Why Minucius Felix is later than Tertullian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The “Octavius” of Minucius Felix is one of the most attractive works of early Latin Christianity.  It features three friends going to the baths at Ostia, when one of them kisses his hand to a statue of Serapis.  Reproved by the other, the three settle down to debate the merits of paganism and Christianity.  There is a lovely translation included in the Loeb Tertullian volume.

The “Octavius” is preserved in a 9th century manuscript of the work of Arnobius the Elder against the pagans.  This manuscript is now in Paris, where it is BNF lat. 1661, and online.  In this manuscript, Minucius Felix appears without identification as “book 8”.  It would appear that, when Arnobius was copied from a collection of scrolls into a parchment codex, the modern book form, the scribe found an extra roll in the box.  Presuming that it belonged with the rest, he copied it too.

Here’s the beginning of the work, on f.162r:

BNF lat. 1611, f.162r (excerpt): the beginning of Minucius Felix “Octavius”, under the title of book 8 of Arnobius.

and here’s the end on folio 190r.

There is no external evidence as to when Minucius Felix wrote.  The Quod idola dii non sint attributed to Cyprian makes extensive use of it, or so I understand; but this work itself may not be authentic.  If it is, it perhaps dates to 248-9, after Cyprian’s conversion and before his ordination.[1].

But the really thorny question is whether the work is considerably earlier.  Is it, in fact, second century, dating to 150 AD or later?  Or is it later than Tertullian, whose Apologeticum is securely dated to 197 AD?  For quite a large chunk of material that appears in Tertullian’s Apologeticum also appears in Minucius Felix.

As long ago as 2001, I wrote a page online with whatever quotes on the date of the work I could find.  It is still here.  The tendency was to place Minucius Felix later.  Tertullian makes the same arguments in his earlier Ad Nationes, but extends them in the Apologeticum.  It is hard to think that Tertullian borrowed some of Minucius Felix in his first work; and then went back and borrowed some more in the second!

But the classic discussion is in C. Becker, Der “Octavius” des Minucius Felix, (1967), p.74–97.  I have a feeling that many anglophone scholars have rather shied away from a volume of German.  Indeed I have myself not felt any urge this evening to go through 25 pages of German.

Fortunately T. D. Barnes summarises the key points for us, in a review of M. Edwards, M. Goodman, S. Price and C. Rowland, “Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity” in Phoenix 55 (2001), pp.142-162 (JSTOR).  On p.150-1 we read (paragraphing mine):

Price reverts to the untenable view that Minucius Felix wrote his Octavius in the late second century before Tertullian (p.111-112). He makes it transparently clear that he has either not read Carl Becker’s proof that Minucius Felix copies Tertullian or not understood the force of Becker’s arguments when he asserts  “‘parallels’ cannot establish the priority of either author” (112).

That observation applies only to cases where priority is inferred from a comparison of two texts or authors without any external control.

But Becker did not merely compare the two Christian writers with each other. He first analysed how Minucius Felix adapts Plato, Cicero’s De natura deorum and Seneca (1967: 10-74); only then did he turn to the relationship between Minucius Felix and Tertullian in order to show that the former adapts the latter in exactly the same way as he adapts Plato, Cicero, and Seneca and, furthermore, that in some passages he has combined his Christian model with his pagan sources (1967: 74-97).

It was the introduction of Plato, Cicero, and Seneca into the argument that provided undeniable proof of the priority of Tertullian – as Becker himself explicitly observed (1967: 79-80, 90, 94).

To paraphrase, Minucius is adapting material from Plato, Cicero, and Seneca in a very particular way.  The “parallel” material, taken from Tertullian, relates to the text of Tertullian in the same manner as his excerpts from Plato / Cicero / Seneca relate to the original text of Plato / Cicero / Seneca .  Indeed he is combining Tertullian with these pagan writers.  Tertullian on the other hand is simply writing what he wants to say, and is adapting nobody.

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  1. [1]Geoffrey D. Dunn, “References to Mary in the writings of Cyprian”, in: Papers Presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2003, vol. 4 (2006), p.371.  Preview.↩

Bits and Bobs and Asset Strippers in Libraries

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been away on holiday in York.  It was very grey and rained a lot of the time. But I stayed in a hotel in a very central location and I enjoyed myself anyway.  One day I went up onto the city walls, using the stairs at the medieval gateway named Mickelgate Bar.  I walked around a section, and came down in front of the Yorkshire Museum, from where the photograph at the end was taken.

