Category: Announcements

General announcements

Michel van Rijn (1950-2024)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

So … Michel van Rijn is dead. Art dealer, forger, smuggler, conman, criminal, informant and inkslinger: whose long-vanished eccentric website exposed many a dirty deed in the art world.

Apparently he died last year, aged 73, on 25 July 2024, in Italy.  There was a notice in Het Parool, which published material from him in the past.

The art world is not my area of expertise.  Men have always bought and sold precious things, and always will.  Other men have sometimes tried to stop them, for various reasons.  Some of those involved are villains.  Some are rich men rescuing what would otherwise be destroyed.  Consequently the world of art dealing is one of secrecy and rumour, and no small amount of slander and dishonesty.  In addition the world of Coptology has long been dominated by people whose self-interest exceeds their devotion to scholarship, as James M. Robinson makes clear in his many articles on the Nag Hammadi codices.

But it is well for those interested in antiquity to be aware of this world.  More than twenty years ago, I became aware that four Coptic manuscripts had been discovered somewhere, around 1983, and had found their way into the hands of the Cairo dealers, and then onwards internationally.  This is entirely normal.  Most such discoveries are made by fellaheen, tilling the soil, and the dealers keep agents in the villages for precisely this reason. Indeed if they did not do so, it is likely that papyrus finds would simply be destroyed by the finders.

Among these manuscripts was a previously unknown gnostic “Gospel of Judas.”  This was published in 2006.  The whole story is told by Herbert Krosny in his The lost gospel : the quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot (2006), which I used to have but seems to have vanished in a recent house move.

My own interest led me to the website of Dutch art dealer Michael van Rijn.  This was a huge farrago of art-world gossip, obviously unreliable – and probably by design – hurling accusations of dodgy dealings at all sorts of people.  It was strangely formatted, and yet deeply entertaining.  How widely read it was I cannot say.

Van Rijn had become aware of the find, and he had also acquired photographs of some of it, and a rough translation.  I corresponded with him, and found him by email to be a charming yet clearly very unreliable person.  He published what he had on his website, and I mirrored some of it on my own.  The trail of what I could find out is still online here.  He was even interviewed by the BBC, who seemingly did not realise the importance of what he had, and chose to run end-credits over footage of him reading unpublished material from the work.

A 2006 photograph of Michel van Rijn.

In the end his website was shut down, in 2006.  This shut-down took place well before the orchestrated censorship of the last few years, in days when such things were still unthinkable.  So I can only infer that he had annoyed some very important people indeed.  What happened afterwards I know not.  There is a 2012 interview with him by Jake Hanrahan here, although, as ever, I do not know how much of it you can believe. He cultivated his image as a rogue.  He appeared in a 2016 film.  The last I heard of him, he was living in Italy.

And now… he is gone.  Whether he made the world a better place, or a worse one, I cannot say.  But there is no doubt that he made it a more entertaining one.

Farewell, old inkslinger.  May you find mercy at the hands of One to whom all answers are known, and from Whom even fewer secrets are hidden.

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Experiments with Amharic and technology (part 3)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Back in August 2023, I found that it was possible to scan in some of an Ethiopian text, part of the Life of Saint Garima.  Unfortunately the results from machine translation were disappointing.  ChatGPT was no better.

This evening I was writing my last post, and remembered these efforts.  So I pasted those chunks of text into ChatGPT.  Here’s the first:

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God above all, I have renounced everything and believed in Him until the end of the world. Amen.

The sermon delivered by Saint John, the Bishop of Aksum, concerning the greatness and honor of Saint Isaac:

He said, “Listen and understand, my beloved ones, what I will tell you. I saw a woman who was suffering greatly, trembling and in distress. And she called upon Our Lady Mary, saying: ‘For the sake of the Son, Christ, this woman is not yet born.’ They said to her, ‘Whoever does not believe in Christ and remains doubtful, they shall be humbled and brought low under her feet.’

Then, at that moment, the King of Heaven and Earth came forth. And she said, ‘The one who is greater than Moses shall come.’

