Category: Information access

When will the police come for me?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday it became a criminal offence in the UK to express strong approval of some sections of the bible in public or to reproduce them on the internet, punishable by up to seven years imprisonment.  For instance:

hate crimesThou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination (Lev 18:22).

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them(Lev 20:13).

The New Testament says:

Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God (1Cor 6:9f).

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another (Rom 1:24). *

As Cranmer (from whom I borrow the image) rightly observes:

Whatever one’s interpretation of the above scriptures, as of today it would be a bold preacher who so much as jokes about homosexuality.

Today is the appointed time by our wonderful Government for Section 74 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 to come into force. It creates the new offence of intentionally stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.

What is ‘hatred’?

OED: ‘intense dislike’.

It is not a matter of inciting violence or grievous bodily harm: there are already laws against that.

So it is now a crime to ‘intensely dislike’ homosexuality.

Or to ‘intensely dislike’ homosexuals.

Because the two are so easily confused in the mind of the victim (if not the perpetrator) that the mildest disapproval of the behaviour might be mistaken (or purposely distorted or misinterpreted) as vehement disapprobation to the extent that it becomes an irrational attack upon the person.

It is true that the Lords won an important ‘freedom of speech’ amendment, but it will exist only on paper. In practice, the culture will shift towards an auto-self-censorship: people will be so afraid of transgressing the law (or, worse still, of merely being accused of transgressing the law) that the jokes will subside, humour will diminish, drama will avoid the subject and real life will consequently be impoverished. Debates on sexuality will become taboo, not because of a statutory prohibition but because of an impediment to negativity, questioning, accusation and allegation.

Did you hear the one about the gay guy who…?

Bigot.

Call the police, report the crime.

And you can be very sure that the police will treat the allegations with the utmost urgency.

God forbid that Her Majesty’s Constabulary might be accused of being homophobic.

Nor is this effect accidental.  It is intentional.  It is intended to chill certain types of speech, to make people afraid to say what they think.  It is intended to allow gay campaigners to torment their enemies, to drag them into courts. 

Not the slightest effort has been made to limit the effect of the legislation.  As one minister gloated, the churches had better start  hiring lawyers.  This too is intentional — Ezra Levant has documented the technique of “lawfare”, of “maximum disruption” where a campaigner is given a legal basis to make as many complaints as he likes, at no charge to himself, against others, to drag them through the courts for months and years, to force them to run up huge legal bills.

Normal people may wonder why the establishment is so desperate to force unnatural vice upon us all, to make it a norm, to force us all to speak politely about it.  But the answer may be found in Paul Kocher’s Master of Middle Earth, which studied the Lord of the Rings: “It is not enough for evil if its victims do as it wants; they must be forced to do it against their wills.”  It is the arrogance of power to choose some evil, detestable to almost everyone, and force all to bow down to it.

This is evil.  This is a piece of hate, passing laws to permit and encourage and foster attacks by one tiny well-organised section of the community on another which is quiet, law-abiding, and harmless. 

It is specifically targetted at the churches.  Indeed we can be sure that the law was drafted by the gay lobbyists who intend to use it — there’s been enough in the press lately about the way in which Blair simply implemented the demands of Stonewall for some huge list of rights and privileges.

Some may say that this all has only a limited bearing on the gospel.  But so did sacrificing to Caesar; “a pinch of incense… what’s the harm in that?” asked the atheist Roman procurators.  It is a fingerprint.  It is intended as a test case.  Do you follow Christ, or Caesar?

How we oppose this evil I do not know.  That we can either oppose it together, or be picked off, one by one, seems certain to me.

* Cranmer also quotes a section of the Koran; but we can be sure that the Moslems are in no danger of interference!

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Interesting article on the preparation of the Sources Chretiennes’ Jerome commentaries

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A note in LT-ANTIQ drew my attention here.  A PDF at the foot of the page not merely lists the manuscripts of some of the commentaries of St. Jerome on scripture but discusses how the editions are being prepared for maximum clarity, what font is used, what forms of quotation marks, etc.

