Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
I have collected together all the pieces of the Life of the 6th century patriarch of Persia, Mar Aba, and revised them slightly and uploaded them to the Additional Fathers collection, with an introduction. The translation is here.
I made the translation, not from the original Syriac, but from the BKV German translation. It’s probably a bit shaky at points; but, hey, it exists!
As ever, I place the material in the public domain. Do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial.
Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans, part 1 and part 2, from the 1839-40 Christian Remembrancer (vols. 21 and 22) is now online.
The translation appeared in installments throughout those two volumes, and the page numbers reset when the new volume came out. So I have divided it into two web pages.
Many of the notes are by “E.B.”, whom I presume to be E.B. Pusey. The author of the translation is unknown to me.
The language is fake-Jacobean, as so often in Oxford Movement translations. I had no heart to translate it into modern English. I hope it is useful even so.
Regular readers will know that defects in Finereader 11 meant that I had to re-proof this text something like four or five times. I am, quite honestly, glad to have got rid of the thing. It has hung on my hands for the best part of two years.
No details as yet. The preacher was a certain Josh Williamson, of Operation513 ministries. I learned of the arrest via a tweet from Tony Miano, the US preacher arrested at Wimbledon for the same “offence”. 
The Facebook post:
I was arrested for “Breach of Peace” in Perth, Scotland. I was told the content of my message is illegal. After putting me in the van, and taking me to the station they issued a verbal warning and released me.
They’ve said in future that if they have complaints they’ll go through the process all over again.
No details as yet. I shall write and ask the police for a statement.
This must be the 4th or 5th incident this year. It still seems astonishing to me, brought up in better days, that the police are systematically engaged in arresting street-preachers. It would have been unthinkable even 5 years ago.
I think the sooner that one of these cases is brought before a proper court the better.
UPDATE: Josh Williamson has now given an account of the incident. This is a strange one. The police received a “complaint”, apparently; but seem to have been quite unsure what, if any law, had been broken.
[The police officer] told me to stop, as I was breaking the law. I asked him what law I was breaking, and he replied that I was in breach of the peace. When I asked him to explain, he pointed to my mp3 recorder and said I was too loud. I pointed out to the officer that I wasn’t using amplification, but just my natural voice. I then asked him what a reasonable sound level would be. The police officer replied that the noise level isn’t the issue, but rather that a complaint had been made. I tried to reason with the officer, explaining that such argumentation is subjective as anyone can claim anything is too loud.
It was around this time I spoke to another officer who told me that I was being arrested. Again, I asked what law I had broken. It was at this point she told me that the content of my message was illegal. I found this amazing, since I was only preaching the Gospel. She also said people had accused me of swearing at those in the crowd. I pointed out that was a lie, and that I have an mp3 recording of the whole open-air.
After a few more minutes I was placed in the back of a police van. Behind me was the protesting man.
We were driven through the city centre of Perth to the police station. On arrival I was told to sit and wait. The police nicely left my Bible with me, so I was able to read from Psalm 37 as I waited.
They first dealt with the protest man, and then they took me into an interview room. The police began to speak, but I interrupted and asked that the interview be recorded and that I have my legal representative. They refused to allow this. As a result I used my right to silence.
Towards the end of my interview the officer said to me, “You seem reasonable. Why don’t you just stop preaching?” I replied by saying, “Let me ask you a question, is it better to obey man or God?”
With that the interview was over, and I was given a caution. The police also told me that if I preach again then we will go through the process all over again.
It would seem that the police have some questions to answer here. None of this seems normal or reasonable conduct by the police. What on earth is really going on here?
I can only infer that Someone Important complained; someone far more important than a couple of bobbies, and the latter were so scared that they ignored any normal procedure or process. In which case … who precisely complained?
I have written and enquired myself: but my query has not been acknowledged.
Something smells about all this. We’re not getting the whole story here, that’s quite obvious to me.
UPDATE: It seems that Williamson has had difficulties before; that time from Moslem hecklers. John Knox must be revolving in his grave!
UPDATE (19th September 2013): The police have replied as follows:
“Due a number of complaints from members of the public about the noise being made an individual in Perth’s High Street yesterday, a man was asked to attend at Perth Police Station where he was spoken to. He was issued with a warning.”
