Roger Pearse

When the sun is suddenly very hot and the sky is now a blinding blue, it’s hard to go into the study and work on the PC.  It seems rather a waste!  So I have been busy with other things.  The last day or so was spent in buying and setting up a mobile air-conditioning unit for a member of my family.  I shall spend this Friday driving around the countryside and the roads, taking a friend to see my mother.  We’ve meant to do this for years.  In this sort of weather it is good to be in the air-conditioned car with the open road ahead.

I do need to return to collating the text of John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas, but not today.  I have three early editions and nine manuscripts open, in PDF, in Acrobat.  Each one is positioned at my current location.  I have bookmarked each chapter as I reach it.  But I’m becoming a little frustrated at the way that Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 tends to simply crash if left open for long enough.  For of course, when Acrobat crashes, I have to reopen them all, and then tediously find the exact position again.  To avoid doing this, I tend to put the PC to sleep at night, rather than shutting down.  But after a day or three I tend to find that Acrobat has mysteriously vanished.  It’s usable, but could be better.  But all this really feels like a winter task.

Meanwhile I’m getting a fair bit of email correspondence, and doing my best to keep current.  Some of it relates to rather old posts, or material that I put online more  than twenty years ago!  It’s good to see that it still has value.

A little while ago I ordered a cheap second-hand copy of Paula Skreslet’s The Literature of Islam: A Guide to the Primary Sources In English Translation.  This has resided on my breakfast table since, and I am slowly working through it.  It is really a very good guide to early Islamic literature and where to find it in English.  Indeed it comes down to modern times also, complete with Muslim Brotherhood material, although that lies outside my interests.  It also gives useful information about Islam itself.  I had not realised that the Koran is only part of the source material for Islamic doctrine.  The life of Mohammed himself is, apparently, an example to be followed, as recorded in all sorts of sources, and transmitted from one identified person to another.  It is frustrating that such a useful source is not online.  Fortunately it is in print, for $38 for a paperback – although $64 for kindle (!!!).

Trying to read this at breakfast led to the unwelcome discovery that I badly needed new reading glasses.   Like most of us, I have worn glasses since the age of ten.  While working as a computer programmer I used to have two or three screens side by side.  This arrangement makes varifocals useless.  It was far better to get a very cheap pair of prescription computer glasses, for a few dollars, and just leave them by my terminal.  Indeed I got half a dozen and scattered them around the house, in my car, and in my suitcase.  They have served me well.  But sadly they are done; and I bought the first new set – again cheaply – last week.  I wear them as I type.  I shall order more.

Another second-hand book that I ordered, for a shamefully small sum, was a biography of Ritchie Blackmore, the Deep Purple guitarist.  I thought this might be interesting to read once, after seeing a quotation from it, and a hardback was cheaper, by a fluke, than a kindle download.  This was advertised with free postage, and even a small complimentary box of decaffeinated tea!  I’ve not read it yet, so it too sits on my table at breakfast, until I have finished with Skreslet’s book.

I saw online yesterday a claim that academics never read books; they only read the opening portion, and the conclusion.  I wonder if that is true?

In chapter 10 of John the Deacon’s 9th century “Life of St Nicholas” (BHL 6105), we find the following quotation from the gospel of Matthew:

Porro nemini hoc incredibile videatur, quia salvatoris est ista promissio, dicentis, “Si habueritis fidem sicut granum sinapis, dicetis monti,  ‘Transfer te,’ et transferetur.”

Moreover let this not seem incredible to anyone, because that promise is from the Saviour, who says, “If you have faith like a mustard seed, you shall say to the mountain, ‘Move yourself’, and it will be moved.”

This is Matthew 17:19, of course.  And yet… if I look at the Weber-Gryson 5th edition of the Vulgate, the text reads differently:

dicetis monti huic ‘transi hinc’ et transibit.

If I look at Sabatier’s edition of the Vetus Latina, it reads the same.

Nor is this all.  Collating the 4 editions and the 10 manuscripts that I am using for John the Deacon reveals a wide range of readings:

• “dicetis monti,  transfer te, et transferetur” – Fal., M (corrector adds “et” before “dicetis”), O, W, L;
• “dicetis monti transferre et transferi” – Corsi;
• “dicetis monti, transferre et transferetur” – P, B, A;
• “dicetis monti, transfer et transferetur” – G;
• “dicetis huic monti transfer te et transferetur” – D;
• “dicentes monti transfer et transferetur” – C;
• “et dixeritis monti huic, te transfer, transferetur” – Mom., Lipp.;

It’s actually slightly tricky to collate.  The difference between “transfer te” (which can look like “transferte”) and “transferre” is minimal in some cases.  It’s not that easy to decide what the manuscript says, in one or two cases.

