Tag: Bible

Cramer’s catena on Mark translated into English!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s remarkable what you can find on Google books if you look.  An idle search for “catena” yesterday revealed that someone has translated the entirety of Cramer’s catena on Mark into English!  Yay!

But first, a few words about catenas!

Not everyone will know what a “catena” (the word means “chain”) is.  The term itself is modern.  It refers to medieval Greek biblical commentaries.  These are composed entirely of extracts from earlier writers, chained together by slight wording alterations at the ends.  They usually appear in the margins of Greek bibles; or, rather, the biblical text appears in a small box in the centre of the page, surrounded by a mass of small writing!  The author of each catena entry is indicated, usually using the first letter of their name or something of the kind.  This of course gives plenty of scope for misattribution!  Often the main author used is John Chrysostom.

Catenas seem to arise in the 6th century, and often incorporate very interesting material.  There can be several catenas for each book of the bible, and the relationships between them are tangled things.

In 1840 Cramer published the Greek text of catenas on all the books of the New Testament in 8 volumes.  The work was shoddily done, as John Burgon among others remarked; but it was still an achievement, and Cramer’s work can be found on Archive.org.  But … it was the Greek text only.

The man who has made this translation is a certain William Lamb, The Catena in Marcum: A Byzantine Anthology of Early Commentary on Mark, Brill 2012 (Preview here).

Lamb doesn’t try to edit the text, which is probably a wise decision.  Pages 27-45 discuss what, precisely, it is that we are looking at.

Cramer published his catena on Mark under the name of Cyril of Alexandria, because a couple of the manuscripts attributed it to him.  But Cyril is too early.  Burgon suggested the little-known Victor of Antioch; and Lamb suggests (p.33) that we probably are mistaken to suppose that the work, in anything like its current form, was the work of any one man.

There is much in this.  Burgon took the view that even a compilation must have an author.  But this is to neglect the physical form in which the catena was transmitted; as a massive collection of marginalia.  Marginalia exist in most manuscripts anyway.  But bibles are a special case.

Most printed bibles belonging to members of modern Christian Unions bore the marks of ownership – underlinings, scribbled notes in the margins, and so forth.  Ancient readers had much the same needs in this respect as modern ones.  So it seems idle to doubt that notes on the meaning of the text would not arise spontaneously in manuscript copies of the scriptures.  A copy in a monastic library might well acquire marginalia from several hands, all of it excerpted from other books in that library, and placed in the (wide) margins where they would be useful.  Over time, we may suppose, some of these bibles could acquire quite a lot of marginal items.

Would a scribe copy such marginalia?  Surely he might.  Because the marginalia were not idle scribblings, but useful commentary.  Scholia get copied, as we know.

A body of marginalia may, quite naturally, evolve into the sort of catena that we see in medieval manuscripts.  If so, then there may indeed be no original author.

Later, of course, someone may decide to compose a set of marginalia.  Such a task is well within the capabilities of medieval scholarship, after all.

It’s hard to be sure.  All this is speculative.  But it is far from impossible.

If any of this is true, however, it does point to the exceeding difficulty in editing such a “text” – because it isn’t really a text at all.  It is whatever somebody thought worth adding to a bible margin.

Lamb’s book is a great deal more than just a translation.  The translation is the item of permanent value, for scholarship ages; but the scholarship in the book is also very welcome.  Chapter 2, which surveys the scholarship and the manuscript tradition, is interesting throughout and I refer you to the online preview.

It is a book to which I wish I had access.  The price is not as bad as some; but at $163 on Amazon.com, it is still prohibitive.

I look forward to seeing bootleg PDF’s in circulation!

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Farewell to the NIV?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The New International Version of the bible was on course to become the new standard English translation; until, in an act of incredible hubris and folly, the publishers, Zondervan, decided to tinker with it and keep tinkering with it.  Not, one might add, in the interests of greater accuracy, but to make it “gender neutral”.   But “gender neutrality” is not a principle of text criticism, nor of biblical theology, but a principle of the modern political movement referred to as “political correctness”.  So the publisher has acted to corrupt the translation in the interests of a modern political lobby – an incredible thing to do.  It went down about as well as you might expect; and I have written here about the story.

This week I came across an interesting blog post entitled “Farewell NIV”.

The version that many grew up reading has finally ridden off into the sunset, never to return. Zondervan has phased it out, buried it, and replaced it with something else.