Plausible.  Here’s the second chunk:

And it happened on one night that a book was opened, read, and written down. And he arose for prayer in the church. And the angels wrote for him the Gospel at the fourth hour and interpreted it for him. And the angels of God descended and stood before him, and our Lord Christ comforted him. And his message was heard throughout all the land. His prayer and blessing remained with us.

Also plausible.

Perhaps I should have another go at this!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This morning I spent driving around, picking up some medicine for my girlfriend’s cat, and then taking her out to lunch.  After lunch, in my last post I uploaded the Life of Isidore of Pelusium (BHG 2209).  This afternoon I scanned in the Greek for a miracle story of St George, the miracle of the demon (BHG 687k); and ran it through ChatGPT.  It’s in the comment to this old post here.

I’d still like to do a translation of the 8 letters of Isidore of Pelusium to Cyril of Alexandria.  I have the Greek for this, thanks to the TLG.  Although tomorrow morning a cheese scone beckons, so it may have to wait a bit.

This evening while sitting in the bath I began to think about what else we could do with this interesting combination of imperfect OCR, plus the ability to get AI to correct the scan errors, and some other languages than Greek and Latin.

A little while ago I used Google Docs to scan in some Ge`ez – which worked -, and then I tried to get AI to translate it.  The last bit failed completely.  I think, given time, that Ethiopian languages will become possible.

I wonder how long ago that attempt was?  I think it was two years ago, after I encountered a legend about Abba Garima copying the bible in a single night.  (Indeed it was!  Amharic, rather than Ge`ez tho. See here and here.)

The technology has come on quite a bit since then.  I must try again.

What other languages might we do this with?  Well, what about Armenian?  Or Coptic?

Interesting thoughts!

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A “Life” of St. Isidore of Pelusium (BHG 2209) now online in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This  short11th century “Life” was printed by Morton Smith without a translation.  I thought it would be interesting to translate it.  I include the Greek text.

Here it is:

The files are also available on Archive.org here.

As usual, I make this file and its contents public domain.  Do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial.

Here’s the translation, for those who will never download the files!

    *    *    *    *

The Life and Conduct of Our Holy Father Isidore of Pelusium.[1]

1. This divine Isidore, who was called marvellous in both life and word, and who shone in both respects brighter than the sun, had Pelusium as his homeland; and this city was renowned among those in Egypt; and from a devout root, a more devout offshoot sprouted, for from his earliest youth, he immediately embraced virtue wholeheartedly; and he showed that he cherished this as an inalienable possession always; and [he avoided] the things in which youth delights, generally being averse to them; I mean childish games and youthful frolics; and the luxury that weakens the soul and enslaves it to the pleasures of the flesh; and simply all the other things that hinder the mind from understanding what is good; but the things that lead to perfect detachment and the highest contemplation of divine things, these he embraced wholeheartedly; I mean self-control in all things, and the finest education, which lightens the soul and lifts it to heavenly things; for having fallen in love with wisdom, and having honoured her according to the divine precepts of Solomon, being adorned and preserved by her, he was seen [to live accordingly] throughout his life; for the wise man says, “Love her, and she will guard you; honour her, that she may adorn you, that she may place on your head a crown of graces and protect you with a crown of beauty.” [Prov. 4:6, 8-9]

2. Guided by these admirable exhortations and training himself, the admirable Isidore devoted his entire mind to the pursuit of wisdom.  He diligently studied all of divine Scripture, both the New and also the Old Testaments, and mastered thoroughly the entire education of the Greeks.  For those who love elegance, this also is necessary, in order to illuminate and eloquently express the thoughts of reason to those who receive what is said with goodwill, rather than with malice.   Indeed, a truly intelligent and wise person should not avoid all the teachings of the Greeks, but rather should select from them and study them thoroughly.  For even these [studies] can benefit the devout and God-loving soul.  Just as the teachings of the Church are of no use at all to the lazy and indifferent, due to their inherent sloth and negligence, so too for the diligent and studious even external learning can be most useful.  Like a bee flitting among flowers and gathering the best from each, so too did the great Isidore engage in the noble trade of knowledge from his youth until extreme old age, becoming a living library.  But why dwell on these matters when there are far greater things to recount?

