Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
An email reached me last week from someone claiming to have experience of translating Cyril of Alexandria. I have dusted off the Apologeticum ad imperatorem, therefore, and asked him to do the first page as a sample. If it is OK, then perhaps we will at last get that work in English. The text is […]
Today I learned from a post by Jim Davila that Isaac Casaubon, the celebrated 17th century philologist, determined that the works transmitted from antiquity under the name of Hermes Trismegistus were not the ancient items that they professed, but rather belonged to the Hellenistic era. I knew that the “Hermetic corpus” was bogus, but not why. […]
We all know Franz Cumont’s Textes et Monumentes, which collected all the ancient sources on Mithras known a century ago. What few realise is that a translation was made of most of the literary fragments that he published. It’s A. S. Geden, Select passages illustrating Mithraism. It was published by SPCK in 1925; and since Mr. […]
Still busy with dull stuff, but I have been revising the Wikipedia article on Areimanios. “Who he?” I hear you cry? Well Areimanios is the Greek name for Ahriman, the Persian evil spirit, used in descriptions of Zoroastrianism in Plutarch and the like. Except … there’s more. There are some odd traces of a non-evil […]
I happened to see this claim in an online puff for the curious theories of Acharya S: The salvific death and resurrection at Easter of the god, the initiation as remover of sin, and the notion of becoming “born again,” are all ages-old Pagan motifs or mysteries rehashed in the later Christianity. The all-important death-and-resurrection […]
I’m looking at Preisendanz’ edition of the Greek magical papyri. I thought some notes on one of them, PGM IV, also known as the great magical book, or the great spell-book, might be useful. This is the codex that contains the so-called Mithras liturgy — in reality merely a spell-ritual. The so-called “great Paris magical […]
I find that the Wikipedia Mithras article is currently being vandalised by an anonymous atheist who has read one article (by Marvin Meyer) in one non-scholarly book on the subject, and is determined that all articles in Wikipedia shall reflect what he believes is the truth — that Christianity and Mithras are somehow connected. With […]
I’ve spent some time collecting literary testimonies about the origins of Serapis. For the moment, these are here. A useful article by Richard Gordon is here. Meanwhile Andrew Eastbourne has agreed to review the translation of 4 letters of Isidore of Pelusium which reached me earlier this week. Yesterday I also went back to the […]