage to say so, clearly.  They may send us to prison for doing so.  They will deny that is their reason for doing so.  But they will respect us for it.

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Manuscripts at Cesena, the Malatestiana mss; mss at Lyons

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There are a considerable number of Latin humanist manuscripts online at Cesena here.  These include Augustine, Justinus, Pliny the Elder and Younger, Suetonius, and so on.  The introduction is here.  For some reason the catalogue entries are not with the images, not even which works begin on which folios.  But the images are super!

Update: here I find a bunch of manuscripts at Lyons, including an 7-8th century ms. of Rufinus’ translation of Origen’s homilies on Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus; and a 5th century ms. of his Commentary on Romans.

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Digitised manuscripts at Heidelberg

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I found that there are a number of manuscripts online at Heidelberg, here.  Looking around, there are a number there, which are of wide interest.  Better yet, you can download them in PDF form!

The Palatini manuscripts are inevitably interesting.  Among the Greek mss are the following items of special interest:

  •  Palatinus graecus 18 (13th century) — Hesiod’s Works and Days, with Tzetzes’ scholia, Euripides’ Hecuba with scholia, a portion of Luke’s gospel, Lycophron’s Cassandra, and others.
  • Palatinus graecus 23 (9-10th c.) — The Palatine anthology of Greek verse.
  • Palatinus graecus 45 (14th c.) — The Odyssey plus summaries and scholia.
  • Palatinus graecus 47 (1505) — Athenaeus, Deipnosophists (the banquet of the foodies!)
  • Palatinus graecus 88 (13th c.) — 32 orations of Lysias, plus other orations.
  • Palatinus graecus 129 (before 1360) — 141 folios of … what?  Any guesses?
  • Palatinus graecus 153 (10th c.) — Plutarch, 6 of the Moralia.
  • Palatinus graecus 155 (15th c.) — Aelian, Variae Historiae!  Then a bunch of letters by Philostratus and Alciphron, among others.
  • Palatinus graecus 252 (10th c.) — Thucydides.
  • Palatinus graecus 281 (1040) — Miscellaneous stuff, none of which I recognise, arithmetical, musical, theological, etc.  I do love these miscellaneous manuscripts, tho!
  • Palatinus graecus 356 (13th c.) — Bits and pieces; extracts from declamations by Libanius, Aristides, Severus of Alexandria, Phalaris, Apollonius of Tyana, Synesius, Julian the Apostate, Isocrates, Gregory Nazianzen, Epiphanius On gems, and much more.
  • Palatinus graecus 398 (9th c.) — Periplus of the Erythraean sea, Arrian’s Cynegeticos, Phlegon, and other geographical and paradoxographical material.

Now that is quite a lot of value from a few manuscripts!

The Latin manuscripts also contain some gems:

Not so spectacular as the Greek, but solid, useful stuff.  I was particularly delighted to see the Periochae of Livy. 

And the ability to download the things makes these mss. invaluable to researchers.

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Notes on the manuscripts of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email this evening requesting information tells me that someone, somewhere, has set his class the task of finding out about the manuscripts of this work.    The question is one of interest.[1]

The text is preserved in the ms. Palatinus Graecus 398, fol. 40v-54v, held today in the Universitäts Bibliothek, Heidelberg and online there.[2]  This means that we can consult it, and also see the other geographical works contained in it!  Here is the top of fol. 40v:

The exemplar was plainly lacunose and corrupt; the scribe has left gaps and placed ticks in the margin where he recognised evident errors.  The ms. is in minuscule, with marginal headings in small uncials, and dates from the start of the 10th century.

A copy of this manuscript exists, errors and all, in the British Library, ms. Additional 19391, fols. 9r-12r[3], of the 14-15th century.

Early editions are generally poor.  The best is Muller’s Geographi Graeci Minores, but Fabricius’ 2nd edition held the field and is described by Casson as displaying “a total disregard for the readings of the manuscript.”  Unfortunately it was this which was used by Schoff for the translation into English commonly available.  A proper critical edition only appeared in 1927 as edited by Hjalmar Frisk.[4]

The date of the work is now established, Casson tells us, as mid-first century A.D.

Returning to the manuscript, however, we find that it contains yet more interesting material:

The collection of writers of marvels — paradoxographers — is interesting.  I have an English translation of Phlegon’s Book of Marvels, which is, in truth, a rather dull collection of oddities. 

However the text in the ms. does not seem to include either an incipit or explicit, which leads me to ask how we know the authorship?  But perhaps there are other mss, which do have this information.

It must be said that I was previous unaware of these online Greek mss.  What a marvellous collection, however!

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  1. [1]Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Princeton 1989, p. 5.  Google Books preview here.↩
  2. [2]Index of available digital mss. here↩
  3. [3]So Casson; but can this small page count be correct?↩
  4. [4]Casson, p.6.↩

We are what we read?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the last year I have taken the time to read quite a few Christian novels.  I read a lot anyway.  But it is remarkable how much effect this has had on my attitudes, and on how close I feel to God.

It makes sense, really.  What we take inside ourselves tends to determine what we are.  The attitudes we take into our minds inform our sense of “normal”, of what is, and is not usual and commonplace.  If we only ever read non-Christian material, all of which silent presumes Christianity is untrue, and that the value-system manufactured in late 20th century America is eternal and everlasting, we may find ourselves in conflict with our own subconcious.

It’s easy enough to take into our heads images that we cannot easily get rid of.  I’m thinking of manipulative, emotion-tugging tear-jerking advertising to save children, and the like.  But it equally applies to TV dramas, and the smut with which they are laced today.  Indeed it applies to novels.  What effect does horror literature have on us?  It even applies to historical reading; I wish that I could dispose of one searing image from the diaries of the Borgia Pope’s master of ceremonies, described in the dullest of prose.

What we are is what we read.  What we think is what we have read, and has become part of us.

What blogs do we read?  Do what extent is our RSS feed devoid of anything useful and soul-building?  Is it entirely stuff that is non-Christian?  If so … what message are we sending to our souls?

Cherish good books and good reading.  You can never have too much of it.

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