Hmm. “Asked to attend”? In a police van? I will enquire whether Mr Williamson agrees with this statement.
UPDATE: He says that he has a recording of the whole conversation, in which the police state repeatedly that they are arresting him. The matter is in the hands of Christian Concern.
UPDATE (23rd September 2013): On Saturday 21st September the following appeared on Twitter:
FB link here. The item has now appeared in the local paper, the Courier here:
“I met some friends who were handing out literature and preaching,” said Mr Williamson. “I got up and a handful of minutes later the police came across and stopped me.
“They said they had received a complaint and it was a breach of the peace as I had upset people with what I was saying.”
Mr Williamson said that at the time he was preaching that Jesus Christ had come into the world to save sinners.
He says that the two officers told his friends not to film the incident and following a discussion about his actions he was “manhandled” into a police car and taken to Perth police station and detained for five and a half hours.
He understands the evidence is being evaluated to see if he will face charges. Police Scotland’s Dundee control said they weren’t in a position to comment on Mr Williamson’s version of events.
What is going on?
I’ve continued to work on formatting Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans for online accessibility.
Another chunk of the translation of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Commentary on Luke has arrived from the translator – chunk 8 out of 14, if I recall correctly. Apparently progress on this will slow down, tho, for term time.
OUP are going to send me a review copy of Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery, which is kind of them, and I shall write a review on it.
I shall be going off to Turkey in a few weeks, on a short coach tour. It starts in Istanbul, and includes Troy, Pergamum, and Ephesus. My impression is that Turkey may well become unstable in the next couple of years – the Islamist government is starting to put army generals on trial, and the army has been the guarantor of Turkey’s constitution – and it may be prudent to go now. It will be very nice to see these sites, and I will be glad of the holiday.
I learn by email of the death of Oliver R. Barclay, a former chairman of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU), and then general secretary of the IVF (now UCCF). He was the author of Whatever Happened to the Jesus Lane Lot? (1977), an excellent informal history of Christian work and witness among students in Britain during the 19th and 20th century. He also helped found Tyndale House in Cambridge. His obituary may be read at the UCCF website here.
He did good work all his life, and I myself benefited from it in so many ways. Without the Christian Unions at Cambridge and Oxford, there would be many fewer Christians in Britain today; and without Barclay and his fellow-workers’ emphasis on solid biblical teaching, there would be no Christian Unions.
Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
An interesting post at Paleojudaica here, drawing attention to a review of a new book by a certain Bart Ehrman, who is described as a professor of New Testament textual criticism and apparently writes books trying to prove that the New Testament is complete nonsense. That would seem like an unusual role for the normal text critic, whose job is to heal the transmission damage of texts to help us read them, not to create barriers between texts and people. The review is by David Licinicum, and is wittily entitled Lies, Damn lies, and Patristics.
Christian literature in the first few centuries after Christ is similarly littered with homegrown lies, deceptions leaders willfully foisted on the gullible faithful. So argues Bart Ehrman in his impressive and wide-ranging Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. Although related phenomena come into view at various points, he zeroes in on works bearing a false authorial claim. The number is startling. Ehrman offers each only a brief treatment, and he still needs more than 600 pages.
A google books preview of the work is accessible. I might review the book, if I can obtain a copy. In the meantime I have dipped into this, and found a couple of things which seem rather worrying.
On page 1, for instance, I find that Dr Ehrman has redefined the word “forgery” for his own purposes to mean “a literary work with a false authorial claim, that is, a writings whose author falsely claims to be a(nother) well-known person”. This is not the usual meaning of the word, which has a very loaded meaning: “a lie, swindle, cheat” in modern English. Anyone reading his book will know that.
Using a loaded term which has been “redefined”, in order to associate a pejorative term with early Christian literature, is a very odd thing to do. I can’t imagine any scholarly motive for doing that. If we write a study of some phenomenon, in order to inform, the last thing we want to do is to attach loaded terms to our investigation.
There is more, on the same page. After making a claim that most first century literature is not by the authors universally attested by every scrap of ancient testimony, he goes on to say that “matters begin to change with the second Christian century” and then lists some forgeries: the ps.Clementine Recognitions, the writings of ps.Dionysius the Areopagite, and the letters of Paul and Seneca.