3. After this admirable man had attained sufficient knowledge, he turned towards to the monastic life, fleeing the disturbances of the world as capable of harming [the soul]. He judged that it was better to die to the world and to live for Christ, and he left the city and settled in the ‘mountain’[2] of Nitria.  There, after spending considerable time in asceticism, the wise man truly practiced the genuine philosophy.

4. Although the blessed one had chosen this solitary way of life, desiring to have God alone as the witness of his virtue, he became well-known throughout Egypt.  Indeed, he even became known to the one who adorned the archiepiscopal throne of Alexandria.  This great man was Athanasius, the champion of the orthodox faith, and a valiant opponent of disreputable heresies.   At his orders the divine Isidore was enrolled in the priesthood of the church, in Alexandria, although reluctantly and only after being persuaded by him.[3]

5. In this sacred duty, is there any need to state his devotion to virtue? What labour and sweat did he not put in?   He was above all a watchful eye, not just over his own affairs, but also for the welfare of others, and more so for their needs than for his own.  For he neglected his own interests in order that others should benefit.   This is why he wrote continuously wise letters to everyone.    To those nearby he gave instruction in person[4] urging them to do what was right.  With those far away he communicated through letters that could guide their souls, to bishops, priests, deacons, monks, and nuns, to rulers and to the ruled; and to everyone alike, high and low, he spoke with equal love.

6. Sometimes he praised those who excelled in virtue, and exalted them in his writings; at other times, he corrected those who went astray, with great wisdom and understanding. In all things he showed a caring and God-loving spirit.  But it was not possible for this blessed man, living so virtuously, to escape the schemes of the evil demon.  For how could it be otherwise, because that devil exists and from the beginning opposes all that is good.

7. After the great Athanasius departed this life for his dwelling in heaven, and after his successors [did likewise], the leadership of the church of Alexandria passed to Theophilus, the nephew[5] of the blessed Cyril[6].   What can be said that is equal to the great storm that he endured?  To what severe trials was he subjected?  For the enemy, who was envious of the virtue of the God-loving patriarch[7], and trying to strip him of it, sowed hatred [in his mind] against this divine man.  At the same time he tried to hinder contentiously his God-pleasing and beneficial works.  He turned Theophilus the patriarch, who had been God-loving in all things before this time, into an enemy through his hostility toward the great Isidore.  The utterly wicked one prevailed so much that he even made Theophilus expel from the priesthood one who was truly worthy of the heavenly altar, contrary to all justice and reason.

8. This [affair], I believe, was like some kind of filthy stain rubbed onto the patriarch.  Yet the truly admirable Isidore did not argue or protest at all.  Nor did he struggle against the one who fruitlessly wronged him, and tried to harm him in every way, both by hand and foot.  Instead, one might say, in a manner worthy of himself, he returned from the Church to the mountain where he had previously dwelt alone, and ascended again, deeming it unworthy for distress to ruin the tranquillity of his own thoughts.  At the same time, he did not wish to increase the judgment against Theophilus through hatred toward himself, the disciple of the peaceful and gentle Christ.  The attack of the wicked and strife-loving devil became for him an opportunity for and voluntary contribution towards greater virtue.

9. But even while dwelling “on the mountain,” and devoted to stillness, the blessed one took thought to encourage everyone towards virtue to [the best of his] ability, even from afar. He knew that this was the chief part of salvation.  So he worked constantly, sending exhortations and instructions through letters, and he never neglected to teach and urge everyone toward virtue.  Day and night, at every hour, he made this his concern, serving as a rule[8] and a guideline[9], so to speak, placed in front of everyone, although he required rest due to old age, and rather needing assistance himself because of his multitude of years.  For his life was extended to nearly a hundred years.  Yet even in old age he flourished and showed energy in building up those near him.

10. Since it was necessary for him, as a man, to die, he fell into a brief illness, which was spent in discourses of thanksgiving and salvation. Also there were the prayers of the assembled monks and laymen to take leave of him in his final moments.  Indeed too many to count gathered together, asking for his prayers, and chanting hymns for his departure.

