I’ve returned to my translation of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas. I hope to have this ready and make it available by St Nicholas’ Day, December 6. At the moment I am reading through the files from the start, and comparing it with the excellent Italian translation by P. Corsi based on a different manuscript. I have decided to descope the textual issues, and simply write something in an introduction.
But as I work through the text and translation, sentence by sentence, I am consulting the collation that I made of the Mombritius, Falconius and Corsi editions. So far there are almost no places in the text in which the differences make any difference to the translation. This will not be true for chapters 12 and 13, where the Falconius edition prints a completely different piece of text. That will have to be printed as an appendix. But even then, the same basic story is being told.
Otherwise the differences between the texts are trivial. I do get the impression that the Mombritius text is an earlier form, which was revised to make it easier to understand. John the Deacon is a complete swine for strange word orders, and some of these seem to have been smoothed out. This tends to support the idea of two recensions of the text. It would not be surprising if the Latin of 800 AD did not seem somewhat strange to copyists of five centuries later.
This week something interesting happened. Two different people wrote to inform me of their crank theories of history. One wrote briefly that Tertullian never existed. The other seemed to be connected to the Worldwide Church of God somehow, and had elaborated the mythmaking of Herbert Armstrong even more. The approach taken to history was the same; only the “conclusions” were widely different.
A thought occurred to me that I ought to create a page listing these people, and giving a short paragraph describing their claim. There is Ralph Ellis with his series of books suggesting that the gospel events took place after 60 AD and referencing King Arthur. There was Acharya S, with her weird claims about Horus. There’s the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, with its bastard child, the Da Vinci Code. There is always Eric von Daniken with “Was God an astronaut?” All these people use the same approach. They all claim to be giving “the real history”, “suppressed” by whoever – usually the Vatican. They all start with a theory and a pair of scissors, and shape the data into whatever shape they need. They all deride “so-called scholars”, usually with an ad hominem. And so on.
Individually these people can confuse ordinary people, who don’t know that this is a genre. But gathered together, where anybody can compare them, they are powerless. I must get onto this some time.
The crackpot index might be useful if scoring is required: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
Love it!
“Tertullian never existed”? Well THAT’s a new one! 😀
They’re out there!
I just through watching Graham Hancock’s ‘Ancient Apocalypse’ on Netflix. How he got a documentary series on there I’ll never know. He claims that an advanced pre-ice age civilization (Atlantis) was destroyed but the survivors taught hunter-gather types farming and how to build megalithic.
Apparently Hancocks been going on about this for years. He gives lots of great rants about the archaeological community not agreeing with him.
May the Lord spare you from pointless distractions!
Looking forward to reading John the Deacon’s “Life of St Nicholas.”
Thank you. Now revising chapter 5 (of 15).
Another one I’ve been running into is Russell Gmirkin.
Gmirkin has noted that the Septuagint Greek in Genesis One shares a lot of language with Plato’s Timaeus – this much is probably true. He also knows that the Greek overall often represents a parallel Hebrew text to the Masoretic: also true, for Jeremiah and Reigns/Kings. He brings these together that this Greek version of Genesis is anterior to the Genesis One in the Masoretic Text. The Greek was then – he posits – translated to Hebrew and made more amenable, as it were, to Jewish orthodoxy.
Questionable to say the least. Also the Qumran version of Genesis isn’t like Qumran’s Jeremiah; Qumran’s Genesis is very close to our MT.
Thank you! A possible candidate, I agree, although not quite off-the-wall enough, possibly? But probably merits inclusion, if only for purposes of comparison.
Von Däniken has always shied away from suggesting that Judaism or Christianity were inspired by aliens. He reserves that for polytheistic religions that are not so popular with his European and American audiences. Some of his disciples who spout similar ideas may not show such restraint, but most do, because they know which side their bread is buttered on.