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Copyfraud once more

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I received an email from a Romanian gentleman, asking about the translation of the lost passage by John Chrysostom from Oratio 2 adversus Judaeos, which I commissioned and then gave away recently.  He wanted to make a translation into Romanian.  So he asked what I paid the journal, in which Wendy Pradels published the Greek text with notes and German translation, for permission to have that English translation made.  I replied that I paid them nothing; there was no money in all this, and any claim to own a text by a man dead 16 centuries might be valid in some benighted lands but hardly in the USA. 

But it led me to muse on the likelihood that any academic publisher would try to sue out a claim to copyright in such a case.  It would hardly be sensible, in my opinion; why sue over what has no commercial value?  

While in bath, tho, my sense of humour took hold, and I took to wondering what questions one could ask in court.  Copyright only vests in “original, creative works.”  So…

“M’Lud, can the plaintiff tell us which specifically which words in the first line are NOT by John Chrysostom?”

“Would you give us a list of the differences between the text printed and the text composed in 400 AD by John Chrysostom?  If you cannot list the portions which are an original creative work by yourselves, on what possible grounds can you claim that any of it is by you?”

“Would you tell us what the commercial value of this item was, when you purchased — as you believed — the copyright from the scholarly author?  Did you pay any money at all for it?”

And so on.

I suspect, sadly, that courts are unimpressed by rhetoric  unless it involves clever points of law.   The layman who ventures into these waters does so at his peril, and indeed few of us ever do so unless cornered.  As Auberon Waugh remarked, from bitter experience, “He who goes to court places himself in the hands of a ring of grinning rascals who will all run up costs as fast as they can until somebody has to pay.” 

It’s probably easier and safer just to meet the plaintiff, shake hands with him, and then pitch him head first out of his office window, “accidental-like”.  Would the fines for so doing be at all likely to reach the charges that any law firm would demand?

The serious point behind all this is that the relentless march of commercial interests taking a yard where the law granted an inch has reached the point of absurdity.  Only the common sense exercised by publishers in the anglophone world is restraining them from foolishness of the sort feared by our Romanian friend; and outside that sunlit circle of generosity and mutual respect, there have been many examples of insane greed.  We need to push back. 

Genuine creative work should be protected by copyright, for the benefit of us all.  Attempts to own the work of the ancients, by one subterfuge or another, should not exist in a civilised land.

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Bootlegging the Theodosian code

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the texts that is not online and really should be is the legal compedium assembled in the reign of Theodosius II in 450 AD and known as the Theodosian code or Codex Theodosianus. 

The work was compiled from earlier collections of imperial edicts, or rescripts as they were known.  These took the form of a letter from the emperor to some official, usually a proconsul or prefect.  The compilation provided a systematic list of things proscribed or permitted.

The work was translated by a certain Clyde Pharr back in 1954 for Princeton University Press.  That means that it could be out of copyright in the US; unfortunately it is not.

The most interesting portion of the code is the last book.   This consists of the rescripts on religious matters issued by Constantine and his successors, which progressively made Christianity a privileged religion, then the state religion, and then prohibited other religions aside from Judaism.  The tone of these rescripts is often violent, as is often the case with the edicts of later emperors.  Pharr’s introduction points out rescripts which indicate the powerlessness of these emperors, and their repeated and futile attempts by ever heavier penalties to get their will enacted by the imperial bureaucracy.

Such interesting material is always likely to find its way online in unauthorised form.  Today I found a site with a substantial chunk of that book 15 here.  I’m not sure whether it is complete, tho.

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From my diary – Chrysostom and Eusebius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just spent a busy couple of hours writing emails to people who host copies of Chrysostom’s Sermons against the Jews online, asking them to update the page with the extra material I’ve had translated.  Paul Halsall is going to update the Fordham site, which is probably the parent of many of the others.  No replies back yet, but I am hopeful.  In some cases the material had been posted to fora, and all I had to do was register and reply to the post.

