Category: Announcements

General announcements

A close up of the Meta Sudans from 1910

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The invaluable Roma Ieri Oggi site continues to upload photographs of old Rome, including photographs of vanished sites like the ancient fountain, the Meta Sudans.  A new one appeared a couple of days ago here.  It’s a close-up of the Meta Sudans, although I had to disable my anti-virus software (Kaspersky) in order to view it.  It seems that the site owner is very keen to monetise his site, and I suppose we cannot blame him for that.

Here’s the image anyway:

Meta Sudans, ca. 1910. Via Roma Ieri Oggi.

I wondered if we adjusted the light levels, whether we might get a little more; but sadly darkness is darkness.  Worth a try tho:

Wonderful to see these old photographs, tho. More! Note to non-Italian readers: remember that you can always view the Roma Ieri Oggi site using the Chrome browser, with built-in translation as you click. Google’s translator works really very well for Italian to English. So don’t be shy about visiting Roma Ieri Oggi.

Share

A new work by Apuleius!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This story passed me by completely, until the excellent J.-B. Piggin tweeted about it, as part of his lists of Vatican manuscripts coming online.  Justin Stover has more here.

In 1949, the historian of philosophy Raymond Klibansky made a dramatic announcement to the British Academy: a new Latin philosophical text dating from antiquity, a Summarium librorum Platonis, had been discovered in a manuscript of the Vatican (although he did not disclose its shelfmark). During the remaining fifty-six years of his life, until his death in 2005, his promised edition never appeared (Proceedings 1949).

The work was transmitted with the other works of Apuleius, where it was treated as book 3 of De Platone, hitherto presumed lost.

Piggin notes (after Justin Stover added a comment) that Klibansky did reveal the shelfmark in 1993, in his catalogue of the manuscripts of Apuleius’ philosophical works, with Frank Regen, Die Handschriften der philosophischen Werke des Apuleius.

The manuscript is in fact Vatican Reginensis Latinus 1572, online here, although only in a wretched digitised microfilm.  The online catalogue entry is here.  The Vatican catalogue describes this as a 14th century manuscript, but R.H.Rouse has identified it as one of the manuscripts of the 13th century French bibliophile, Richard de Fournival.[1] It contains works of Apuleius, plus notes.  Justin Stover has a paper online here discussing how the manuscript fits within the stemma of the philosophical works of Apuleius.[2]

The new work begins on folio 77r (frame 78), and here’s the opening portion.  The text starts with the Quod in the third column.

Piggin adds that

Stover’s edition, A New Work by Apuleius: The Lost Third Book of the De Platone, has since appeared with OUP. (HT to Pieter Buellens (@LatinAristotle).)

Furthermore, there is also a paper online here from Justin Stover and Yaron Winter, in which the proposed authorship of the work is assessed using computational linguistics.[3]

I think we all owe a debt to Justin Stover for his work on this one.

And if you don’t follow J.-B. Piggin’s blog, with its endless notices of Vatican manuscripts as they come online, you should.

UPDATE: My thanks to Pieter Bullens for correcting my mistake about the date of the manuscript on twitter.  I’ve updated the reference.

Share
  1. [1]R.H. Rouse, “Manuscripts belonging to Richard de Fournival”, Revue d’histoire de textes 3 (1974), 253-269; p.266, where it is identified as number 85 in the Biblionomia of Richard de Fournival.  Online here.↩
  2. [2]J. A. Stover, “Apuleius and the Codex Reginensis”, Exemplaria Classica: Journal of Classical Philology 19 (2015), 131-154.↩
  3. [3]J.A.Stover & Y. Winter, “Computational Authorship Verification Method Attributes a New Work to a Major 2nd Century African Author”, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 67, 2016, 239-242.↩

Piranesi’s engraving of the Arco di Portogallo

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The “Arco di Portogallo” or “Arch of Portugal”, so called because it was located in the Corso in Rome near the residence of the Portugese ambassador, was demolished in 1662.  I had never heard of it, I confess, until Anna Blennow tweeted an engraving by Piranesi.  It stood near the Palazzo Fiano.  It seems to have been a late edifice, perhaps of the time of Marcus Aurelius, perhaps later.

