Category: Eusebius

Rescuing a bit of Eusebius from oblivion

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the things which I hoped for, in translating Eusebius “Gospel Questions”, was to find unknown material in the fragments that aren’t in Migne.  Yesterday that hope was justified.   In an obscure publication in Moscow in the 18th century of a catena, an extract from Ad Marinum 2 produced results:

At the line marked by my footnote 2, where I saw something was rather unusual about the Greek, it turns out that the Greek word for “dawning” came twice, and the scribe of the MS used by Mai (so also Migne and Zamagni) cut two whole lines by going on from the second one after just reaching the first.  So we’ll be the first to give our thirsty readers the real thing!  

That said, it’s only the usual verbosely repetitive hammering-in of a point already obvious;  but still, it’s very nice to have a text that does make sense without straining the Greek, as I did, or ignoring the problem altogether like Mai and Zamagni.

Two more lines of ancient literature, rescued from the darkness.  It is a small but definite triumph.

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Eusebius, Agapius project news

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Long term readers of this blog will know that I commissioned a translation into English of Eusebius of Caesarea’s book about differences between the gospels and their solutions (Quaestiones ad Stephanum/Marinum).

The Greek remains of this text are now almost entirely translated.  The last few fragments from catenas remain; but almost all of the mass of fragments in Migne (reprinted from Mai, which is what we are using) are done.

There is no progress on the Syriac or Coptic front, tho, which is disappointing.  I’m considering asking my Greek translator to do the other minor works of Eusebius — the epitomes of the Commentary on Luke, On Easter — while we wait.

Once the work is complete, the intention is still to publish it myself and sell copies to people to cover the translation costs; and, when that is done, to make it available online.

I think a book about problems in the gospels and how to overcome them ought to have a popular market as a paperback among Christians.  Not sure what to call the book, tho.  Maybe:

Eusebius of Caesarea
Commentary on the Gospels
A fourth century writer resolves differences between them

What do people think?

I’ve also begun to translate the first half of the world history of the 10th century Arabic Christian writer, Agapius.  This looks very likely to be of considerable interest.

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Eusebius, “Gospel questions”, published in French

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The excellent Claudio Zamagni has now published his edition and translation of the epitome of Eusebius, Quaestiones ad Stephanum et Marinum in the Sources Chrétiennes series as “Questions évangéliques”.  It’s available from Amazon.fr.

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Eusebius and Islam

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There are some things which are obvious, once they have been invented.  It took the genius of Eusebius of Caesarea to digest down into a tabular form of dates and events all the information about dates and events for Greece and Assyria and Persia and Rome — and the Hebrews — contained in the literature available to him.  But once this Chronicle of World History existed, running up until the 20th year of Constantine, every copyist would feel the urge to add extra lines on the bottom, to bring it up to date.  It’s sort of obvious, isn’t it?

To this obviousness we owe a mass of chronicles, not just in Greek but in Latin and Syriac.  One such continuator was James of Edessa, the 8th century scholarly West Syriac bishop who attempted to introduce Greek vowels into the Syriac script, and partially succeeded.  His continuation was composed in 692 AD.  

The text is lost, but portions of it remain.  The text of the 10th century World History of Michael the Syrian makes use of it verbatim in places, although not in tabular form.  Better still, a 10th/11th century Syriac manuscript from the Nitrian Desert, now in the British Library (Ms. Additional 14685) contains a substantial chunk of it, albeit in an abbreviated form.  It starts where Eusebius left off, and begins with a preface in which James discusses an error in calculation which he has found in Eusebius.  Then it goes into a set of tables.  Like the Armenian version of Eusebius (but unlike the original, or the Latin version), the columns of year numbers are positioned in the centre of the page, and events for those years written on either side.

I was looking around the web today for the ancient texts which mention Mohammed, and came across this site.  To my surprise this chronicle by James is one of the earliest mentions of Mohammed.  This has given impetus to me to put it online.  But how to do so?

E. W. Brooks published the Chronicle in Zeitschrift fur deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft 53 (1899), p. 261-327.  He didn’t publish the preface.  He published the Syriac text, laid out in tabular form.  He followed it with an English translation, not of all the text, but of the wording (events) against each year.  He then republished it, this time with the preface, in CSCO Syr. 5, with a Latin translation of the lot in CSCO Syr. 6.  Both text and translation contained the tabular layout.