Various items came to my attention while I was away.  Naturally I ignored them.  Only a fool picks up email while on holiday.  Burnout is a real risk for people of our sort, so we really must take our holidays.  Likewise if you wrote to me, pardon my failure to respond.

But here’s a couple of them.

The first of these was a set of Unicode fonts for Old Slavonic.  Here’s a screen grab of the website, sci.ponomar.net/fonts:

By coincidence I also learned of the Brill fonts.  These are commercial fonts, designed by that publishing house to give a common appearance to their books.  They are of interest because they implement a lot of odd characters useful to manuscript researchers.  They are free for non-commercial use.

I also managed to get banned from Twitter for a week.  Once more onto the naughty step, dear friends.  It’s about the third time now, in each case because I made an off-the-cuff humorous reply to something which their censor-bot didn’t like.  So I have ended up browsing my old Mastodon account instead. I was also able to create a Bluesky account, although I have yet to work out how to feed my posts there.  Twitter gets a lot of bad press these days, but most of this seems to be politically motivated.  All the same I’m rather in favour of dispersing social media among more than one site, to be honest.

But in the process I came across a truly interesting and perceptive article by Cory Doctorow on just why sites like Facebook, Google, Amazon, are getting steadily worse and worse to use.  It appeared in January, but was reposted in Wired, and it clearly struck a chord with others.  It is unfortunate that the author gave it a coarse title: Tiktok’s enshittification.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Recommended.

We might think that this process will not affect the world of academia.  But we would be wrong. For this very morning I found another article, by Karawynn Long, on how precisely the same process is now affecting public libraries in the US and Canada: The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries: Global investment vampires have positioned themselves to suck our libraries dry.

Ignore the first four paragraphs.  The next few summarise the Doctorow article.  But then… it gets interesting.

Well, if you use a public library in the United States or Canada, and you ever access their ebooks or audiobooks, you’re almost certainly familiar with the OverDrive platform or its mobile app Libby.  That’s because OverDrive, a private corporation, has a monopoly on managing the availability and distribution of ebooks and audiobooks for government-funded public libraries in North America. …

I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR…

Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.

“In the popular imagination, private equity is often portrayed as a vulture, or some other scavenger that feasts on the sick and dying,” writes Hannah Levintova in Mother Jones. “But the bulk of the work done by modern-day private equity firms is not to finish off sick companies, but rather to stalk and gut the healthy ones.”

Calling them “vampire capitalists” would be more accurate.

Enshittified platforms are not an accidental outcome; they are just one of the inevitable dessicated corpses the vampires leave behind.

And these vampire capitalists currently have a chokehold on the digital catalogs of the public library systems of North America.

Again, if you can wade through the article, it will be enlightening.  The term “enshittification” seems to have caught on, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it starts to shape policy.

Anyway, enough about boring stuff.  Here’s my photograph of the splendour of York Minster!

View of York Minster
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Archivo Pertzii??

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Here’s a reference guaranteed to waste the time of a researcher.  It’s from the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina:

This is some miracle material associated with the abbey of Brauweiler.  But… what is “Archivo Pertzii”?? I did find out, but it was enough work that I thought I’d put up a blog post, in case I forget and need to google it again.

At the moment, a google search points you right back to the BHL, seemingly the only publication in all history to know of this source.

The italics on Archivo are the key; clearly it’s the abbreviated title of a journal.  I know that German publications often referred to the editor of a journal, especially if he was someone famous, so “Pertzii” is probably the editor.  But you may search for “Archivo” as long as you like.  It’s bad enough with Google.  Imagine the bafflement of a 20th century researcher without it!

I tried “Pertzius”, and kept reading results, and this gave me what I needed.  Apparently this is Georg Heinrich Pertz, whoever he might have been.

I found that he edited the last volume, volume 12, of the “Archiv der Gesellschaft für Ältere Deutsche Geschichtkunde zur Beförderung einer Gesammtausgabe der Quellenschriften deutscher Geschichten des Mittelalters”.  So the “Archivo” is just a Latin ablative of the real name “Archiv”.  The BHL, in translating it into Latin, managed to obscure the sense completely.

Just to make it better, Pertz only edited some volumes.  It wasn’t his “Archiv” anyway.