Let’s enjoy this image of another bit of vanished Rome.

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s been a busy few days.  I have a few blog posts backed up, which I shall now be able to get to.   The last few days have been taken up with life stuff, and also with thinking about the post by Richard Carrier that I responded to earlier.

Reading polemic is a tedious business, and responding to it more so.  I’m going to have to get back into the habit of declining to be involved.  None of us must spend much time on it, or it will rot our souls.  Nobody wants to hear why other people are wrong anyway.  We want to hear about enthusiasms, not hatreds.

A friend to whom I mentioned this reminded me that, as Christians, we are called to love those who hate us.  That does apply to atheists too, tempting as it is to respond in kind.

Once I clear the backlog, I shall return to Eutychius.

Share

More on the sestertius of Titus showing the Meta Sudans

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent kindly drew my attention to the following piece in the Daily Express.

Rare Roman coin featuring early depiction of the Colosseum sells for £372,000

AN INCREDIBLE rare Roman coin featuring one of the earliest depictions of the Colosseum has sold for £372,000 – nearly five times its estimate.

The bronze Sestertius coin that dates back to AD81 is believed to be only one of 10 that exist today.

Seven are in museums around the world while the other three are in private hands.

This one, appearing in public for the first time in almost 80 years, was acquired by a wealthy British connoisseur of Roman bronze coins in 1939.

It had remained in the late collector’s family ever since but was today sold to a European private collector through London coin dealers Dix Noonan Webb.

A packed auction room watched on in amazement as the relic far exceeded its £80,000 estimate.

One side of the coin features an image of the famous Colosseum in Rome, which had only just been built.

It’s very interesting to learn that his coin is so rare.  In case they vanish from the web, I’d like to place here copies of the marvellous large photographs of the coin.  Note the depiction of the fountain, the Meta Sudans, to the left of the Colosseum, and some kind of long-vanished portico to the right.

Share

Words, Words, Words: A response to Richard Carrier on Feldman and Eusebius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s always nice when my blog posts attract attention. I learned last week that an old post of mine, from 2013, has attracted a response from a professional atheist polemicist named Richard Carrier. In a rather excitable post here on his own blog he roundly denounces my casual remarks, and indeed myself (!), and offers a new theory of his own. A correspondent drew my attention to this, and asked me to comment.

My original post was written after I happened to see an article by the excellent Josephus scholar Louis Feldman. This tentatively endorsed the fringe idea that Eusebius of Caesarea (fl. early 4th century) may have composed the so-called Testimonium Flavianum (TF), the rather odd passage in Josephus Antiquities 18 which mentions Christ.[1] This claim is not one that anybody has previously had much time for, and I didn’t see any purpose in rebutting it. Feldman was only summarising work by others, I felt.

But then I saw something interesting. The article made the claim that, if you search the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database for a phrase towards the end of the TF, “And the tribe of Christians has not died out even to this day” (eis eti te nun – even/still to this day),[2] then it gives a bunch of hits in Eusebius’ works, and pretty much nowhere else.

I do computer searches. I’m interested in Eusebius. So I did the search for the phrase, but I got only a handful of results. Disappointed, I blogged about it, added some cautions on rushing to conclusions from these kinds of matches, and thought no more about it.

Last week I learned that, after four years, Richard Carrier has written a blog post in which he asserts rather over-enthusiastically that I simply did the search wrong – that instead I should have searched for eis eti nun; the te is just a particle, with the vague sense of “and”, and the two phrases are pretty much the same in meaning. Of course the two are indeed more or less identical in meaning.

Carrier’s search produces splendid results. It gets 94 matches.[3] Of these, 6 are later than Eusebius; one each in six authors. The other 88 are entirely in Eusebius. In other words, practically nobody in all Greek literature ever uses the phrase other than Eusebius, if we can trust this search.  It looks like the claim that Eusebius wrote the TF is proved!

