Month: October 2024

1,000 British Library Manuscripts now back online!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I learned that the British Library has made 1,000 manuscripts available online again.  They are here.  Scroll past the pretty-pretty stuff, and a very workable list appears, on three pages, in order of collection/fond.  Each row is a link, with shelfmark, date, and a quick summary of contents.  Most are Latin, but there are papyri on page 3.  There are no downloads (“as yet”).  But it is a huge relief to see these appear.

It looks rather as if the images mostly (all?) come from manuscripts that were made available to other institutions, and thereby preserved off-site.  If so, that ought to give BL management pause for thought as to the wisdom of only holding digital images in one place.

Funnily enough the list format, although obviously knocked up quickly, is far more usable to a researcher than anything we had on the old site.  I do hope that it is retained, possibly divided into collections, as with the Wiglaf index to the Vatican manuscripts.  Most manuscript repository sites are a pig to navigate.

Looking good.

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More on Pseudo-Josephus, “Discourse to the Greeks on Hades”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In my last post, I mentioned that this Pseudo-Josephus text is transmitted to us in a range of manuscripts, but is also transmitted in the “Sacra Parallela.”   The Sacra is an immense anthology of extracts from the Fathers.  Since then I have been trying to find out more about the Sacra.  It was originally in three volumes, often attributed to John Damascene, but only compilations derive from it survive.

The Sacra has only been edited once, by Michel Lequien, in 1712, in two volumes (here and here), with parallel Latin translation.  But in recent years a German team has been working on the text, and now they have issued an edition of two recensions of the second volume of the Sacra, in the Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos series.[1]  Each recension gets two volumes.  Sadly these do not contain a translation.

The edition by J. Declerck of the second recension of Book II of the Sacra Parallela (volumes 3 and  4 ) contains 2,007 extracts.  These are organised in alphabetical order, using 23 letters of the Greek alphabet.  Apparently this recension included no entries for “zeta.”

But the last entry given is out of sequence.  Indeed this entry is none other than pseudo-Josephus, “Against Plato, on the cause of everything”; in other words, our “discourse to the Greeks on Hades.”  The section is noticeably far longer than the short extracts that precede it.

Here’s the start of this part.

Even the reviewer, Paul-Hubert Poirier, had some difficulty understanding the abbreviations at the top!  *II2 is the second recension of book II of the Sacra.  The asterisk is inscrutable, apparently. “PMLb” is a group of manuscripts.

That it appears there, out of sequence at the end, must mean that it is an addition, added later on to the end of some copy of this recension of the text, and transmitted with it.  For the first recension ends with a short extract from Justin Martyr.  The fact that it is a comparatively long text in several chapters also suggests that it is not part of the original.

We’ve already seen that this version of pseudo-Josephus was edited a century ago by Holl from two manuscripts.  These also form the basis of the new critical edition.  But this edition also ends at the same place, earlier than the Barocci manuscript used for the English translation.

I would infer from this that the pseudo-Josephus text is a free-floating bit of text, on version of which accidentally became attached to the end of one recension of the Sacra Parallela.

So pseudo-Josephus is not a portion of the Sacra Parallela which has gone solo.  Rather it is an independent artist that has joined the band.

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  1. [1]T. Thum/J. Declerck, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, in the Patristische Texte und Studien series.↩