The journal is online at Digizeitschriften.de, which has a useful page for the whole serial here, but a rather awkward interface to download any of it.  I ended up downloading the 9 pages individually and combining them locally. Then I found there was a button for “PDFs for individual items”, which I struggled with and finally got the same chunk in one file.  Why you can’t just download the volume I can’t imagine.  But I think this is teething troubles.  The site otherwise seemed well organised.

There is another copy online, at digitale-sammlungen.de, here.  But I only found this after more effort.

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A new use for the parallel Latin translations in the Patrologia Graeca

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Now that we have a very effective Latin translation in Google translate, it occurs to me that we can also use this to read a great deal of patristic Greek.  For as we all know, the Greek fathers were all translated into Latin at the renaissance and after, and were nearly always printed with parallel Latin translation, right the way down to the 19th century.

The obvious example of this is Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, our standard reference collection of texts.  It’s never been worth transcribing the Latin side.  But maybe now it is, just as a reading aid for those of us without fluent Greek?

This isn’t a new situation, in a way.  Indeed the reason why all these Latin translations even exist at all, is that knowledge of Greek was always rarer than fluency in Latin.  The translations are not always reliable; but something is better than nothing.

On the other hand it won’t be all that easy to OCR the Latin of Migne…

An excerpt from PG volume 78, column 226, a letter of Isidore of Pelusium in the Migne edition.

The low quality of Migne’s printing is something that we have all struggled with.

But there are workarounds.  The last time that I needed to OCR the Latin of Migne, I went and found the edition that he was reprinting on Google Books.  This, needless to say, was far better printed, and created many fewer errors in Finereader 15.

So it is possible, and it’s worth bearing in mind if we need to work with a large patristic text for which no modern translation exists.  Spend some time creating an electronic text of the Latin translation, and push it through Google Translate!

Update (5 Aug 2023): Note that it is actually possible to copy the OCR’d text from Google books itself, for both the Greek and Latin sides in the PG.  Go to the page in question.  Hit the cut-and-paste icon so it goes dark grey, then drag a rectangle over the area that you want to copy the text from. As you release the mouse, a dialogue will pop up, and the text is in the top box. It looks as if its monotonic for Greek. The results are quite respectable.

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The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A few minutes ago I learned of a marvellous project to create the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources (DMNES).  This is under development, although a lot now exists, but a blog is available, and is itself a rather wonderful thing:

The dictionary aims to contain all given (fore, Christian) names recorded in European sources written between 600 and 1600, minus the names of historical/non-contemporary people, and names occurring only in fictional literature or poetry.

I came across the blog while attempting to translate BHL 6177, the Miracles of St Nicholas at Angers.  This contains the following paragraph:

4. Contigit igitur in una sollemnitatum, quam supra diximus, ad excubias sancti viri nonnullos decubare infirmos et debiles, inter quos puer unus erat, Brientius nomine, qui ab ipsa fere materna alvo contractus, a renibus videlicet infra membrorum omnium officio destitutus, a quodam Britanniae pago, qui Sanctus Briuntius dicitur, ortus, ad Andegavensem usque devectus fuerat urbem.

It happened, therefore, during one of the solemnities which we have mentioned above, that, at the vigils of the holy man some sick and feeble men were lying down, among whom was a boy, named Brientius, who was almost crippled in the womb by the mother herself, that is to say, deprived of the service of all his limbs by his kidneys, and, born in certain district in Britannia named Sanctus Briuntius, he had been carried as far as the city of Angers

Not being familiar with the period, I am relying heavily on Google to understand the names!

But who or what is “Brientius”?  It’s a name from Britannia, which is Britain, of course, although it’s strange that they do not say “England” (would it be “Anglia”?).  The lad comes from somewhere called “Sanctus Briuntius,” wherever that might be.  It all sounds a bit Welsh, or Cornish.

But a google search revealed this article from the DMNES on the blog.  The name turned out to be Breton!  The vernacular form is “Brient”, and this is turned into a French form “Briant,” which I seem to remember from King Arthur literature when I was little, from the 12th century onwards.

A look at the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources at Logeion reveals that indeed “Britannia” can mean Brittany!  Even better, the comments on the article were wonderfully learned and beautifully referenced.  This was incredibly useful, for I who knew none of them.  From this I learn that “Brient” is Old Breton, and might mean “free man.”

I’m still at a loss for the village or district, “Sanctus Briuntius”, but I’m far further forward than I was.

Truly we live in days of miracles and wonders.