Yet everybody knows that the Clementine Recognitions, in their current form, are certainly works of the 4th century, so rich in the composition of the novel-like texts condemned in the Decretum Gelasianum; that the unknown author of Dionysius the Areopagite wrote in the times of Maximus Confessor, probably at the end of the 5th century; and that the letters of Paul and Seneca belong to the 4th century also. The motives of their authors are unknown. The presumption of guilty intent, involved in using the word “forgery”, is all very well. But why mis-date these?
But the best is to be found elsewhere.
At the opening of chapter 6 is a further introduction, which heaps up lists of texts whose authors are unknown or clearly mistaken, as if there was an industry of forgery in “early Christian times”. I was amused to find ps.Tertullian’s Adversus Omnes Haereses in this, a text that became attached to Tertullian’s name during the middle ages through the accident of being transmitted with a bunch of Tertullian’s works. We have no idea who the author was, but we need not suppose he attached Tertullian’s name to the work, as Ehrman’s readers will infer.
All this will give only one impression to the general reader; which is that the early Christians were forging texts on an industrial scale. It achieves this, by repeating his earlier accusations against the New Testament, and then mingling rapidly together all sorts of documents, Christian and heretical alike. He knows very well that the heretics often forged ‘gospels’ in the names of apostles, and that the Christians tell us so (and, when extant, their contents tell us so). But he prefers to write as if this was a Christian phenomenon. This is a curious thing to do.
In a thousand years time, when Christianity in the 20-21st century is studied in universities, there can be little doubt that extinct heresies like the Moonies, Scientology, etc, will not be studied independently. They will form a tiny part of the curriculum of Christian history in the period.
If Bart Ehrman were preserved in a test tube and able to control that curriculum, to judge from chapter 6 of his book, he would instead assert that the Christians, the Moonies, and the Scientologists were all equivalent, and all more or less the same. He would write in such a way, say about brainwashing, that the ordinary reader would presume that the Christians did it routinely in this century, because the Moonies and Scientologists did and, hey, they’re all the same, and who’s to say who is the “true Christian”.
Which means, apparently, that I am a Moonie. And a Scientologist. At the same time. Whatever is convenient for Dr Ehrman’s argument.
I think everyone has the right to state their own religious position. And if so, we might like to grant the early Christians the same privilege.
I haven’t ventured further into the book, so I cannot say whether it has any useful scholarly content. But thus far it seems to be a wretched piece of work.
Last year Josephus scholar Louis Feldman wrote a tentative article in support of the hitherto fringe idea that Eusebius of Caesarea composed the so-called Testimonium Flavianum found in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, book 18.[1] On p.26 we find the following statement:
There is one phrase in the Testimonium that, while it has been noted by several scholars, has not been sufficiently emphasized, namely, eis eti te nun (still to this day), referring to the fact that “still to this day,” “the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has not disappeared.”
This brief phrase, I would like to suggest, may–I repeat, may–give us the key to the whole puzzle as to the legitimacy of the Testimonium Flavianum. That key is now available to us because of the compilation during the past few decades of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the complete dictionary of all the Greek words in all the extant Greek literature. In such a thesaurus, one would expect such a phrase to appear not hundreds but thousands of times, and it does appear frequently; but the only writer in this entire collection of many thousands of Greek texts to use this phrase with the words in this order, aside from Josephus, is Eusebius, in whose writings it appears three times. This phrase thus appears to be a favorite of Eusebius and of no one else, at least of extant writers from that period.
Now this seems really rather impressive (to me, anyway). But we must always verify our facts.
Let us do a textual search on the TLG for eis eti te nun. What do we get?
We get precisely four results. I’m not sure what search term produced “frequent” results.
1. The first result is Josephus himself. So far so good.
2. The second result is … erm … Eusebius quoting Josephus in the Church History book 1, chapter 11, verse 8; English translation here. This, of course, is neither here nor there as far as Feldman’s theory is concerned.