11. When, through the hands of God who gave him life, the blessed on entrusted his blessed soul [to God], his honourable remains were laid in earth with a large escort and and great honour.  [His tomb] gushed streams of miracles for all who approached it in faith.  The day of his departure[10] was the fourth of February.

12.  O Isidore, best of all priests and monks, wise and God-inspired, entreat Christ unceasingly to be the guardian and protector of the realm for our orthodox emperor.  Glorify him with the greatest trophy monuments[11] over enemies. Grant him strength against every adversary, and to be the mightiest hand in wars.  And at the end, grant him the imperishable kingdom of heaven, mercifully granting him forgiveness of sins (graciously releasing the chains of life’s transgressions), and the divine enjoyment of a paradise of delight, which may we also enjoy, to His praise and glory, to Whom be glory forever and ever.  Amen.

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  1. [1]The paragraphs are usually a single sentence, composed of clauses connected by semi-colons. I have broken this into shorter sentences.↩
  2. [2]A place of solitude.  ὅρος: 1. Sinai in Genesis, the Mountain of the Transfiguration; 2. a place inhabited by monks (Lampe).↩
  3. [3]Isidore was probably born in 370 AD, but Athanasius died in 373.  This mistake indicates that the text cannot be anywhere near contemporary to Isidore.↩
  4. [4]Lit. “spoke with a living voice.”↩
  5. [5]This should read “the uncle.”↩
  6. [6]St. Cyril of Alexandria.↩
  7. [7]θεόφιλος: The name “Theophilus” means “God-loving.”↩
  8. [8]κανών.↩
  9. [9]στάθμη, a carpenter’s line.↩
  10. [10]τοῦ μεγάλου τελειώσεως, lit. “his great completion”↩
  11. [11]τρόπαιον.↩

Using Deepseek on an obscure Greek “Life” of St Isidore of Pelusium (d. 435 AD) by Morton Smith

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I started googling about Isidore of Pelusium, and I quickly came across a number of papers showing that Dr. Madaline Toca is actively working on Isidore of Pelusium, the manuscripts of his letters, the reception of his work in Latin, and so on.  This is good news!  Most of these papers are accessible on Academia here, which is even better news.  Also among her efforts is an online bibliography for Isidore, here.

This bibliography informed me that a previously unpublished Greek “Life” had been printed back in 1958 in an obscure Greek volume.  Thankfully she provided a PDF here.

The author of this publication was none other than a certain Morton Smith.  Today Morton Smith is notorious for his “Secret Mark” forgery.  But in 1957 he was just another a young scholar, travelling through Greece and the Levant, and searching for manuscripts of the letters of Isidore of Pelusium.

The “Life” printed is basically a transcription of four manuscripts, the oldest 12th century, the rest 16th century; three from Mount Athos, and the other in the National Library in Athens.  From the incipit and explicit, it appears to be the text listed in the BHG, vol. 3 (supplements) on p.38 as BHG 2209.  The text is in 12 paragraphs, which are those in the manuscripts.  No paragraph numbering or subtitles appear.

I was curious what the text said.  Unfortunately Smith gave no translation.  It does not seem to be in the TLG.  But I knew that if I could create an electronic text, then I could work on it with ChatGPT.

What I did was to run it through Abbyy Finereader 15 Pro.  Unfortunately this only supports modern Greek, which means that the accentuation gets mangled.  But never mind that.  Who cares?  This is just idle interest.  Or so I thought.

Anyway I pulled it, did a certain amount of light correction.  Then I pasted it into ChatGPT using the free online web interface, and asked for an English translation.  The request that I gave it – the “prompt” in the AI jargon – was this:

Please correct the following text in medieval Greek: ”’  …. ”’

with the Greek between the triple quotes.  Triple quotes seem to be the standard way to indicate something in these AI interfaces.  I have no idea why.