Bibliotheque Nationale Francais, MS. lat. 12611, folio 73r: an excerpt showing our passage.
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Is it a waste of time for us to make translations of ancient texts?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Earlier this evening I was working away on a translation of one of the medieval St Nicholas miracle stories, BHL 6177, the “Miracles at Angers”.  I was using Google translate on the Latin text, which was producing some very decent quality outputs.  Then I was checking and correcting it.  It did indeed need correcting, but it’s mostly right and far faster than sitting there doing it manually.

A little while later I had a play with Bard, Google’s AI product.  (It would have been ChatGPT but this demanded an alarming amount of personal information.)  I asked the prompt if it could translate ancient Greek, and it said that it could, including whole documents; but it might not be perfect just yet, but was improving.

So I tried it out with a chunk from the Greek Anthology, which it rendered into English; but I realised afterwards that this probably just retrieved a pre-existing translation.  Then I went to Ulrich Harsch’s useful site – which Google downvotes because he hasn’t implemented the latest https – and found a page on George of Pisidia here.  This began:

Γεώργιος Πισίδης, διάκονος καὶ ποιητὴς ἐν Κωνσταντινουπόλει, ἐγένετο περὶ τὸ ἔτος 580, ἐτελεύτησε περὶ τὸ ἔτος 634, εὑρετὴς τῶν στίχων δωδεκασυλλάβων.

So I put in “translate the following ancient greek into English:” and then the Greek.  The result was:

George of Pisidia, deacon and poet in Constantinople, was born around the year 580, died around the year 634, inventor of the twelve-syllable lines.

That’s very reasonable.  I then asked it a second time whether it could translate ancient Greek.  This time I got a rather different reply, and much more bullish:

Yes, I can translate ancient Greek. I have been trained on a massive dataset of text and code, including ancient Greek texts. I can translate ancient Greek into English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and many other languages. I can also translate ancient Greek into modern Greek.

I am still under development, but I am able to translate ancient Greek with a high degree of accuracy. I can translate simple sentences, as well as more complex passages. I can also translate ancient Greek poetry and literature.

If you have an ancient Greek text that you would like me to translate, please feel free to share it with me. I will do my best to provide you with an accurate and informative translation.

But …. I just pasted in a chunk from Arethas of Caesarea on Romans here – I’m pretty sure that there’s no English translation of that! – and it just echoed the text.  So… in fact it’s not there yet.  But it’s food for thought.

But how many of us even understand what these things are doing?   A web search was clear enough – just collect URL’s and make a list of words and topics.

But AI?  Well, as I understand it, these “generative AI” products are basically a chat-bot on the front of a “large language model” (LLM).  An LLM is a “next word predictive engine”, apparently.  So basically some code for pattern recognition on the front of a search engine; indeed pre-loaded with a lot of text to search from the web.  The AI generative image makers do much the same, apparently.

The amount of hype and exaggeration around “AI” is staggering, as it is with every new fad, but it is not magic.  In IT “it” is never magic.  If you think “it” is magic, then you don’t understand “it”.  Everything is ones and zeros and lumps of metal and silicon.  The rest is attempts to sell stuff.

Now I don’t fully understand it.  But it did set me to wondering about whether I am wasting my time.  For it wouldn’t be the first time that technology has rendered my work useless.

When I came online originally, I was scanning existing English translations of ancient texts and putting these online.  Bandwidth was low, and text-only pages were the only way to get stuff online.  I did so for some years, until the technology rendered it pointless.   Bandwidth became enormous, so file size didn’t matter.  The PDF arrived, with exact images of the book pages.  OCR improved, so the PDF was searchable.  Google Books came along, with every book under the sun prior to 1923, all freely downloadable.  I haven’t done any more since then.  There’s no point.  I don’t regret doing it, but … in a way it was wasted effort.

Since then I’ve concentrated on texts for which no translation exists.  At one time I commissioned these.  Now that I am retired, I sit here and make my own.

But again the technology is taking this away.  Is there any point in an amateur like myself labouring over a Latin text, with my limited Latin, to produce an awkward translation if Google Translate can do it in an instant, and be pretty nearly “good enough”?

Prior to January 2022, the question was academic.  Google Translate was rubbish for Latin.  And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.  In fact it could make sense of sentences better than I could.  I can polish the result, and correct minor errors, and do something worthwhile; but basically it is doing the job.  Furthermore, it is quite likely to improve further.