But 88 out of 94 is not just a good result for the theory. It’s a fabulous result! In fact, it’s too good to be true. It’s like a Soviet election result with 99% voting for the official candidate. The number is supposed to produce confidence in the result, and does the opposite. It’s a sign that we need to sanity-check what we are doing.

Doing so produces instant discomfort. Surely “even to this day” is a trivial phrase? Are we really saying that Eusebius invented something as obvious as that? It seems unlikely. Imagine a Greek, complaining about his neighbour, as man has done since time immemorial. Would he not say, “How long has this been a problem?” “Oh it started when we landed, and it has continued even to this day.” How else would you express that idea?[4]

In fact, if we look at little further we find that the idea in rather similar words is indeed kicking around well before Eusebius, six centuries earlier, in the third century BC.   Apollonius Rhodius uses the idea in his Argonautica. He uses it to tie together past and present, in precisely the way that Eusebius does. [5]   The historian Polybius uses it, the poet Callimachus uses it. Nobody in our corpus uses it like Eusebius does; but then nobody is writing quite the kinds of works that Eusebius is.

So why didn’t these authors appear in the results, when we do the search? Because these rely on searching for versions of eiseti nun, which differs only by a word-division and means much the same thing.[6] We can omit te; we can replace it with the stronger equivalent kai; we can run eis and eti together, especially when we know that Greek manuscripts did not feature word division.  Any claim that depends on the presence of a space in the text is a pretty fragile one.

In fact there are quite a number of things we can do to twiddle the search, once we start thinking about it. Let’s just give the numbers from the TLG for a few versions of this search string, all of which mean much the same:

  • eis eti te nun – 4 hits. Josephus (1 hit), Eusebius (3 hits).
  • eiseti te nun – 7 hits. Eusebius (4), Sozomen (2), Oecumenius (1).
  • eis eti nun – 94 hits. 88 are from works of Eusebius, and the other 6 are later: Didymus the Blind (d.398) On Genesis, Procopius of Gaza (5th c.) Commentary on Isaiah, Stobaeus (6th c.), Chronicon Paschale (6th c.) and two 12th century Byzantine writers.
  • eiseti nun – 142 hits. Mostly pre-Eusebius; 7 hits in Apollonius Rhodius (3rd c. BC), Timaeus Historicus (3rd c. BC), Polybius (2nd c. BC), Philo (1st c. AD), Aelius Aristides (2nd c. AD), Lucian (2nd c.), Oppian (2nd c.), Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200), and others.  But Eusebius (63 hits) and Sozomen (41 hits) do appear.
  • eis eti kai nun – 23 hits. 2 hits from Porphyry (3rd c.) from different works. Some from Eusebius, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, and then Byzantine writers.
  • eiseti kai nun – 110 hits. Callimachus (3rd c. BC), Herennius Philo (ca. 100 AD), Lucian, the Book of Jubilees (ca. 150 BC), Eusebius (56 hits) – especially in the commentaries on Isaiah and Psalms – Eutropius, Chrysostom, Palladius, and Byzantine writers.  Also an LXX variant reading for Isaiah 9:6 (given by Eusebius).

All of these do show significant use by Eusebius. Some of these show pre-Eusebian use; others don’t.

In fact Carrier is quite well aware of the pre-Eusebian results, which he proceeds to mention briefly in a paragraph that reads as if it was tacked on afterwards.   But it’s terrible stuff. Clement of Alexandria is just a Christian, so he doesn’t count (?!).  Polybius doesn’t count because no other historical writer after him uses this phrase.  In fact Carrier has changed his argument; from “only Eusebius uses this, so it proves that Eusebius forged the TF” – a defensible argument, if wrong – to “Eusebius uses this more than anyone, so that proves that he forged the TF”.  Which, of course, it does not.  Carrier has defeated himself.[7]

Here’s the rub; the success or failure of our search comes to depend on us, on our judgement, on our ingenuity, on our knowledge of Greek.   This subjectivity was precisely why, in my first blog post, I never proceeded beyond the exact match.