I’m not going to transcribe the Syriac, or the Latin.  I have already OCR’d the English, but there is a problem.  The Islamic website above rightly quotes three chunks of relevant information.  But… two of these are embedded in the table in the middle of the page, so not present in the English translation.  Anyway… don’t we want to see the proper layout?  I certainly would!

I think the solution will be to take the Latin translation, lay it out in HTML, and then substitute the English where it is available, translating the trivial bits of Latin where it is not.  It will be fiddly; but it will work.  Considering its importance, tho, something must be done.

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Bibliographies of classical Armenian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There comes a time in the life of every man interested in patristics when he needs to know about classical Armenian literature.  Hoc est hora.  There must be fragments of Eusebius in Armenian catenas, I reason.  But where to look?

The indefatigable Robert W. Thomson gave us a Bibliography of classical Armenian literature to 1500, published by Brepols in 1995 and available for an eye-watering sum.  I think that I will try and do an ILL for that!

But while surfing for it, in abebooks.co.uk I came across something strange, something otherwise unknown to Google.  It’s a series called “The Armenian Classical Authors”, published by the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia ca. 2005.  There are at least 5 volumes, each running to around $100.  It starts with the 5th century of course.  Contents are in Armenian, which is why they don’t show up in an English-language book search.

Book Description: Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia, 2005. Hardcover. Book Condition: New. The Armenian Classical Authors Volume IV, 7th Century. Yegavian, Zaven (Director).

Book Description: The Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia, Antelias (Lebanon), 2005. Hard Cover. Book Condition: New. First Edition. xiii, 791 pp., Armenian text, double columns per page, hard back. A series of studies covering large number of Armenian authors. The idea of this work was pursued by his Holiness Aram I Catholicos. In the occasion of the 1600 anniversary of the Armenian Alphabet Genesis, invented by Mesrob Mashdots, and in celebration of the Armenian Golden literary age of the fifth century. This work contain a bibliography of famous Armenian authors of the fifth century, together with a study and analysis of the work of each author. Due to weight and size of the book, shipping to outside of the USA is $39.00. Inside USA is $10.00. Size: 8 1/2″ x 11″

How fascinating!  How wonderful that such a book should exist.  I’ve even managed to find an online bookseller in Lebanon who stocks it, Kutub Ltd (and even my Syriac is enough to recognise the triliteral root KTB = book).  Nice to see the Lebanese abandoning their pointless civil wars long enough to make money.  But… any chance of it in English?

Later: I’ve been asking in LT-ANTIQ, and the excellent Dominique Gonnet has told me that the Clavis Patrum Graecorum supplements cover versions of Greek texts in Syriac, Armenian, etc.  I must hie me to a library and look!

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Eusebius in Armenian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We all know that many interesting works are preserved in Classical Armenian translation.  Eusebius’ Church History exists in an Armenian version; book 1 of his Chronicle is only preserved in Armenian.  But what else exists?

I’ve often mentioned that I have translators at work on Eusebius’ Gospel differences and their solutions (Quaestiones ad Stephanum, ad Marinum).  Today I received a translation of a chunk of this work from a Coptic catena, much to my delight.

But what about Armenian?  What exists?  What catenae exist?  What catalogues of unpublished manuscripts?  Is there any possibility that this work Eusebius exists whole somewhere?  Or new fragments in a catena?

I realise that I have no idea.  If anyone can point me in the direction of finding out, I would be most grateful!

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Robert Bedrosian does Eusebius’ Chronicle into English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just had a note from the excellent Robert Bedrosian.  It seems that he has translated Eusebius of Caesarea’s Chronicle book 1 directly from the Armenian into English!  It’s here.  Andrew Smith of Attalus.org translated it from Petermann’s Latin into English, but this is the first translation from the original langauge.  And… he’s made it public domain, so anyone can use it.

Robert has also scanned most of the Budge translation into English of Bar-Hebraeus Chronicon Syriacum (the secular history).

Robert’s site is much less well known than it deserves to be.  It’s impossible to get people to translate Classical Armenian into English, even for money (I’ve tried!).  Yet here is a great selection of primary Armenian sources, all free, all online, all of the highest historical interest.

More later when I have a chance to actually look at this!

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A difficult piece of Greek in Eusebius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Can someone tell me what the following piece of Unicode Greek means? The problem is the plural ‘angels’, in one section:

Alternatively, perhaps, there is one angel in Matthew, **while the ones who encounter the women are different from that one**, and both the place and the time of the sighting of the angel are also different.   Similarly, too, the two angels in John, seen inside the tomb, are different from the one in Matthew, seen outside, sitting on the stone in front of the tomb.  