So I’m getting this feeling of dejà vu.  Is there any point?  I’m not sure, and I’m not going to stop right now, if only because I’m still enjoying it.  But it is food for thought.

The world-wide web is a very different place from what it was.  One horrible aspect of the new craze for “AI” is that, for the first time, the products are commercial.  You have to pay to use them.

This is a novelty, and an unwelcome one.  It marks a big shift from the free, open internet that we have had until now.  Bye-bye the internet to which I contributed, where it was expected to be free.  No longer.  Worse yet, those who contributed freely find their work turned against them.

I saw this evening a report that StackOverflow, the computer programmers’ forum site, has lost 50% of its traffic.  The bots hoovered up all the replies to technical questions, shared freely by ordinary people, out of the kindness of their hearts, and embedded them in new tools like GitHub Copilot.  This, needless to say, is a commercial product.  And it’s killing the original site.

Will the internet change, until we have to pay for everything, via a million subscriptions?  It is beginning to look like it.

The new AI is also biased in various directions, probably for commercial reasons, certainly in line with horrible American politics, but also simply in selecting what some corporation wants us to see.  That corporation wants us to see “important stuff”.  They decide what is important.

For instance, if you type into Google search “Who is Roger Pearse”, you get some rubbish at the top about some “Roger Pearce”, selected by Google; but then you get stuff from my blog, and material by me.  My name is not common, and I write on a specialised subject, and have done so for 24 years.  In a fair and level internet, I would naturally appear.

The same query in Bard AI produces “I’m designed solely to process and generate text, so I’m unable to assist you with that.”  Which is not too bad, except that, if I repeat this for public figures, like “Joe Biden”, I get an article back.  A source is given, which is – of course – Wikipedia.

Indeed if I ask “Who was Petrus Crabbe”, a very obscure figure, it begins with the text mainly from the Wikipedia article.  I myself wrote this article, in a moment of madness, so I know just what is on the web about him.  Bard AI is using Wikipedia plus one other source linked from it.  No doubt ChatGPT is doing the same.  But I don’t think that ChatGPT intends to send any money to me in return for my generous efforts.

So AI is only returning “important people”.  In this case it is defined as people for whom there is a Wikipedia article.  I do not have an article about me in that toxic hell-site, nor do I wish to.  Of course if you asked someone in the national television industry who Roger Pearse is, they would have no idea.  But… the practical effect of the coding around AI is to reduce the information, to only “approved sources”, to only “important people”.

Yet originally the web was a levelling phenomenon.  That was part of the charm.  Anybody could start a website.  Anyone could start a search engine.  You rose or fell on merit.

And now?  Well, what we see in AI is what someone in a major corporation chooses that we should see.  Little people don’t matter.

I don’t see any reason immediately to change what I am doing.  But it is, as I said, food for thought.

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The date and authenticity of the “Oration concerning Simeon and Anna” of Pseudo-Methodius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The literature of antiquity is transmitted to us mainly in handwritten medieval books.  These are often more like loose-leaf binders than modern books, and can contain all sort of things.  A great number of ancient and medieval sermons appear in these volumes.  This is quite natural, since the volumes were copied exclusively by monks for almost a thousand years.  The author of the sermon is not always given, and when it is, the name may be ambiguous or wrong.  Part of what scholars do is to establish who wrote these texts.  I’ve been collecting some snippets of scholarship about one of these, which I thought I would share.

The surviving works in Greek of the patristic writer Methodius of Olympus (d. ca. 311 AD) were translated into English in the 19th century, and are included in the Ante-Nicene Fathers collection, volume 6.  The translator also included a translation of a sermon (online here), the “Oration concerning Simeon and Anna” (Sermo de Symeone et Anna, = CPG 1827 = BHG 1961 (vol. 3, p.241)). This is of interest because it contains clear evidence of the veneration of Mary.  Indeed if it were authentic, it would be some of the earliest evidence for the cultus of Mary.

The BHG tells us that the text  of the Sermo de Symeone et Anna was first edited by P. Pantinus, Homiliae IIII SS. patrum (Antverpiae, 1598), pp.18-154 (online here); reprinted by F. Combefis, Amphilochii opera (1644), pp.396-430 (online here); who is reprinted again in Migne, PG 18, cols.348-381; and finally edited by A. Jahn, S.P.N.Methodii opera omnia (1865), 105-113 (online here).