Googling produced some interesting results.  But it also identified what is probably the source for this translation of Mt. 17:19.  For this is exactly what appears in a text written around 374 AD.

The “Life of Anthony” by Athanasius of Alexandria was an influential text; and it was important enough to attract, not one, but two independent translations into Latin in the same time period.   Both are edited in the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina vol. 170, ed. Pascal Bertrand and Lois Gandt, who helpful produce a parallel text of both against the Greek at the end.

One of these, by a certain Evagrius of Antioch (discussed at Purple Motes here), is the one with our text.  The CCSL text is (p. 91, chapter 83):

83.  Hucusque Antonius.  Sed nos minime convenit diffidere tam, grande miraculum per hominem potuisse portendi.  Salvatoris enim promissio est, ista dicentis: Si habueritis fidem ut granum sinapis, dicetis huic monti, ‘Transfer te’, et transferetur.…

transfer te] transferre A2, AASS
transferetur] transfertur G1

Note that the “promise of the saviour” is also in here.  I would suggest that John the Deacon had this in mind when he made his “Life of St Nicholas”.

The variants in Evagrius are likewise interesting – that “transferre” is not the majority reading but does indeed appear, and has made its way into the Acta Sanctorum.  It seems to be a corruption of “transfer te”.

The other early translation is anonymous, but reads:

… dicetis monti huic, ‘Transi hinc illic’, et transferetur.…

The CCSL tells me of two editions of Evagrius of Antioch.  The first appeared in 1615, from Heribert Rosweyde in his Vitas Patrum.  This is online here.  It’s the same as the CCSL.  The second was produced by Montfaucon in 1698, as part of his edition of the works of Athanasius, and was reprinted in the PG 26, col. 959, here. This gives yet another version of the words.

‘Hinc transmigra’ et transmigrabit.

But I discover an earlier edition, in Cologne in 1548, in an edition of the works of Athanasius.  Chapter 83 is on f.172v (online here).  This reads exactly the same as the CCSL text.

Interestingly the google search also revealed that the same text as Nicholas appears in the unique manuscript of the first Latin translation of Barlaam and Josaphat, edited in José Martínez Gázquez, Hystoria Barlae et Iosaphat (Bibl. Nacional de Napóles VIII.B.10), CSIC (1997), where the epilogue (p.193, here) gives:

dicetis monti huic: ‘transfer te’ et transferetur.

I understand that the Latin version of Evagrius was a very widely read text.  Clearly it was being read in Naples in the 9th century, when John the Deacon wrote his “Life of St Nicholas”, drawing upon Greek sources just as Evagrius had done before him.

Tomorrow I hope to go up to Cambridge University Library.  I’ve applied online to renew my card, paid them the money they see fit to exact, discovered a Facebook “memory” that tells me that, ten years ago, I was doing exactly the same thing.  While there I hope to look at a Corpus Christianorum volume.  I would also like to look at some of the “Cornish Saints” series of Gilbert H. Doble.

I’m still busy with John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.  I have been collating the Latin text against the four editions and the oldest ten manuscripts to which I have access.  Today I am working my way through chapter 11.  Ahead lie the vast wildernesses of chapters 12 and 13.  I also need to recollate chapters 2-4.  As with everything else, I’m learning as I go, and the way I collated those chapters isn’t what I would do now.

I have the editions and manuscripts open in Adobe Acrobat Pro 9, and I’m adding a bookmark for each chapter as I reach it.  The longer I work on the text, the more familiar it becomes.  So it takes a while to open everything up.  At night, instead of shutting down my PC, I put it into sleep mode, so I don’t lose everything.

But it is summer.  The golden light streaming through the windows makes it hard to spend days on the computer.  Some days I only collate a couple of lines.  But then what does it matter?  It will never be formally published, but rather released on the web.  I’d never intended to spend so much time on all this – nearly a year and a half now.  But it feels worthwhile, and it’s certainly something that I am unlikely to do again.