3. The third result is from book 2 of the Church History, chapter 1, verse 7; English here.[2]
4. The fourth result is from the Eclogae Propheticae, p.168, l.15. This is part of Eusebius’ later work, the General Elementary Introduction (to Christianity): “Διὸ καὶ τότε θαυμάζεσθαι αὐτοὺς εἰκὸς ἦν παρὰ τοῖς ἔμφροσιν, καὶ τοὺς λόγους αὐτῶν ἀναγράπτους παρὰ τοῖς ἱερογραμματεῦσι φυλάττεσθαι, εἰς ἔτι τε νῦν παρ’ ὅλῳ τῷ ἔθνει προφήτας γεγονέναι τοῦ Θεοῦ πιστεύεσθαι·”
It is not obvious from this list of data just why this means that Eusebius composed the TF. So at this point we may ask ourselves what Feldman’s argument was again. It would be advisable to place the argument in our own words — to avoid the danger of being influenced by rhetoric — and to make explicit any inferred arguments.
Feldman’s argument would seem to be as follows:
I think most of us will be perplexed a little at this logic.
The first part of the argument seems very risky in a number of ways. The phrase is a simple one, and ought to appear, as Feldman acknowledges, all over the place. But the TLG as it stands reports only 4 results. It would seem possible, therefore, that the TLG database is not representative of Greek literature or speech. Since only 1% of ancient literature is preserved, and the TLG contains only a portion of that 1%, it is not impossible that this supposition is correct. But if the TLG is not comprehensive, then the presence of only 2 authors in the search means nothing; only that the TF is not comprehensive. In regard of completeness, it is suspicious that no other quotations of the TF appear in the results. Is it really the case that no later Greek author quotes the TF?
Likewise a phrase of 4 words is not much of a fingerprint.
Finally, arguments from parallels are always dangerous, because trivial parallels can be mistaken for significant fingerprints. They can arise in a great number of ways, and do not necessarily involve connection, never mind derivation. For instance literature derives from oral speech. Phrases appear in multiple places in modern literature, not because the authors know each other but because of some other source. The popularisation of the term “chillaxing” by British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010 will undoubtedly have left its mark in the literary record; but woe betide any subsequent scholar who draws conclusions from comparing literature, rather than seeking its real origin.
The fourth part of the argument is a non-sequitur. If we allow a connection, it may arise in a number of ways.
The first possibility is the simplest. Let us suppose that Josephus wrote those words. Let us suppose that Eusebius copied them for the HE I, liked the phrase, and, having it in mind, repeated it when he composed book II, and, later, in the GEI. What could be more natural? What need is there to suppose anything other than copying?
There is another, many-headed alternative. For this we need to consider the second quotation of the TF by Eusebius, in the Demonstratio Evangelica, book 3, chapter 5. This does not appear in the search because, simply, it has a different text: “ὅθεν εἰσέτι νῦν ἀπὸ τοῦδε τῶν Χριστιανῶν οὐκ ἐπέλειπεν τὸ φῦλον.”
Why are there two versions? Is Eusebius quoting from memory and tripping up, or using different copies of the text? — for how else can the same quotation have two different wordings?
But if he is quoting from memory a favourite saying then why does he get it wrong? This, surely, is evidence against the “favourite” argument.
If he has access to copies with two different versions, then of course there is a textual problem at this point with Josephus in transmission, which means that arguing from a parallel in the text is pointless because in this case we don’t know what the text is.
We might also consider the well-known phenomenon of harmonisation. This is most familiar to us from the New Testament and the Lord’s Prayer where — I am told — the version in Luke tends to become assimilated to that in Matthew in the manuscripts, as the former was more familiar.
Now Eusebius HE is a common text. Josephus’ Antiquities 11-20 is comparatively a rare one. The TF was so well known by itself that it intrudes into Josephus Jewish War. The conditions are right for assimilation in transmission. Do we know for sure that, far from Eusebius composing the TF, the copyist of the 9th century ancestor of all our modern mss. of Antiquities 11-20 did not harmonise the text with the HE, conciously or otherwise?
We do have evidence that assimilation did occur in versions of the TF. Jerome quotes in Latin in De viris illustribus a somewhat different version of the text. But I am told that in the Greek translation of DVI, someone has “corrected” the TF to the version found in Eusebius HE and Josephus.
On the other hand, the DE is also a rare text. Evidently harmonisation was not that commonplace.