Many people denied that a significant change had taken place, and tried to act like the Bible being sold now as the NIV is indeed the NIV they grew up with. That myth was sustainable for a while, but eventually it just didn’t work. This year many Christian schools finally dropped the NIV, and replaced it with something else. Even AWANA was forced to make the change.  …

[This] is a FAQ guide to the NIV, with an explanation for why churches and ministries are dropping it:

Why did so many churches and schools change their translation this year?  

Because Zondervan, the company that makes the NIV, stopped publishing it last year. It was widely used in churches and schools, and this changed forced those that used to find a new translation.

What do you mean they stopped publishing it? I see the NIV still for sale in book stores.

A brief history of the NIV: Translated in 1984, it quickly became one of the most popular versions, especially in schools. Then in 2002 Zondervan released an update (TNIV), which went over as well as New Coke, and the beloved NIV was resurrected. This time Zondervan learned from their errors, and released an update that they called the NIV2011, and for one year they sold both it and the NIV. But with a name like NIV2011, shelf-life was obviously not in view, and last year they simply dropped the old and beloved NIV, and then shrewdly dropped the “2011” from the updated one. In short, they pulled a switcheroo. What you see on shelves today is the new version which is sold and marketed as the NIV.

How is the NIV on the shelves now different from the one I’ve been reading for 20 years?

There have been deniers about the demise of the NIV. Many people have tried to hold onto the idea that the new one is the same as the old. After all, they have the same names, so how could they be that different? But the more people have tried to use the new one, the more the changes are evident.

Here are the stats: 40% of verses have been changed from the ’84 edition of the NIV. The stat that Zondervan gives is that 95% of the Bible remains unchanged. I assume they are counting words and not verses, but even so I’m not sure how they got that number. When you consider individual words, the new version is 9% new. That might not seem like a lot, but in schools and with curriculum,  verses are what is important, and that means that 4 out of 10 passages needed to be updated.

The whole post is worth reading, and makes me deeply sad.  I have used the NIV since my first days as a believer.  I too feel loss.

But who can now trust the “new NIV”, under whatever marketing name it is produced?  Who will trust any translation labelled “NIV”?

This sort of thing should not happen.  The author is quite right to say that Zondervan have destroyed the NIV; because, since you can’t buy it, and none of us want the TNIV (or whatever they call it), it is effectively dead.

On a humorous note, old copies of the Gideons’ bible may suddenly become rather valuable!

I cannot avoid feeling that Zondervan have not acted with integrity.  It pains me to say this, since I know otherwise only good things about them.  But you don’t address a real question of the utmost urgency — is this a corrupt version? — by the sort of “switcheroo” tactics that have been employed.  No: to do that is to railroad opposition; it is the kind of tactics used by lobby groups to force unpopular measures on a democracy which is denied the opportunity to vote.

Very, very sad.  I imagine we will all use the ESV instead now.  But I preferred the old NIV.

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A 2-3rd c. papyrus “title page”?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An extremely interesting article on the Brice C. Jones blog about a piece of papyrus, found inside a leather binding, which is blank except for “Gospel according to Matthew” in Greek on the recto.  Simon Gathercole has written about it.[1]  The suggestion is that this is the “cover-leaf” for a papyrus codex, and that the title was written on the outside.

Jones rightly queries one element in this: the suggestion that the first page of the codex had the title on the recto, and a blank verso, before the text began.

Now I have seen quite a few parchment codices where folio 1 recto is blank, and the text begins on the verso.  Indeed this is the case in British Library Addit. 12150, which the colophon dates to 411 A.D.  The reason for it is undoubtedly to protect the text.

All the same, the title of ancient works was often placed outside the work altogether, on a sittybos, or slip of parchment hung from one of the wooden ends on which the roll was wound.  So it seems possible that someone got creative here.   If this is not a fly-leaf, then what is it?

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  1. [1]Simon Gathercole, “The Earliest Manuscript Title of Matthew’s Gospel (BnF Suppl. gr. 1120 ii 3/P4),” Novum Testamentum.↩

Stephen Langton and the modern chapter divisions of the bible

Posted on by Roger Pearse

If you read any book on the text of the bible, you will sooner or later come across a statement that the chapter divisions in our modern bibles are not ancient, but are the work of Cardinal Stephen Langton, the medieval Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 1228 AD.  I have never seen this claim referenced to primary sources, however, which means that it is hard to check.