This sermon bears the name of Methodius in the manuscripts.  But according to R. Laurentin[1], the work is found in collections of sermons (“homiliaries”) of the 7th century, so this cannot refer to the later Methodius who was patriarch of Constantinople from 842-846 AD.  Likewise a portion of the text (PG 18, 360C) is quoted word for word by John Damascene (7-8th c.) in the Libellus Contra Jacobitas (PG 94, col.1489)

There is a list of manuscripts at Pinakes here.  Some are online.  This for instance is the beginning in Codex Vaticanus Ottobonianus graecus 85 (online here), on folio 76v, with a few words and then “Πάλαι ἱκανῶς, ὡς οἷον τε, διὰ βραχέων…” 

Here’s another from BNF gr. Coislin 274, f.158v:

Both have some introductory words, although my ignorance of Greek paleography doesn’t allow me to read either.  But I can pick out the name of Methodius alright.

The question of the authenticity of the sermon was discussed by V. Buchheit, Studien zu Methodios von Olympos, TU 69 (1958), p.133-140.  Methodius of Olympus died around 311 AD.  Now the work begins:

Although I have before, as briefly as possible, in my dialogue on chastity, sufficiently laid the foundations, as it were, for a discourse on virginity, yet to-day the season has brought forward the entire subject of the glory of virginity…… We keep festival, not according to the vain customs of the Greek mythology; we keep a feast which brings with it no ridiculous or frenzied banqueting of the gods, but which teaches us the wondrous condescension to us men of the awful glory of Him who is God over all.

From this, it seems that the sermon was delivered, it seems, on the feast day of the presentation of Jesus at the temple, the Feast of the Hypapante (Feb. 2nd), and the BHG lists it among the sermons on that date (vol. 3, p.241, BHG 1961).  But Buchheit states that this festival is not referenced by any source prior to 385 AD.  So this is a problem, if the sermon was composed by the Methodius who died ca. 311 AD.

The first line does refer to a quite genuine work by Methodius of Olympus.  But this sermon ends with a version of the Nicene Creed, including the keyword term “homoousios”, not used in this way before the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.  Again, this is a problem of the same kind.

Buchheit also conducts a linguistic analysis, which I am not competent to comment upon.  He references the Byzantine use of prepositions and “clauses” which does not agree with the usage in genuine works of Methodius.

Based upon this, Buchheit concludes that the work has to be dated between 325 and the 7th century, and that the first sentence is merely a deliberate deception by the author:

Der unbekannte Verfasser oder ein Abschreiber hat diese Rede durch eine geschickte Fäl­schung in der Einleitung dem Methodios unterschoben. Bei dem Verfasser handeltessich umeinen geistig zweifellos hochstehenden und rhetorisch vorzüglich gebildeten Mann. Sein Stil war asianisch; die byzantinische Satzklausel hat er nicht angewendet.

The unknown author or a copyist has foisted this speech on Methodios through a clever forgery in the introduction. The author is undoubtedly a man of high intellectual stature and excellent rhetoric. His style was Asian; he did not apply the Byzantine propositional clause.  (Google translation)

Further work was done upon the sermon by Roberto Caro, in his 1965 thesis, La homiletica griega.  Unfortunately I have no access to this.  Parts of this were published as R. Caro, La homilética mariana griega en el siglo V (= Greek Marian Homilies in the 5th Century), Dayton, Ohio, 2 vols (1971-2), where the CPG says that the discussion is in vol.2, pp. 610-617.  Again I have no access to this at the moment, but apparently he concludes that the text is 5-6th century.

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  1. [1]R. Laurentin, Bulletin Sur La Vierge Marie, Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 52 (1968), pp. 479-551, esp. 539-40, JSTOR.↩

Working out the manuscript affinities from a collation

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I finally finished collating the 4 editions and a selected 12 manuscripts of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.  This gives me a Word .docx file with every line of the text, the collation beneath it, and my translation under that.  In the left margin, it gives me a list of significant-looking variants:

I’ve had to recollate the early chapters, because I got better at this as I went on, and the earlier stuff needed to be redone, extra manuscripts added etc.

The text still contains a lot of working notes.  I have already found that it is a mistake to remove these too early.  Keep them to the last, and then remove them all as a specific activity, rather than along the way.

But then the question arises: how do I analyse this data in order to get a stemma out of it?  It’s too big, and I can’t get my head around it.