There are further possible issues with this method. Only 1% of Greek literature has survived. Much of that is biased towards technical, classical or ecclesiastical writings, those that were useful to copyists in the Dark Ages. The TLG contains only a portion of that 1%. Someone who knew more about computational linguistics than I do could easily point out more problems.

The database itself is not “clean”;[8] it is comprised of texts edited by many different editors, whose choices from the manuscript tradition will reflect their preferences. One example of this may be found in searching outside the TLG for eis eti nun. The TLG gives no hits before Eusebius. But I find that the 1831 R. Klotz edition of Clement of Alexandria, Protrepicus, has three hits for it.[9] In the TLG, based on the GCS edition, eis eti is replaced by eiseti. There is no indication in the apparatus as to why. The results of each database search are therefore a reflection of editorial choices.

Stylistic analysis, whether manual or automated, can be something of a trap. It’s terribly easy to forget how little we really know about the texts before us, the language which none of us speak as a native and which changes considerably over the thousand years before us, the vagaries of editors, the influence of ammanuenses and copyists, and of the non-literary spoken language, which surrounds the literary text like a warm bath at every instant but is almost invisible to us.

To sum up, we saw that a search for the exact phrase does not confirm Carrier’s claim. A search for revised phrases which mean the same does not confirm the claim either.  Attempts to dodge this simply destroy the argument.

*   *   *   *

Now let’s go back to where we started. The argument in Feldman’s article was that the use of this phrase proved that Eusebius wrote the TF.   We don’t want any implicit assumptions here, so let’s lay the argument out explicitly.

The claim is: (1) we have no evidence that eis eti te nun (etc) was used in Greek literature before Eusebius; (2) the search proves that Eusebius uses it extensively; therefore (3) any use of the term proves that Eusebius composed that bit of text; and (4) the TF as found in the Church History of Eusebius does contain it; so (5) Eusebius composed the TF.

The second point is correct. Eusebius does use the eis eti nun phrase extensively, once or twice in every book of the Church History, and elsewhere.

But the first point is dodgy, and so is the third. We have seen that in fact we do have evidence of its use for 6 centuries before Eusebius.

But let us suppose for a moment that the TLG searches did in fact show, as Carrier contended (before he discovered otherwise), that nobody used eis eti nun before Eusebius. The argument still is flawed. For this argument is an argument from silence – that we have no evidence that anyone else … so it must have been him. Arguments from silence are not valid.

The archaeologists never tire of telling us that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is the first thing that we must remember. And we’re searching only a subset of 1% of Greek literature, as we saw.  According to Carrier this means that we don’t have any evidence of use before Eusebius … very well. But even then we don’t have all the evidence. We have only a fraction of it.

In conclusion, the claim that examining the use of eis eti nun proves that Eusebius composed the TF is not correct. The claim itself seems to involve an argument from silence. And the silence itself can only be sustained by ignoring the exact matches, using a related search, and then finding reasons to ignore other related searches.

Share
  1. [1]There is another brief mention in Ant. 20 which also does so.↩
  2. [2]I have transliterated the Greek so that general readers can follow along.↩
  3. [3]This from a search of the TLG-E disk; I am currently unable to access the online system.↩
  4. [4]In fact it would be rather interesting to know how this was expressed in the classical period, as eis eti nun does not seem to be classical.↩
  5. [5]M.P. Cuypers, “Apollonius of Rhodes”, In: Irene J. F. De Jong, René Nünlist, Angus M. Bowie, “Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative”, vol. 1. Brill, 2004, p.56 and n.24.↩
  6. [6]My thanks to Ken Olson for pointing this out in a comment on my original post. Dr O. is clearly no bigot, for he did so despite this information working against the interest of his theory: clearly a gentleman and a scholar.↩
  7. [7]Full disclosure: I wrote the majority of this post without Carrier’s post before me, so I did not remember his change of mind at this point.↩
  8. [8]See further M. Eder, “Mind your corpus: systematic errors in authorship attribution”, Literary and Linguistic Computing 28, 2013, 603-14.↩
  9. [9]Page 9 line 29, p.12  l.17, p.18 l.16. The first of these reads “καταδουλοῦται καὶ αΐκίζεται εἰς ἔτι νῦν τοιὶς άνθρώπους,”↩

Solomon in Coptic Songs – text and translation by Anthony Alcock

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Anthony Alcock continues his series of translations from the Coptic.  This new item consists of 10th century AD Coptic songs – folk-stories – which mention Solomon.