Well, ChatGPT produced a very nice, perfectly readable translation.  Here is the opening section:

The Life and Conduct of Our Holy Father Isidore of Pelusium

This divine Isidore, who lived a wondrous life both in deed and word, shone like the sun in both respects, and even brighter. His homeland was Pelusium, a distinguished city in Egypt. He sprang from a pious lineage, yet he himself flourished as an even more devout offshoot. From his earliest years, he ardently embraced virtue and steadfastly held to it as an inseparable possession. He despised the pleasures of youth, such as childish games, frivolous laughter, indulgence that weakens the soul, and enslavement to the desires of the flesh—everything, in short, that distracts the mind from perceiving true beauty. Instead, he pursued complete detachment and the heights of divine contemplation, embracing temperance in all things and the highest form of education—one that elevates the soul and leads it toward the heavens.

My experiences with ChatGPT as a helper with the translation of the “Life” of John Damascene had demonstrated that ChatGPT does give reasonable accuracy.  But also that you do have to check!  But how to do so?

My next thought was to try out another AI product, the Chinese DeepSeek, also available for free online.  I did the same with this, with the same prompt, and it also produced a translation. Here’s the opening section:

The Life and Conduct of Our Holy Father Isidore of Pelusium

This divine Isidore, who was wondrous in both life and word, shone brighter than the sun in both respects. His homeland was Pelusium, a renowned city in Egypt. From a devout root, a more devout branch sprouted, for from his earliest youth, he wholeheartedly embraced virtue and held it as an inalienable possession, demonstrating his unwavering love for it. He shunned the pleasures that typically delight youth—childish games, youthful frivolities, and indulgences that weaken the soul and enslave it to the desires of the flesh. In short, he avoided everything that hinders the mind from attaining true understanding of what is good. Instead, he devoted himself entirely to what leads to perfect detachment and the highest contemplation of divine things: universal self-control and the best education, which lightens the soul and lifts it to heavenly things.

Various awkwardnesses in the DeepSeek output suggested to me that it was probably closer to the Greek.  But there are enough differences there that I felt that I needed to get closer to the Greek.

So I put in another prompt to DeepSeek:

For each sentence, give the Greek, then the English translation; then analyse the syntax, with meanings; then give a list (in table format) of all the words with the grammar, lemma, part of speech, case, number, gender, and meaning for each word.

Doing so produces quite a bit of output.  The “translation” gets quite a bit closer to the Greek as you do this, and of course you can read its explanation of the syntax, you can lookup individual words in Logeion or somewhere using the lemma, and generally wrestle with the sentence until you believe what you have.

But back to the AI output.

If you run this prompt in ChatGPT, it just does one sentence only, and then it asks if you want to continue.  If you say “yes”, then it does another.  However ChatGPT has no idea what a sentence is!  So it does a dozen or so words.  DeepSeek is the same, but I quickly found that the length of a “sentence” was much shorter.  Rather nervously I asked if it could “do the same but for two sentences” and I got longer outputs.  So that worked.  When I asked if it could do four “sentences”, it went a bit funny.  So I went back to two.

At one sentence a time, all this becomes very tedious.  Copying and pasting the output to a word document takes a lot of time.  Indeed I have spent the whole day doing this.  But DeepSeek did a fine job.  It was no worse than ChatGPT.

It’s generally best to do this, one paragraph at a time.  It doesn’t feel so oppressive, and you can go off for a break at the end of each paragraph. You don’t want to sicken yourself, and it takes too long to do the whole thing in one go, even for just 4 pages of Greek.

For the curious, I attach a sample file with what I got for one of the paragraphs.  How reliable the output is, well, I will find out in due course!  It’s here:

But I did get tired.  So I wondered if it was possible to do this process from the computer command line, thereby saving myself a lot of time.  You can indeed connect to the website using the “API,” which would allow you to write a program.  But… alas… they want money for that!  The restrictions on the free web interface are deliberate.

You can also download for free a DeepSeek “model” (jargon word) and run it on your PC.  But unless you have an awful lot of memory fitted, you will find yourself working with “distilled” versions which are not nearly as good.  The process is fairly technical, and although I got it to work, I’d need to spend a lot more time on this.  Whether my fairly powerful PC would handle a full-size model is something that I don’t yet know.  So I went back to the free web interface.

One place where DeepSeek is definitely superior to ChatGPT is that it recognises when it reaches the end of the passage.  ChatGPT does not.  It will quite happily continue beyond the end, “translating” random Greek garbage.  So every so often you have to take the last word translated, and check that it is still in the text!