One of the better versions of this story is in Metzger’s Early versions of the New Testament.[1]  It reads as follows:

The custom of referring to chapters when quoting from the Scriptures was rare before the twelfth century. [1] The development of the lecture and reportatio method, however, must have shown the convenience of such a practice. The chief difficulty to its adoption arose from the lack of one generally agreed-upon system, for several systems of chapter-division from late antiquity and the early medieval period were current. The diversity was felt most acutely at the University of Paris, where the international provenance of the student body showed most clearly the absolute need for a standardized system of capitulation,[2] as well as a standardized canonical order of scriptural books.[3]  Uniformity was introduced amid such chaotic conditions by the Paris scholars, notably, as it appears,[4] by Stephen Langton (d. 1228), then a doctor of the University of Paris, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the barons in the struggle which gave birth to the Magna Carta. His system, which is substantially the one in use today, was adopted in the earliest printed editions of the Vulgate. The chapters were at first subdivided into seven portions (not paragraphs), marked in the margin by the letters a, b, c, d, c, f, g, reference being made by the chapter number and the letter under which the passage occurred. In the shorter Psalms, however, the division did not always extend to seven.

[1] Cf. O. Schmidt, Über verschiedene Eintheilungen der heiligen Schrift (Graz, 1892), and A. Landgraf, ‘Die Schriftzitate in der Scholastik um die Wende des 12. zum 13. Jahrh.’, Bib., xviii (1937), 74-94.
[2] On the diversity of earlier chapter divisions, see the tabulation of differences in P. Martin, ‘Le texte parisien de la Vulgate latine’, Mu, viii (1889),444-66, and ix (1890), 55-70, and especially the important monographs by De Bruyne, Sommaires, divisions et rubriques de la Bible latine (Namur, 1920); for a summary of part of De Bruyne’s research, see Patrick McGurk, Latin Gospel Books from A.D. 400 to A.D. 800 (Les Publications de Scriptorium, vol. v; Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam, 1961), pp. 110-21.
[3] For a list of 284 different sequences of scriptural books in Latin manuscripts, see Berger, Histoire de la Vulgate, pp. 331-9; and for a list of twenty different sequences of the Pauline Epistles in Greek, Latin, and Coptic manuscripts, see H. J. Frede, Vetus Latina, xxiv/2, 4te Lieferung (Freiburg, 1969), pp. 290-303, and id., ‘Die Ordnung der Paulusbricfe’, Studia Evangelica, vi, ed. by E. A. Livingstone (TU cxii; Berlin, 1973), pp. 122-7.
[4] On the ambiguous evidence supporting the attribution to Langton, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn. (New York, 1952), pp. 222-4.

The absence of primary sources in this bibliography may be noted.

Recently I was reading Diana Albino’s article on chapter divisions and chapter titles in ancient texts[2] and found some interesting statements:

The modern division into chapters of the books of the Bible was carried out in the West by Cardinal Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury (+ 1228), rather than by Lanfranc, also Archbishop of Canterbury (+ 1089), to whom it has been erroneously attributed.

In a manuscript in the Bodleian, no. 487, probably written in 1448, we find this precise testimony: “1228: Magister Stephanus de Langueton, archiepiscopus centuariensis obiit qui biblia apud parisium quotavit.” [28]. (I.e. “1228: Master Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury died, who divided up the bible at Paris.”)

Another witness, equally precise and also older, is that of Nicolas Trivet (1258-1328) [29], who wrote about Stephen Langton: “Hic super totam Bibliam postillas fecit et eam per capitula, quibus nunc utuntur moderni distinxit; ….”. (“Here he made postillas throughout the whole bible, and split it into chapters, which are now used by modern people; …”)

Otto Schmid [30] has collected the evidence of the manuscripts of the Bible, from which we may deduce with certainty that Stephen Langton divided the Bible into chapters.

We also know that the work was performed in 1204-1205, when he was a professor at the University of Paris [31]. This information was obtained by Martin from manuscript 1417 of the National Library of Paris. The Langtonian division into chapters was introduced in 1226 in the edition of the Vulgate known as the Paris Bible.

