Author: Roger Pearse at ToA

I’ve been gathering more materials.   The medieval Greek commentaries on the bible (catenae) are made up solely of chunks of quotations from earlier authors.  The catena published by John Cramer is particularly good for material by Eusebius, and has a nice index at the back of which pages to look at,  unlike another catena by Possinius that I had to leaf through.  I obtained photocopies of the Eusebius pages of the volume on Luke/John.  Using the TLG, I found that many of these quotations do indeed turn out to be from the “Quaestiones”; some look as if they might be new fragments.

It’s interesting that so many catenae do exist in publication, and all in very old editions.  Cramer, being 19th century, is the most modern of them.  I can’t help feeling that someone should translate Cramer.  It could not fail to be interesting.

The excellent and industrious Andrew Smith has completed a translation into English of the Latin translation of the Chronicon of Eusebius of Caesarea!  He has also made this available as a public domain text, which is how it should be, of course.  It’s here.

Note that information on the manuscripts should be checked against a recent article by Dr. Drost-Abgarjan, here.

The revision of the ‘ecloge’ (the collection of selected extracts) of the work is in progress, and it sounds as if it’s thoroughly worthwhile.  I’ve also compared the fragments of the full text found in catenae which Angelo Mai published in his first edition to that which he printed in the second.  The main difference is that he added a load of material from a Vatican ms. (Vat. gr. 1611) of the catena of Nicetas (a still unpublished text, as far as I know).  But he also omitted fragments published in the first edition.  I’ve compiled a concordance of the two and sent it to Mr. A.  I’ve also found some fragments in Cramer’s catena on Matthew/Mark.

I’ve been looking for a text by Francois Combefis, which seems to contain more fragments.  A trip to the Bodleian one Saturday was in vain; apparently they don’t bother to fetch books from the stacks on Saturdays!  I also need to try to track down the letter of Latino Latini in which he refers to the full text existing in Sicily; increasingly I get the impression that no-one has consulted this in centuries, and everyone has just reprinted Fabricius via Migne.

Meanwhile I’ve finally fired Mr. C, the Syriac translator.  He’s ignored all my emails for two months now.  I received no reply to my email of enquiry, so I really had little choice. It’s a little hard to understand why anyone would just fall silent and leave someone hanging.  Couldn’t he imagine that it might be very inconvenient for someone to have no idea if he ever intended to do more?  Still, he did two fragments which is more than anyone else has done. 

Fortunately Dr. E. has agreed to translate more of the Syriac for me.  Fragment 3 has arrived today, and is very literal and very good.  She hopes to do a fragment a week, which would be ideal.  It is curious how difficult I have found it to find Syriac translators. 

Regular readers will know that I have commissioned a gentleman whom I refer to as Mr. A to translate all the remains of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Quaestiones ad Stephanum et Marinum.  This work contains a series of ‘problems’ — differences between the gospels — and Eusebius’ ‘solutions’ to them.  The problems ‘for Stephanus’ all come from either the start of the gospels, and usually deal with the geneaologies of Jesus.  The remainder deal with differences between the endings of the gospels, including the multiple endings of Mark, found even then in the manuscripts.  The work is lost, but an epitome survives, plus lots of fragments in Greek and Syriac catena-commentaries.

Today is a great day.  Mr. A has today completed the first translation of the entire epitome into English, and intends to revise it all by the end of this week.  After this, we start in on the fragments of the catenae.  This week I went to Cambridge and found yet more fragments in various 17th century printed extracts, themselves taken from catenae. 

So far the cost of translation has reached $1,800, which is quite a sum to pay out of my own pocket!  But I hope that if I make the text available in a print-on-demand version online, that enough copies can be sold to recover this.  I also invite donations; after all, the subject of the work should be of interest to an awful lot of people, whether Christian, atheist, or whatever.

Mr. A, who is translating this work of Eusebius on the differences between the gospels and their solutions, writes to tell me that the 16th and final question to Stephanus is now done.  This is gratifying news; the first complete translation into English is progressing nicely.  We’re now trying to decide whether to press on into the four questions to Marinus; or pause and do a revision process on all of Stephanus.

I’ve also been trying to determine whether a critical edition exists of the Catena on Luke of Nicetas, which contains fragments of this work.  No luck so far.