Doing this led to an interesting discovery.  I always ask for the Greek, the English, and then the syntax analysis.  I found that DeepSeek was silently fixing up the garbage Greek text that I had got from the OCR.  It was adding the missing accentuation.

So I tried asking it explicitly to do so.

Please correct the following text in medieval Greek: ”’…”’

And it did, and then translated it.  A quick look at the original PDF suggests that it is doing a good job.  Well, well.

Update 27 March 2025.  I did find a couple of places in the “corrected” Greek text where it had mysteriously introduced a full-stop.  It also capitalised proper names without my asking it to!  But still interesting.

One thing that is really important – divide your text, however short, into chunks of no more than half-a-dozen sentences, and work on each chunk in turn in separate documents.  If you think, as I did, that the document is too short to bother, you will quickly get into a morass.  It’s psychologically necessary to have some positive reward every few sentences, or you get depressed and give up. In this case I ended up simply numbering the paragraphs and taking each as a “chapter.”

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A quote from the Marcionite “gospel” in Isidore of Pelusium

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The 5th century monk Isidore of Pelusium was a contemporary of Cyril of Alexandria, to whom he directed at least 8 letters.  I always wanted to get these translated, ever since I learned of them in Quasten’s Patrology, vol. 3, p.184.  Today I went to my PDF of the Patrologia Graeca 78, and added bookmarks to them.  One of these is letter 370.  But my eye drifted to letter 371, to Pansophius, which turned out to be about the Marcionites!

Here’s the text and a quick translation:

(371) ΤΟΑʹ. ΠΑΝΣΟΦΙῼ.

Εἰ προΐσχεται ὁ τῆς Μαρκίωνος συνήγορος βλασφημίας, τὸ παρ’ ἐκείνοις ὀνομαζόμενον Εὐαγγέλιον, λαβὼν ἀνάγνωθι, καὶ εὑρήσεις εὐθὺς ἐν προοιμίοις τὴν ἀτοπίαν. Αὐτὴν γὰρ τὴν κατάγουσαν ἐπὶ Χριστὸν ἁπὸ Δαβὶδ καὶ Ἀβραὰμ γενεαλογίαν ἀπέτεμον• καὶ μικρὸν ὕστερον προϊὼν ἄλλην ὄψει κακόνοιαν. Ἀμείψαντες γὰρ τὴν τοῦ Κυρίου φωνήν, «Οὐκ ἦλθον, λέγοντος, καταλῦσαι τὸν νόμον ἢ τοὺς προφήτας,» ἐποίησαν• Δοκεῖτε, ὅτι ἦλθον πληρῶσαι τὸν νόμον ἢ τοὺς προφήτας; Ἦλθον καταλῦσαι, ἀλλ’ οὐ πληρῶσαι. Ἐκ τούτων δὲ εἴσῃ, ὅπως ἔχθραν ταῖς δυσὶ Διαθήκαις κατασκευάζουσι, ξένον εἶναι τοῦ νόμου τὸν Χριστὸν σχεδιάσαντες.

If the advocate of Marcion promotes blasphemy, take up and read their so-called Gospel, and you will immediately find its absurdity in the opening passages. For they have cut out the actual genealogy that leads down to Christ from David and Abraham.

And proceeding a little further, you will see another instance of their malice.  For they have altered the Lord’s words: “I did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets”, and changed it to: “Do you think that I have come to fulfil the Law or the Prophets? I have come to abolish, and not to fulfil.”

From this, you will understand how they fabricate enmity between the two Testaments, having contrived to make Christ a stranger to the Law.

We don’t really think of Marcionites hanging around in the 430s AD.  But as we know from the Life of Severus of Antioch by Zacharias Rhetor, even in the early 500s there was a fully operational pagan temple of Isis at Menouthis, less than 20 miles away from the seat of government at Alexandria, and now submerged under Abukir bay.  Ancient societies were not like the tightly controlled societies of our own day, after all.

Not merely does Isidore know of followers of Marcion’s teachings, but he knows of someone promoting it.  He also takes for granted that Marcion’s “Gospel” can be readily obtained at that late a date.