Thank you, Dr A., for sharing this with us!

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A previously unknown Temple of Mithras was discovered last week at Lucciana in Corsica, during road improvement work.  The location is somewhere near or in the Roman city of Mariana, itself founded by Gaius Marius.  The archaeology suggests a third century date.  The usual cult benches on either side are present, and three fragments of a tauroctony.  I’ve not found any pictures of that, however.  My notes on the find, from a Corsican newspaper site, are here.

Readers will have noticed that I have resumed working on the translation of the 10th century Arabic chronicle, the Annals of Eutychius, whose Arabic name was Sa`id ibn Bitriq.  I’m stuck at home in the poor weather, so I will probably do quite a bit more of this, as time permits.

I’ve continued to look at the Sudan as a possible travel destination, not least because it is 30 C out there right now.  But although the weather looks lovely, it seems clear that there is very little in Khartoum for the tourist; mysteriously so, considering its history.  Getting there involves a really long flight via Addis Ababa, or somewhere equally improbable.  Being there involves a tour of 8-9 days through the desert, which might well be a bit much for me.

I do like the Arab countries, but I do wish that it was possible to visit safely more of them. I also wish that they had better weather at this time of the year.  A week of sunshine would be just the thing!

My book-shredding activities have come to an end.  There are no more obvious candidates for conversion into PDF.  I am beginning to wonder whether all the series of trashy fantasy novels really need to be in paper form.  That said, I do worry about my eyes, when it comes to reading novels on a screen.  I notice that sitting all day looking at my phone screen is not good for them.  They may take up space, but the novels are better for me in paper form, and I can take them to bed with me.

Free speech online is becoming a distant memory, and the recent polls in the UK and US have led to a series of profoundly ill-advised initiatives (by the losers) to restrict it still further, and worse.  Indeed I have seen posts on Twitter by British police threatening to arrest any who dare express certain views.  It still seems incredible to me that this can happen in the land that gave us Sherlock Holmes. Yet there are certainly people in prison in Britain right now for no more serious crime than insulting some powerful woman.  Likewise even jobsworths in Human Resources departments surf the web, seeking to find out anything about us that might be “damaging”.  At the same time more and more information appears online about us.

In the light of this, it is wise for most of us to consider ways to reduce our online footprint.  This article offers a few suggestions.  I have long since renamed my Twitter account to something other than my name; and then created a new Twitter account with my name and with nothing in it, just to ensure nobody else does.  I don’t put my photograph on my social media accounts, preferring images like those above.

Mind how you go, people.

Share

The Annals of Eutychius of Alexandria (10th c. AD) – chapter 18e – the reign of Ali

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The murder of Omar was followed by the murder of Othman.  The next caliph, Ali, was unable to master the large realm that he had inherited and was swiftly murdered also.

Caliphate of Ali ibn Abi Talib (35-40 / 656-661)

1. After Othman there was made caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib b. Abd al-Muttalib b. Hashim b. Abd Manaf – his mother was Fatimah, daughter of Asad ibn Hashim b. Abd Manaf – in the month of Dhu’l-hiğğa in the thirty-fourth year of the Hegira, in the fourth year of the reign of Constantine, the son of Constantine.  He then went to Basra and the battle of the Camel took place.  Then he went to Kufa, aimed at Syria and the battle of Siffin took place there. He returned and there took place the battle of al-Khazrawiyyah, in Nahrawan.  He returned to Kufa, where he was killed by Abd ar-Rahman ibn al-Mulğam al-Muzadi, ten days before the end of the month of Ramadan of the fortieth year of the Hegira.  He was killed at the age of sixty-three years.  The funeral prayer was held by his son al-Hasan.  His caliphate lasted four years and ten months.  He was of a dark complexion, with a big belly and he had a bushy beard that touched his chest.  Gray hairs had in no way altered his features.  He was buried in al-Ghariyyān, others say in an-Nawbah: it is in fact uncertain where he was buried.  The head of his bodyguard was Ma’qil Qaysi ibn az-Zibāgi, and his ‘hāgib’ was the freedman Qanbar.