The Greek for this bit is:

e#teroi de\ kai\ a!ggeloi au0tou= oi9 pro\j ta\j gunai=kas

ἕτεροι δὲ καὶ ἄγγελοι αὐτοῦ οἱ πρὸς τὰς γυναῖκας

This is from one of the catena fragments of Eusebius of Caesarea, Quaestiones ad Marinum, discussing problems at the end of the Gospels.   A PDF of Mai’s edition is here, and this is found on p.88, where it says:

null

Mai renders it “alii item angeli apud eum mulieribus oblati” which would mean that Eusebius had forgotten that there was only one angel in Matthew 28.

2This is a very puzzling sentence.  The Greek is:  ἕτεροι δὲ καὶ ἄγγελοι αὐτοῦ οἱ πρὸς τὰς γυναῖκας, which at first sight might appear to mean “and his angels that encountered the women are also different”.  However, neither in Matthew nor in John, the only two evangelists here under discussion, do more than one angel encounter more than one woman; Eusebius’ knowledge of the bible can hardly have slipped in this, given its normal accuracy, and he is careful, below, to distinguish the angels appearing in these two gospels from humans in the other two.  The translation printed assumes that αὐτοῦ means not “his”, with ἄγγελοι, but “from that one”, with ἕτεροι (and is not the adverb “there);  but, quite apart from the problems already mentioned, this is also doubtful on linguistic grounds: ἕτερος, which can in some writers have a genitive to mean “from”, is in this text normally put with παρά; and αὐτοῦ is here uncomfortably distant from ἕτεροι in the word-order.  If the text is corrupt, the corruption seems too deep for a convincing emendation.

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Lagarde’s Coptic Gospel Catena

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I obtained a copy of the printed text of this catena for the Eusebius project.  It appears to be out of print, so I’m going to make it available to buy on Lulu.com in printed form again.   I might try and get it distributed as well — it would be interesting to see how that works.

The book is now available here.

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Feeling the crunch

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have a number of projects on the go to create English translations of material never previously translated or — in some cases — not even edited.  The economic news here is now becoming so bad that it is starting to affect ordinary individuals.  As a freelance, my income is a little uncertain anyway; 2009 may involve rather a lot of “non-earning” time, which is quite stressful.  Rather worse news for me is that most of my “rainy day” savings were in the collapsed bank Icesave.  (If about 1,000 readers would care to buy my CDROM of the Fathers, that would be very welcome right now!).

So I’m going to have to cut back somewhat.  I was in the process of commissioning a translation of the Coptic fragments of Eusebius Quaestiones.  This I will now postpone.  I think that I can still afford the other three items I have on the go; the Greek of Eusebius, Cyril of Alexandria’s Apologeticus Ad Imperatorem and Al-Majdalus Commentary on the Nicene Creed.  I shall feel relieved when these complete, though!  Other ideas that I’ve had in mind will now be put on hold until times improve.

As might be expected, all of this has led me to some reflections on the impermanence of life.  I tend to place quite a bit of my faith in my savings, my ability to earn a living, and my confidence that my way of life will continue unchanged in a comfortable way.  In the last couple of days, all this has looked like an illusion.  But… is this not life?  Wouldn’t the ascetic fathers simply smile and nod their heads?

I learn from the news reports that politicians are having to change every assumption, and think originally and inventively to deal with the crisis.  Policies pursued for years suddenly turn out to be irrelevant, expensive luxuries.  Events like these bring us to ourselves.  They strip away the illusions in which we can so easily lose sight of what is going on.  In this sense, they are God’s anti-septic.  After all, all our money will mean nothing to us on the day we die.

At lunchtime today I was in a newsagent to buy a paper and a coke.  I stood behind someone, whom I gradually realised must be mentally disabled in some way.  But he stood there, forcing his reluctant body and mind to go through the process of buying some little purchase, of counting out money from his wallet.  Clearly he found it hard to keep in mind how much a few dollars was; or what change he should expect.

Stood behind him, I felt a little more reality creep into my mind.  My problem didn’t look so serious: one can always get more money, somehow.  We’re all very fortunate, very blessed, that we don’t have disabilities that will never go away, as that man did. 

Let’s keep our feet on the ground.  Here we have no abiding city, and all our projects, efforts and dreams will end with the grave.  Let’s make sure we cherish each day, and consider how we stand when we come before God.

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