Fascinating!

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More on the Sacra Parallela of John Damascene

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Before getting distracted with the BHG 884 “Life” of John Damascene, I was investigating the massive anthology (CPG 8056) known as the Sacra Parallela, attributed to John Damascene but clearly earlier, and first published by Michel Lequien in 1712, in an oddball and unsatisfactory edition.  This was reprinted in the PG 96.

I’m afraid that my urge to delve further into the Sacra has evaporated in the five months that I seem to have spent on John’s “Life”.  I had hoped to find some interesting material in the prologues, but in truth these do not say much.

Running the Latin translation of the prologue printed by Lequien (vol. 1, p.278) through ChatGPT gives us the following:

Virtue is a precious thing, through which man is united with God and becomes an heir to the kingdom of heaven. Indeed, this is attained by observing the divine commandments. For the Lord, in the promises He made to the people who had lived in Egypt, said: “If you listen to Me and keep My commandments, you will be My chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.” Furthermore, He proclaimed that those who obey His divine commands would become children of God. How great this good is, no one can fully explain in words. For grace surpasses our nature, and the dignity of adoption exceeds all hope. Therefore, in order to attain such great blessings, we must diligently and willingly carry out what has been commanded of us.

The choice to do what is beneficial to us will be easy if we compare virtues with the vices opposed to them and to God, and if we consult what has been said about them both in sacred Scripture and by the saints and Fathers inspired by divine authority. From this, we will understand both the great rewards promised to the righteous and the punishments threatened to the wicked.

Moreover, it is important to know, for the glory of Christian truth, that we have also compiled teachings from the writings of Philo and Josephus, both of whom were Hebrew scholars.  For this reason it is worth our while to pay careful attention to their accounts and pronouncements, so that in no way do they deviate from the purpose and end of the foremost men of faith and holiness who have flourished among us. Rather, they should show great similarity and agreement, both in their words and in their morals, and the words of the learned Fathers, which the educated teacher will present from them, should confirm and strengthen, rather than diminish or undermine, the truth.

This tells us no more than that the Sacra consists of a series of extracts from the fathers, organised by the virtues, and their corresponding vices – hence the “parallela”; and also that the author has mined the works of Philo and Josephus.  Oh well.

The new German edition in the “Patristische Texte und Studien” series of the Schriften of “Johannes von Damaskos” has five volumes so far devoted to “book 2” of the Sacra.  The volumes for “book 1” do not seem to have appeared as yet.

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Life of John Damascene by John, Patriarch of Jerusalem (BHG 884)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have completed my translation of the so-called “Jerusalem Life” of St. John Damascene, or John of Damascus.  It is the same as the individual chunks posted earlier, but with bible references and additional footnotes.  As usual, I make this file public domain.  Do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial.

Here are the files:

The files can also be found at Archive.org here.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this, especially Diego, without whom it would never have been done!

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From My Diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Well, I thought that I was pretty much done with the Life of John Damascene, but it seems not.

Over the weekend, I printed off the whole thing, and got to work with a pen, highlighting errors.

People forget the power of paper.  Even in my days as a professional software engineer, I sometimes found it useful to print out a whole program on paper, and work on the listing with different coloured biros.  Some of the younger staff raised their eyebrows; but you just cannot get a picture of the whole thing nearly so well on a screen. Paper is a valuable tool.

I was delighted to find that in general the translation reads well.  There are quite a few typos, but nothing significant.  Which is really rather pleasing, and not at all expected.

So I sat down today to process the print-out into the electronic text.  My eye fell on the first query, in chapter one – a word underlined that read slightly awkwardly.  So I looked again at the Latin and found that it did not fit my translation well.  Then I went to look up the file with the Greek analysis; and I found that there wasn’t one.  I hadn’t started saving the same working files to disk until chapter 5.

Any translation project is like this.  You cannot just launch into it.  You have to learn how to do it.  You have to devise a way of working.  When you start out, you don’t know what you’re doing, and what will work.