Share

The Annals of Eutychius of Alexandria (10th c. AD) – chapter 18d

Posted on by Roger Pearse

After the  murder of Omar, the Muslims elect Othman. The Muslim conquests continue.  The Byzantines don’t make much resistance, apparently.  Othman too is murdered after drawing up an edition of the Koran and destroying all the other copies.

Lots of theological letters in this section of Eutychius.  We also see the appearance of “Misr” for the first time – Cairo.

Caliphate of Othman ibn Affan (23-35 / 644-656)

1.  Othman ibn’ Affari b. Abi’l-‘As b. Umayya b. Abd Shams was made Caliph – his mother was Umayyah bint Kawbarā b. Rabi’a – three days after the death of Omar, at the turn of the month of Dhul-hiğğa.  His caliphate began in the new moon of the month of al-Muharram, in the twenty-fourth year of the Hegira, the twenty-fourth year of the reign of Heraclius, King of Rum.  He held the caliphate for twelve years.  In the third year of his caliphate George was made by Patriarch of Antioch.  He was a Maronite.  He settled in Constantinople and remained there five years without ever going to Antioch.  He died in Constantinople and was buried there.  In the tenth year of his caliphate Macarius was made patriarch of Antioch.  He was a Maronite.  He was invested with the office in Constantinople and remained there for eight years and never entered Antioch.  He died and was buried in Constantinople.  In the ninth year of his caliphate Peter was made Patriarch of Constantinople.  He was a Maronite.  He held the office for six years and died.  In the fourth year of his caliphate Peter was made Patriarch of Alexandria.  He was a Maronite.  He held the office nine years and died.  In the eighth year of his caliphate died Honorius, patriarch of Rome, who had professed the doctrine of Maron, thus giving rise to different opinions within the church.  After his death a man named Sadinus was chosen and was made patriarch of Rome.  He held the office for six months and died.  After his death a man of proven virtue named John was chosen.  Made aware of the origin of the doubts that were snaking about within the church – the sovereigns of Constantinople were then Heraclius and his brother Constantine – the Patriarch John wrote them a letter in which he passed under review the reasons for such doubts, taking the side of his predecessor Honorius, patriarch of Rome.  The letter began:

2. “Pope John, Patriarch of Rome, to Heraclius and Constantine, ruling brothers, to whom are entrusted the church of Christ, true God, whose light appeared in the darkness, who has delivered us from the power of darkness with his wonderful light, the light of truth uncontaminated by any darkness, so that with the blood of his cross peace is restored between heaven and earth, who ever guards his church.  It is given to you, O emperors, to ensure that in his church are raised the best and noblest invocations and that people believe according to the perfect faith and stay close to him.  Something has happened that it is necessary to set forth, for him to understand who loves and cultivates justice, so that the truth can shine again as brightly as it once did.  I have come to know the state of the controversy, also, and the doubts that are circulating in the West.  I received news of all of this by a letter of our brother Honorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and from others.  And it is our duty to explain how things are, because He knows everything.  The beginning of the story is this.  About eighteen years ago Cyrus, Patriarch of Alexandria, professed the doctrine of Maron, according to which in Christ, our Lord, there are two natures, one will and one operation.  He heard about Sophronius, who became Patriarch of Jerusalem, who disputed with him, getting the better with his arguments.  Then Sophronius went to Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and perceived that he spoke the same way as Cyrus, affirming also that Honorius, patriarch of Rome, professed his doctrine.  From Constantinople Sophronius went to Jerusalem.  Later when he became Patriarch of Jerusalem – it was in fact because of the righteousness of his faith that the inhabitants of Jerusalem made him Patriarch of Jerusalem – he wrote a book on the faith that was welcomed by the people of this world.  When Honorius, patriarch of Rome, heard this and that Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople, had lied about him [Honorius], saying that he [Honorius] was a Maronite, he wrote a letter in which he said: ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the source of life, was born without sin, because the eternal Word, by whom all things were made, coming down from heaven, he took a body from the Virgin Mary and became like us as to the nature, but not in the will of sinners.  Because Paul says that he took the similitude of us sinners, i.e. the body, without sin, with a rational soul and intellect.  And similarly, he was pleased to take the single will for his humanity, not as we know it, who have two contrary wills, one of which is centred in the intellect and the other in the body, opposed to each other, which takes place in every human being who is subject to sin, and because none [of us] is exempt from the sin of rebellion.  But the body of Christ, our Lord, did not in itself have two contrary wills nor was the will of his intellect contrary to the will of his body and he who had come to take away the sin of the world had no sin.  Away from him be such a thing!  In Christ our Lord there was never sin, not even one, either in his birth or in his incarnation.  We profess and confirm that there was only one will to which was conformed his sacred humanity, and we do not accept at all that there were in him two contrary wills, one in his intellect and the other in his body”.  So wrote Honorius, patriarch of Rome, to Sergius, the patriarch of Constantinople.