After some thought, I decided to create an Excel spreadsheet and process the supposedly significant variants into it.  This morning I did so.  I found that this required some intervention.  Actually I had to “simplify” some of the variants as I put them in.  Because unique variants are most likely errors, or mistakes, of no special meaning.  It’s the stuff in common that you need.  So where 3 manuscripts have “meritis” and the 4th has “et meritis”, and the 5th was “procul”, I entered the first 4 all up as “meritis”.

I also ignored variants that were merely endings.  The truth is that all the ending variants probably arise from scribes misreading abbreviations.  There’s just so many!

I then put a column for each manuscript, and put them in.  In the end I only had 19 locations where the text gave clear divergence into families.  On each row I coloured one set of readings in red, and another set in black, just so I could see the groupings (because you just try skim-reading “vocitatur” and “vocaretur”!).  Where a manuscript didn’t have that part of the text, I indicated with hatching.

The result looked a bit like this, except that M was originally on the left and C on the right.

As soon as I did this, I could see the PQO group, and the BGD group, which I was aware of anyway. I drew the vertical black lines to separate the groups.

Then I did some rearranging.  M, which I had thought isolated, I moved to be with W.  C, which I sort of thought was related to O, was now obviously part of the PQO group, so I moved that.

All the same some things do not jump out.  I’d already found that G is actually a copy of B in the first 6 chapters, but then switches to a copy of D!    Indeed the layout on the page is identical.  But that does not jump out from that table.  I’m fairly sure that I can eliminate G.

So … have I learned much?  A bit more than I knew before, perhaps.  But clearly I have a long way to go.

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From My Diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My last post on the “Praedestinatus” brought back a memory or two.  If my memory serves me correctly, this was the very text that caused me to seek out the Patrologia Latina for the first time, almost quarter of a century ago.  A reference in Quasten for the “Tertullianistae” was the prompt.  So I drove up to a research library, where I purchased a visitors’ ticket, and nervously explored the huge building.  At length I came to the reading room, then as now organised in a baffling manner.  Shyly asking the individual at the desk for help, I was curtly pointed to one end of the immense room.  And there were the volumes of the Patrologia Latina, bound, and faded, volume after volume – a whole wall of it.  I’d never seen anything like it.  I found the passage; and then wondered if I could get a photocopy.  Back to the desk, where I was told to take it to another room.  There, in turn, I was told that it was too fragile, and I would have to purchase a service photocopy and come back for it in a couple of days.  So of course I had to do so, and drive all that way again.  The copy was absurdly overpriced and not very good quality, and came on A3 sheets – hardly easy to use.  But at last it was mine!  I took it home, and pored over it with my nascent Latin – just a faint memory from schooldays – and tried to puzzle it out into English.

How things have changed.  The free availability of the PL online in PDF was unthought-of then.  Now we take it for granted.

I have continued collating a dozen manuscripts of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.   I’ve collated all the way through, but I am redoing chapters 2-5, because I didn’t do those as thoroughly, and I have since learned better.  I’m still correcting the text.

Originally I started with two early editions, and a couple of articles with extracts.  Now I am deep in the manuscripts.

The longer that I spend collating, the more that I start to get a “feel” for each manuscript.  In turn this means that certain relationships are starting to emerge, quite without effort.

I know that P and Q will be near-identical; but Q breaks off in chapter 6, so Q is a copy of P, not the other way around.

I know that O will give much the same variants as P and Q; except that it has some oddities of its own.  It is probably a descendant of P also.  I know that C is generally a mainstream manuscript, except that, once in a while, it has a reading which only O shares.  There’s some kind of influence from O.

I know that G and D are very similar.  So similar, in fact, that the layout of the words on the page is sometimes identical.  But G goes a bit weird sometimes.  So G is probably a copy of D, by a careless or imaginative scribe.

M is my oldest manuscript, just.  I know that it won’t tend to agree with the P, Q, O group.  It’s not that similar to G and D.  It usually agrees with W, but not always.  It’s a bit of a rogue.

The 12th century manuscript V is generally in agreement with W, and C.  Except that… sometimes it is the only manuscript to give the reading in the editio princeps, the Mombritius 1483 edition.

There’s no shortcut to this.  It just starts to imprint itself on your mind.  As I go along I am noting what I think may be significant points of variance.  But of course I won’t know until later.  I have to find out by doing.