Which means that, when you have reached the end of the text, and learned how to do it as you go, you will almost invariably have to go back to chapter 1 and redo it, and a number of subsequent chapters.

A little investigating reveals the story.  When I started this project, I originally intended simply to blast the old Latin translation through Google Translate and ChatGPT, interleave the results with the Latin, and make a quick translation that way.  Not ideal, but better than nothing.

But then… scope creep.  I obtained the Greek text, and started interleaving a machine translation of that also, just to keep things sensible.  And then I started doing a real analysis of the grammar and syntax of the Greek, and working with that for each sentence.

In chapter 1, I was still really thinking about the Latin.  By chapter 40 I had long since ceased to have any such idea.

Which means that the early chapters will have to be done again, properly, from the Greek; at least until I reach a place where I had started to do so.

I remember that something similar happened when I was working on John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.  It’s inevitable in any non-trivial piece of work; that by the time you reach the end, you’ve become a better craftsman than you were when you started.

Oh well.  I shall call it “phase 2”.

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ChatGPT and Isidore of Pelusium

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This evening I wondered whether the letters of Isidore of Pelusium were in the TLG database.  It seems that they are!

Inevitably I pulled up the text, and then stuffed it into ChatGPT.

ΤΟΥ ΕΝ ΑΓΙΟΙΣ ΠΑΤΡΟΣ ΗΜΩΝ
ΙΣΙΔΩΡΟΥ ΤΟΥ ΠΗΛΟΥΣΙΩΤΟΥ
ΕΠΙΣΤΟΛΩΝ ΒΙΒΛΙΑ ΠΕΝΤΕ
ΕΙΣ ΤΗΝ ΕΡΜΗΝΕΙΑΝ ΤΗΣ ΘΕΙΑΣ ΓΡΑΦΗΣ
1.ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ ΠΡΩΤΟΝ.
(1) Αʹ. ΝΕΙΛῼ ΜΟΝΑΧῼ.
Οἱ μὲν ἅγιοι τῆς μοναχικῆς φιλοσοφίας κορυφαῖοι (2)
καὶ ἡγεμόνες, ἐκ τῶν ἄθλων καὶ ἀγώνων ὧν ἐτέλε-
σαν, καὶ τὰς προσηγορίας ἁρμοδίας τοῖς πράγμασι @1
πρὸς νουθεσίαν ἡμῶν καὶ μάθησιν ἔθεντο, ἀποταγὴν (5)
τὴν τῆς ὕλης ἀναχώρησιν, καὶ ὑποταγὴν τὴν εὐ-
πείθειαν καλέσαντες. Καὶ οἱ μὲν φύσιν μόνην ἔσχον
διδάσκαλον· ἡμεῖς δὲ καὶ τὴν ἐκείνων πρᾶξιν ἀνά-
γραπτον ἔχοντες, μικρὰ τῆς ἐργασίας φροντίζομεν.
Χρὴ τοίνυν τὴν μὲν ἀποταγὴν λήθην εἶναι προκα- (10)
τασχούσης γνώμης, καὶ ἄρνησιν συνηθείας· τὴν δὲ
ὑπακοήν, νέκρωσιν καὶ φθορὰν τῶν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς
μελῶν, καθὼς γέγραπται. @1

Which gave:

Of Our Holy Father Isidore of Pelusium
Five Books of Letters on the Interpretation of Divine Scripture

Book One

1. To Neilos the Monk

The holy leaders and chiefs of monastic philosophy, from the struggles and contests they have completed, have also assigned fitting titles to their deeds for our admonition and instruction—calling renunciation the withdrawal from material things and submission the willingness to obey.

Some had only nature as their teacher, whereas we, having both their unwritten example and their deeds recorded, take little care for the labor.

Thus, renunciation must be considered as the forgetting of a previously held judgment and the rejection of habit, while obedience is the mortification and destruction of earthly members, as it is written.

That needs a bit of reworking to make sense in English, I see.  But really it’s very good, isn’t it?  Without investigating the text at all, I should add!

I’ve always had a soft spot for Isidore’s letters.  I suspect that, if they were translated well, we might find that we have a spiritual classic.

Of course the down side is the sheer volume of the material!

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