Now, with regard to our own natures, we recognize two contrary wills, the intellect and the body, and some, bending this fact to their fallacious doctrines, thought that Honorius, patriarch of Rome, was saying that there was one and the same will in the divinity and humanity of Christ our Lord.  Now I ask those who advocate this doctrine:  “In what nature can we say that Christ God had only one will?  If only in his divinity, then his humanity had no will, so therefore he was not a perfect man.  If they say that this will alone was in the humanity of Christ, we ask them: “How could he then be perfect God?”  And if you respond that there are two natures with one will, this would not be possible at all.  We profess the incarnation of Christ and therefore we do not deny the two wills of his two natures, nor alter in any way the peculiarities of each of them.  But let’s say that each of the two natures of Christ, the incarnation of the one and only person, has a will.  We do not say that there are two persons, like the much-execrated Nestorius [said].  As for those who claim to be two natures and one will, common to the deity and humanity of Christ, and a single operation, well they are known to be in error, like the maligned Marone.  As for those who claim there to be one nature, one will and one operation, well we also know that they are in error, like the execrated Eutyches, Dioscorus and Severus, since this is the doctrine of the Jacobites.  But sound and manifest doctrine is that which [our] masters professed, namely that in Christ our Lord there are two natures, two wills and two operations in one person, for it is impossible that one who has two natures can have only one will.  If he had only one will, he would also have only one nature.  But if he has two natures then he must have also two wills.  We therefore ask you to tear up the parchment in which are accused Leo, patriarch of Rome, and the council of Chalcedon, so that it is not widely read and not understood in the hands of weak minds so as to shake their faith. We ask Christ our Lord to look upon you with his mercy, his forgiveness and his help and to subdue the nations with his invincible strength.”

3. When John, patriarch of Rome, had thus finished his letter, he affixed his seal and sent it by entrusting it to a remarkable man named Barsiqā, archdeacon of the Church of Rome.  He went to the sovereigns Heraclius and Constantine, but he found that Constantine had died.  The ministers and army generals revolted against Heraclius, and killed him, because they thought that he was the cause of the disaster that had hit them – they had indeed lost Egypt and Syria – and also because he was a Maronite.  In his place they elected king the son of the late brother Constantine and called him Constantine, with the name of his father.  This was in the eighth year of the Caliphate of Othman.  This new king, Constantine, was a godly man.  When Barsiqā handed him the letter of John, Patriarch of Rome, the king took it, read it and was amazed at the insight of the Patriarch of Rome.  Then he ordered that his answer should be written in these terms:

4. “We welcome, Your Excellent Holiness, your instruction.  We profess and believe in Christ our Lord there are two natures, two wills, two operations and a single person and anathematise anyone who dares contradict anything.  We also believe in what the Six hundred and thirty bishops gathered in Chalcedon said, and anathematise anyone who dares act against them.  We have complied with the order that you gave to tear up the parchment where is slandered Leo, the holy patriarch of Rome, and the Council of Chalcedon, and we gave it to the fire.  We remain steadfast in your teaching, which is the teaching of truth, and ask that you invoke upon us salvation, and preservation from every calamity.”

