There are quite a few of the fathers who we don’t know anything about, despite having their works. Titus of Bostra is perhaps one of the most important of these. We — i.e. almost everyone aside from one or two scholars — don’t know anything about him because his work Against the Manichaeans in 4 books has never been translated. Worse than that, it’s never had a critical edition. In fact I don’t think I even have a pre-critical text on my hard disk, it’s so hard to obtain.
Back in 2007, I blogged on this here.
But today there is news! This evening a comment appeared on the article from Paul-Hubert Poirier, who has been working on an edition and translation for a while:
I am very pleased to announce the publication of the first critical edition of the Greek and Syriac versions of the Against the Manichaeans of Titus of Bostra, along with the excerpts from the Sacra Parallela of John of Damascus:
ROMAN, A., POIRIER, P.-H., CRÉGHEUR, É., DECLERCK, J., Titi Bostrensis Contra Manichaeos libri IV, (Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca, 82), Turnhout, Brepols Publishers, 2013.
A synoptic translation of both versions will follow in 2014 in the series “Corpus Christianorum in Translation”
This is excellent news! And it will be more excellent when a translation appears too!
This evening I happened to read Quasten’s entry on Titus’ Contra Manichaeos, which (characteristically) really makes one want to read it. So I did a little googling around and found that one William Oliver Walker translated books 1–2 for his M.A. thesis at the University of Texas at Austin in 1958. The title is “Titus of Bostra: Against the Manichaeans: A Translation of Books One and Two.”
Google Books says it runs 364 pages and ResearchGate says it “Includes bibliographical references.” What a treasure, if one could get one’s hands on it.
Yes … invaluable. Thank you for highlighting this. If only it was online!
I ordered a scan of William Oliver Walker’s thesis from the University of Texas at Austin. Since it dates from 1958 and the copyright was never renewed, I believe that it is in the public domain. In any event, I have uploaded it to the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/titus-of-bostra-against-the-manichaeans/
Enjoy!
Wonderful! Thank you!