But if we do assume a connection, and we allow for harmonisation, then it is equally likely that the Josephan TF is merely a scribal copy of the Eusebian version in the HE, itself probably corrupt, and that the real text is lost. If Eusebius (or his literary assistants – we must remember that there are problems with the quotations in the HE) did write down the TF from memory, and did so differently in the HE and DE, then of course errors of memory are possible and Eusebian phrasing may be introduced by a normal text-critical path.
Some will also feel rather concerned at the tiny data volumes – 4 words, 2 quotations – involved. Are these numbers large enough to be statistically significant? Databases can tell us much, but they can also mislead if used without awareness of the pitfalls, and without devising a way to exclude false positives.
In short, the argument put forward by Prof. Feldman is interesting but unconvincing. The data does not require the hypothesis of Eusebian composition in order to explain it.
UPDATE (17/2/17): In a new article, atheist Richard Carrier complains here that, for the purposes of the theory, I should have searched for eis eti nun instead of the exact phrase in the text of Josephus, eis eti te nun. In fact I just searched for the “brief phrase” that Feldman gave, and I didn’t look further for ways to make it work. But let us by all means discuss this in a separate post when I have had a chance to look at the TLG.
I am still struggling away with transcribing Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans. 15 pages to go.
When I have it done, I will collect the bits of the Life of Mar Aba, write a preface and upload them as a whole. It would be useful to know what the manuscript tradition is for the work.
I have also been playing with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) website. An article on a forum asserted that some words from the Testimonium Flavianum must be Eusebian, because the TLG only returns 4 results for it, 1 from Josephus and 3 from Eusebius. So it does, but it can’t mean what the author supposed, once you look at the results. So I need to write a blog post on this; because, while databases are wonderful, they can mislead badly if used without thought.
I’m off to South Wales for a day or two soon. I wonder if there is anything Roman to see? If the rain stops, that is!
I have a certain amount of time for the antiquities trade. If it did not exist, there can be little doubt that the majority of papyrus codices discovered in Egypt in the last century would have gone into the fires of local farm-workers in that country (and some did anyway). The fact that, in modern Egypt, even the simplest know that “antiquities” is spelled “cash” has undoubtedly preserved much ancient literature for us, from the Nag Hammadi finds to the ps.Gospel of Judas, and much else.
I can think of no rational reason why someone should not collect ancient coins or statuary (should he have room enough), and I tend to feel no urge to tell other people what they should do. Nor do I feel that “public” collections are always the best; private owners can very often be more helpful in providing access than indifferent officials.
On the other hand anyone who looks at what happened to the four codices, including the ps.Gospel of Judas, and their dismal fate of damage and dismemberment — because the owners did not safeguard the items properly and instead handed them to a man willing to chop them up — must feel something less than pleasure at what the antiquities trade sometimes involves. The amount of illegal digging now going on all over Egypt, in hopes of a quick profit, while archaeology is destroyed, must pain us all.
Readers of this blog will take it for granted that the material remains of antiquity should be preserved, recorded and published, both formally and online. We all believe that destroying what remains of the ancient world costs each of us something.
But for me it is genuinely difficult to know what to think on this question.
On the one hand, now that order has broken down in Libya, local businessmen are selling the ruins of Cyrene as building land to each other; a sure indication of what happens when antiquity brings no profit to the modern inhabitants. If antiquity is worth nothing, as it was in the middle ages, then marble has a value if we burn it for lime, and land is always in demand, building materials are desirable, and explosives are cheap. The fate of the temple of Horus the Elder at Armant, still standing when Napoleon came to Egypt but blown up for materials to build a sugar factory by Mohammed Ali, is one that many other sites might experience.
On the other hand, the ready market for small, easily portable finds causes Italian and Greek peasants to rob tombs, and, in most of Europe, metal-detector enthusiasts to secretly destroy invaluable archaeological evidence in the hope of striking it rich. The current recession must have provoked a boom in such activity.
In Britain, metal-detectorists are encouraged to work with archaeologists. It’s not illegal to use these gadgets. There are well-understood (and generous) returns to finders, who are thereby encouraged to hand finds in to local archaeological units. A general sense of amity and cooperation seems to exist, unknown elsewhere.
One of the blogs I follow is Cultural Property Observer, which ‘champions the longstanding interests of collectors in the Preservation, Study, Display and Enjoyment of Cultural Artifacts Against an “Archaeology Over All” Perspective’. The current article, drew my attention to some disputes in the world of archaeology.