5. Barsiqā set off, carrying the letter of King Constantine in order to hand it over to John, patriarch of Rome, in response to his letter.  When he arrived in Rome, he found that the patriarch John was now dead and in his place had come a man of proven virtue named Theodore.  Barsiqā presented himself, let him know what the king had willingly accepted, informed him of his orthodoxy and handed him the letter that King Constantine sent him in response to the letter that John had sent to the two sovereigns.  The Patriarch Theodore took it, read it and remained comfortable with the orthodoxy of the king.  He answered him in these terms:

6.  “To King Constantine, singularly faithful to pure orthodoxy, from the patriarch of Rome, Theodore.  Almighty God, who protects his church, gave us the economy of his mercy by the event of your orthodox faith and has given us the opportunity to talk to you with joy and fervour in order to manifest this grace.  Because you have received your authority as vicars of the holy Apostles in order to defend orthodoxy and make manifest the true religion, not as Heraclius did who does not deserve to be called King because of his wickedness, and to be left out of the truth, nor as Sergius, Honorius, Paul and Peter, the patriarchs of Constantinople, who opposed the truth making themselves worthy of anathema, and that they deserved to be deprived of the place they occupied within the church, for the falsity of their doctrine and for the doubts that they spread among the people.  As for you, most excellent king, know that the true orthodox faith is the fruit of paradise and it is your job, most excellent king, to protect it, fight for it and make it manifest to the people.  We ask this through Christ our Lord to grant this with his blessing by his generosity.”  Patriarch Theodore affixed his seal to the letter and sent it to King Constantine in response to the letter he had sent to John, patriarch of Rome.  When he received the letter, King Constantine felt great pain to learn the news of John’s death.  Then he opened the letter and remained extremely pleased with the response that the patriarch Theodore gave him in place of the deceased John.  Then he ordered a reply.  When the king’s messenger came to Rome, he found that Theodore had died and that Martin had been made Patriarch of Rome.

7. In the time of Othman ibn Affan, King Constantine sent an eunuch named Manuel with a large army by sea and captured Alexandria.  Amr ibn al-As was at Misr [i.e. Cairo].  Amr ibn al-As came out against him accompanied by the Copts and other people of Misr.  Al-Muqawqas was with them who provided them money, housing, weapons and provisions.  They met at the gates of Alexandria in a furious battle carried on fighting for several days.  Eventually the eunuch Manuel fled along with all the Rum that were with him, they embarked and returned to Constantinople.

8. During the times of Othman ibn Affan were conquered Africa, Armenia and Khurasan.  Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan ruled Damascus in the name of Othman ibn Affan.  Mu’awiya made a pact of friendship with the people of Cyprus in the twenty-eighth year of the Hegira, the fourth year of the caliphate of Othman ibn Affan, for a tribute of seven thousand, two hundred dinars to be paid to Muslims each year, forever.  The same amount they gave to the king of Rum. Othman had the Koran drawn up, beginning with the longest suras and ending with the shorter ones;  he had seven copies made and ordered the destruction of all the others.  This was in the thirtieth year of the Hegira.  The people revolted against Othman ibn Affan and he was killed.  Those who killed him were Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr, Ammar ibn Yasir and Kinana ibn Bishr, on the eighth day of Dhul-hiğğa (others say “the eighteenth of Dhu’l-higğa”) in the thirty-fifth year of the Hegira.  He was eighty years old.  They buried him three days later.  He was of medium height, handsome of face, dark, had a thick and braided beard, and his teeth were linked together with gold frames.  His influential adviser was Marwan ibn al-Hakam.  He was buried in Medina in a place called ‘gisr Kawkab’.  The head of his bodyguard was Abdullah ibn Fahd al-Adawī and his ‘hāgib’  was the freedman Hamdan.

Share