Menwhile I’ve been making progress with the Greek text of Eusebius Gospel problems and solutions.  Now I have this all in unicode, it’s a much better proposition to deal with.  I need to spend some time working it over, tho.

One nice bit of email today: from a medievalist interested in Porphyry’s Isagogue who discovered the reference to it in Abu’l Barakat’s catalogue of Arabic Christian literature.  He found the latter on my site, because I’d had it translated and put online.  It’s nice when my endeavours visibly help others!

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Chrysostom, Against the Jews homily 2 (missing part) is now in English!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Ever since the eight sermons against the Jews by the 4th century writer John Chrysostom were published, men have noticed that sermon 2 is only a third of the length of the others, and speculated that some of it is missing.  The missing portion was discovered in a manuscript on Lesbos a decade ago and published, but no English translation has ever been made of it.

One now exists, and it is here.  I commissioned it and own the copyright, but I make the translation public domain.  Do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial. 

Now to communicate with the owners of copies of the Eight Sermons online, and try to persuade them to host the missing chunk as well!

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Chrysostom against the Jews — online copies

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Once we have a final version of the missing portion of Chrysostom against the Jews, I need to make sure that it is added to the copies of the defective text that are around online.  Of course that means I need to know where they are.  A google search provided quite a few links:

The first is undoubtedly the most important; many of the others derive from it.   But I have yet to visit most of these.

Some of the more unusual sites in this list — and there are a few — can be difficult to communicate with, as their authors are either very eccentric or have developed a well-grounded fear of entrapment by their political enemies.   I cannot say that I am looking forward to the task of writing to all these sites and asking them to add the missing passage to sermon 2.  Doubtless some will ignore my email.

But unless we do this, unless we reunite the lost portion of the text with all the copies we can find, we may be wasting our time.  We cannot be certain which copy of the text will be the ancestor of all the copies to reach the year 3,000 AD.  In so many cases, we know that a single copy ca. 800 AD is the ancestor of all our current copies of a text.  To fail to reunite the severed texts may be tantamount to wasting the rediscovery.

Our duty to the future dictates that the effort must be made.  Once I have the final version, I will make that effort.  Not because I agree or disagree with the sites above; but because we cannot tell which of them may provide the future with the text of Chrysostom.

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Google goes to Rome

Posted on by Roger Pearse

AP has this excellent news:

Google says it will scan up to 1 million old books in national libraries in Rome and Florence, including works by astronomer Galileo Galilei, in what’s being described as the first deal of its kind. …

Culture Ministry official Mario Resca says the deal will help save the books’ content forever.

Resca said the 1966 Florence flood ruined thousands of books in the Tuscan city’s library. He said digitizing books from before 1868 will help spread Italian culture throughout the world.

Google will cover the costs of the scanning of the books, all of them out-of-copyright Italian works, including 19th-century literature and 18th-century scientific volumes.

Well done, the Italians.  Suddenly we will all be able to read a whole load of material that no-one could ever see.

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Dreaming of Chrysostom and his works

Posted on by Roger Pearse

quastenI often take a volume of Quasten’s Patrology to bed with me.  In times past I tended to turn down leaves where English translations that were not online were marked.  These days I find myself looking at texts and wondering whether a translation of them would be worth commissioning.  Short, obscure, interesting texts are the sort of things I look at.

So I looked, and I browsed.  There are several works by Chrysostom that seem interesting.  I’ve mentioned the missing portion of his Adversus Judaeos — but that was just housekeeping.  It costs $20 to get a translation of a column of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca Greek text, and at that rate there are a number of possible texts of historical interest.

On p. 453 Quasten mentions a discourse In kalendas (PG 48, 953-962, i.e. 9 columns, or 4.5 columns of Greek, i.e. $90) — On the kalends [of January] — in which he discusses and condemns the pagan celebration of the New Year.  That ought to contain quite a bit of historical material.