The critical edition of the Praedestinatus also had a nice couple of pages in which the editor established the relationship of the 5 manuscripts and drew a stemma.  It’s a nice, concise, worked example of what I need to do.  I shall refer to it again.

All this is really quite good fun. I really do recommend it.  Text criticism is not real until you actually have to do it, in the wild, with a text that has never been critically edited, and ask: “just what did the author write?”  Once you do, you really feel that you are achieving something.

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The “Praedestinatus” – an anonymous 5th century text on the “Predestinarian heresy”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In 1643 in Paris, Jacques Sirmond printed a previously unknown Latin text of the 5th century.  He had discovered it in the cathedral library at Reims.  His edition is online here.  The manuscript that he used is now Reims B.M. 70, 9th century (online here), and gives no title or indication of the author.  But Sirmond found that the title “Praedestinatus” – “The Predestined One” – was given by the author in a self-reference in book 3, 15, and so it has been known under that title since.

The text can be found in Migne, PL 53: 579-672, reprinted from Galland’s edition, Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum, t.10 (1774, online here).  In 1999 Franco Gori published a critical edition[1], and in 2000 his edition was reprinted in the Corpus Christianorum, as part of the works of Arnobius the Younger, to whom Sirmond assigned it, and to whom today it seems to be generally attributed[2]. Gori located five manuscripts:

  • A = Augiensis CIX (AD 820-842) – Karlsruhe, Bdische Landesbibl.  Copied by a scribe named Reginbert.
  • C = Casinensis 322 (10-11th century) – Montecassino, Bibl. della Badia.
  • L = Florentinus Laurentianus S. M. 945 (11th c.) – Florence, Bibl. Mediceo-Laurenziana, San Marco collection.
  • D = Dunensis, nunc Brugiensis 158 (12th c.) – Brugge, Stadstbibliothek.
  • R = Remensis 70 (9th century) –  Reims, Bibliothèque Municipale.

Finally – and admirably – an English translation by Guido Stucco, with the bare Latin text on the facing page for reference, appeared from Brepols in a useful new series in 2022.[3].  The Stucco volume also has a very useful introduction to the use of this work down the centuries, including by Archbishop Hincmar of Reims against his unfortunate opponent, the monk Gottschalk, whom the archbishop imprisoned in solitary confinement for the rest of his life.

In the Reims manuscript, the text itself begins with no heading and the first words of the praefatio: “Quotienscumque ad te, O amator Dei, verba doctorum attingunt, …” (“Dear lover of God, every time you hear the words of our wise teachers,…”).

MS. Reims Bibl. Mun. 70, folio 1r – the beginning of Praedestinatus.

The work is divided into three books.  The first book is a catalogue of ninety heresies, mainly derived from Augustine, De haeresibus, but with some interesting additions, especially for the entry on the “Tertullianistae”, which gives us information on Tertullian and his followers not otherwise recorded.  This is far and away the most useful portion of the book, historically.  From it, we learn that the work is indeed plainly 5th century, since the 89th heresy is Nestorianism, but no later heresy is given.  Heresy 90 is the “predestinationists”.  The book says:

These people claim that the election of good people and the rejection of evil ones is up to God’s decision and not human beings, whether they are diligent or negligent.  … They are used to say: “Anyone who has been predestined by God unto evil, even if they wanted to do what is good, they will not be able to reach it. On the other hand, anyone who has been predestined to good, even if they become negligent, they will be led to the good against their own will.” … They say that no one can come to faith in Christ unless they were drawn against their own will by the Father… (Book 1, heresy 90)

The second book is a pamphlet putting forward some heretical views on predestination, derived and expanded from some of Augustine’s statements; and the the third book is a point by point refutation of these.

There are some topics that attract daft people, such as speculation about Revelation; and predestination is definitely one of them.  So I think we can skip the theological discussion!

All the same it is useful to know that this curious little work is now much more readily accessible than it was.

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  1. [1]F. Gori, Praedestinatus di Arnobio il Giovane, Pubblicazioni Agostiniane (1999), ISBN: 9788879610322.  Available here for a trivial price, although I have not seen this.↩
  2. [2]F. Gori, Arnobii Iunioris Praedestinatus qui dicitur, CCSL 23B (2000), ISBN 9782503002552↩
  3. [3]Arnobius Iunior, Praedestinatus, in: Brepols Library of Christian Sources / Patristic and Medieval Texts with English Translations 6, Brepols (2022), ISBN: 9782503596761↩