The article mentioned a certain Paul Barford, whom I come across occasionally and whose position I find so extreme as to be very difficult to understand. His current article is an example. In it he attacks metal-detectorists in Britain for being pleased if they find something valuable (!), with a cartoon depicting greed, and the title jeering at them as being most likely lower-class (!). But Mr Barford might care to reflect that his efforts are unlikely to eradicate greed from the human race. They might however, if successful, eradicate cooperation between metal-detectorist and archaeologist. If such a “success” is achieved, the archaeologist called out at night might find it expedient to hire bodyguards, as elsewhere in Europe; and we may as well abandon any thought of learning anything about any find by metal detector ever. A better example of thoughtlessness and the law of unintended consequences I have yet to see.
The other item was a blog entitled “Looting Matters: Discussion of the archaeological ethics surrounding the collecting of antiquities” by David Gill. This blog is new to me. However I had great difficulty understanding his point of view either. I was unable to find anything resembling an explanation for newcomers like myself on his blog. So, inevitably, I find myself guessing his position from his posts.
Dr Gill seems to dislike western museums. As far as I can tell, he wants to take the contents and distribute them to the modern states that happen to stand on top of whichever section of the globe the items originally came from.
For instance in this post he talks about the “return of antiquities to Italy”, meaning in this case pieces of terracotta. By “return” he means “hand over to the state in Italy without compensation items which were sold by Italians to foreigners”. Indeed the blog is full of apparently illogical demands that antiquities be handed over by US museums to non-US states.
To me, as a layman on this dispute, this is incomprehensible. Whence comes this supposed right, of the officials of the modern state of Italy, to everything ever dug up in Italy? Those who know that parts of Pompeii are collapsing through the neglect and corruption of the feckless officials of the Italian state will be less enthusiastic about this.
Similarly he apparently wants to give the Elgin marbles, bought by Lord Elgin from the then rulers of Greece and donated to the British Museum, to the officials of the modern Greek state (which he calls “return”, for reasons not self-evident). Why he wants this I do not know, for he does not tell us.
Presumably, on the same logic, he would like everything in the British Museum connected with ancient Assyria, Babylon, Sumeria, etc, to be crated up and delivered by plane to whoever currently has the most guns in whatever is left of war-torn Baghdad. I daresay those who destroyed the Ur harp will be equal to the task of destroying the contents of a few crates also. But why would any rational person wish this?
Why would a professional archaeologist wish to destroy museums and cause their collections to be dispersed to Third-world states? As I said, this position is incomprehensible to me.
Likewise Dr Gill seems to share Paul Barford’s belief that, if metal-detecting was criminalised, it would miraculously cease, and that the only people digging on farms will be then, erm, archaeologists. Yet I believe that on farms quite a few other people have been known to have shovels and to use them quite often for other reasons. Some, indeed, have been known to possess other implements, such as those for deep-ploughing. Why would anyone suppose otherwise?
He also seems to believe that the antiquities trade is an evil, and without it the world will have more and better archaeology. Yet it is in no sense obvious that this is so. Again, I do not understand such a point of view; and I find no explanation of it on the blog.
These are the perils of writing blogs for specialists! No doubt my own preoccupations tend to baffle newcomers also; but at least I have an “about” page.
It might be a good idea if Dr Gill were to consider those who come to his blog for the first time, and at least try to explain his position to the public. Without it he runs the risk of alienating, by adopting a position which most people will consider elitist at best.
One item that has hung around on my PC for ages now is Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans. A translation actually exists of this obscure item, published by an Oxford Movement person in the 1840’s, in a journal, and then forgotten. I did scan it in the then-new Finereader 11 back in early 2012; but a bug in the software promptly erased a whole load of formatting. The original editor had used italics instead of quotes, where bits of the bible were involved, which means there are a lot of them.
I re-added the italics, laboriously, not realising why it had disappeared; and lo! it vanished again.
After trudging through 80 pages, twice, adding italics all over each page, my will to live disappeared and I left it to one side.
But I have got stuck into this again. This time I add italics to a page, and then copy the page into Word before I do anything else. Slowly, slowly, I am building up the text. Another 25 pages to go. I hope to get it done this week.