Also mentioned is his Contra circenses ludos et theatra (PG 56, 263-270, i.e. 7 columns or $70) — Against the circus games and theatre — which he preached on July 3, 399, on finding the church half-empty because everyone had gone off to see the show.  He mentions chariot racing on Good Friday, for instance.  Again, this must give insights into the popular entertainments at the end of the 4th century.

The temptations of the theatre are addressed in Homiliae 3 de diabolo (PG 49, 241-276, i.e. $350, so quite a bit more) — Three sermons on the devil — which must, therefore, describe these events.  At that price, tho, I can probably resist.  The nine homilies on penitence (one in fact by Severian of Gabala) are 80-odd columns, and a bit long for my purse.

Equally interesting are some of the sermons delivered for church festivals.  His In diem natalem Dominus Noster Jesu Christi, (PG 49, 351-362, i.e. $110) was given on Christmas Day 386 and calls Christ Sol Iustitiae, the Sun of Justice.  It is important for the history of Christmas.  A partner sermon (PG 56, 385-396, i.e. $110) is probably spurious, but also interesting historically for what it tells us about the rivalry in that period between the pagan solar cults and the Christians.  None of the other festal homilies grab my eye.

The first sermon that Chrysostom ever delivered (PG 48, 693-700, i.e. $70) ought to be in English, if only as a curiosity.

Two sermons, before and after his first exile (PG 52, 427-430, i.e. $30; and PG 52, 443-8, i.e. $50) are probably just waffle, but it would be good to have them.

One very interesting work is De S. Babyla contra Julianum et Gentiles (PG 50, 533-572, i.e. $390) — On St. Babylas against Julian and the pagans.  When the emperor Julian the Apostate attempted to restore the oracle at Daphne in Antioch in 362 AD, the priests told him that the Christian shrine of St. Babylas — interred at the sacred grove — was interfering with the voice of the god.  Julian ordered the remains removed; but soon after the temple burned down, and then Julian himself was killed in battle.  Chrysostom treats both events as evidence of the power of the saint, and responds to the lament of Libanius on the temple of Apollo by describing it as drivelling nonsense.  I could wish the work was shorter.

Another text of interest is Contra Judaeos et Gentiles quod Christus sit Deus (PG 48, 813-838, i.e. $200) — Against Jews and Gentiles that Christ is God.  I had originally seen this as a natural complement to the Eight Homilies Against the Jews, but it is only so to a limited extent.  Apparently it does mention the attempted rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem under Julian, when the Jewish workers were driven back by subterranean gas explosions.  Again, this seems interesting.

I could carry on.  But what is noteworthy is how little it would cost to translate some of these, and that almost none have ever been translated.  I might commission translations of some of these, just to make them available.

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Really Important: tell the British Library which manuscripts you want to see online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Juan Garces is inviting suggestions for manuscripts to be digitised here.

The obvious answer to this question is: all of them! We all want access to free digital resources, but creating them is tempered by a series of practical considerations. How can we best deliver digitised manuscripts to your desktops? One answer is to secure funding for independent digitisation projects with achievable goals. Such a series of projects has to be placed squarely within a vision and strategy. At the start of each one we have to ask ourselves: which manuscripts should we digitise next? …

It is, however, crucial that we also engage you. Here’s how. Contact me to answer the following question: which particular Greek manuscripts held by the British Library would you like to see digitised and why? I cannot promise that your favourite manuscript will be in the next phase, but I can assure you that your feedback will inform our decision.

Basically Juan has to go out and bid for money.  So if you have an idea for some manageable-size “project” that would attract funding easily, tell him.  If you have a bunch of manuscripts in mind, tell him.

I notice that the Stavros Niarchus Foundation is funding the first tranche.  We have, perhaps, overlooked the “wealthy Greek shipowner” angle on all this.  The manuscripts — the physical books — are the remains of Greek culture as it was in the middle ages, and record that culture from still earlier stages.  Why shouldn’t this Greek culture be online?

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