[28] According to the lexicon of Du Cange, “quotare” means: to divide into chapters and verses.
[29] N. Trivet, Annales sex regum angliae, ed. A. Hall, Oxford, 1719, p. 182.  [Archive.org; p.216 of the 1845 reprint]
[30] O. Schmid, Ueber verschieden Einteilungen der heiligen Schrift, insbesondere über die Capitel-Einteilung Stephan Langtone im XIII Jahrhunderte, Graz, 1892, p. 56-106. [Google books]
[31] Paulin Martin: Introduction à la critique générale de l’Ancien Testament, Paris, 1887-1888, t. II, p. 461-474.

These statements are very interesting, but for more details we need to refer to Schmid’s work, On the divisions of Holy Scripture and the chapter divisions of Stephen Langton in the 13th c.

Schmid states on p.56 that the first statement may be found on fol. 110 of Ms. Bodl. 487.  On p.58 he states that it first became known to scholarship via Casimir Oudin, Comment. de scriptoribus eccles., Lips. 1772, vol. 2, col. 1702.  This was repeated by later scholars.

According to Schmid, Trivet’s statement was also copied by a considerable number of scholars, whom he lists.

Schmid also has something to say about Paulin Martin’s statement.  Notably the ms. is not 1447, as Albino gives it, but Ms. Paris, BNF lat. 14417.  This codex is a 13th c. miscellaneous codex of 316 folios, originally from St. Victor.  On f. 125v-126v there is a list of chapters of scripture. (This is followed by commentary on scripture by Langton)  The list of chapters is headed, Capitula Canthuar. archiepiscopi super bibliotec. (Chapters of the archbishop of Canterbury on the bible.)  Schmid then gives an edition of the chapter title list verbatim on p.59-92. He then goes on to say (p.92):

From this list it will be seen that the chapter divisions of Stephan Langton are generally the same as those contained in the Clementine Vulgate, but are not the same in terms of both number of chapters of individual sacred books, as well as with regard to the beginnings of some chapters of the same. The difference is most striking for Judith and Esther.  The books Paralip., Esdras and Nehemiah are counted as one book, but otherwise the difference in the number of chapters is usually only 1. We give below a brief overview of the difference in the number of chapters, where there is one, between Langton’s division and the Clementine Vulgate. ….

We cannot decide whether Langton made and published a number of versions of his division of scripture into chapters, nor whether the version above is a later redaction of it, or the only version.  However it certainly leaves us with the question of when and where he worked out the division.

Trivet (see p.56) in his report leaves it vague as to where Langton worked on his chapter division.  But H. Knyghton  specifies Paris explicitly; apud Parisium quotavit.  This gives us a guide to determine the date.  Langton was made a cardinal on 22nd June 1206 by his patron Innocent III, who had studied in Paris and probably had Langton as a colleague.  This meant that Langton in 1207, when there were great disputes about the next appointment to the see of Canterbury, was elected to it in Rome.

From this he concludes that the work was done not long after 1201, probably in 1204-5, while he was teaching in Paris.  Robert de Courson, also an Englishman, quotes passages of scripture using the new system in his Summa, written between 1198-1216 (since it refers to Petrus Cantor, d. 1197, and a council held in 1201, but not to the revocation of a decretal in 1216).  It is extant in Ms. lat. Bibliotheque Nationale 8268, 8269 and other mss.  He adds:

Denifle in his Archiv für Literatur und Kirchengeschichte, l. c., p. 291, expresses the opinion that Langton’s divisions were propagated to France and other countries through the Paris Bible, the Exemplar Parisiense (so-called by Roger Bacon), on which Denifle’s thorough investigations have shed new light.  This view can only be accepted, since Paris and France in the 11th century, as in the 12th and 13th century, was the seat and centre of theological learning, where many distinguished men settled and where anyone who sought to study theology would choose to come.

The returning students, who had learned and used the new division in Paris, brought it back to their homes.  Langton’s work was also disseminated by the numerous copies of the Paris bible.  Sam. Berger has found confirmation of the author of the new division in ms. 340 of the town library of Lyons, in which the proverbs begin with the words, Incipiunt parabole Salomonis distincte per capitula secundum mag. Stephanum archiepis. (Here begin the parables of Solomon split into chapters according [to the system of] master Stephen the archbishop.)  The divisions are also found in the Paris, Bibliotheque Mazarine ms. 29, written in 1231 AD.  Certainly it will have appeared in bible manuscripts before this date.

It is not clear what inspired Langton’s work.  Perhaps it was the wish of the Paris theologians to have a simpler system by which to cite the scriptures, or, as some think, the chaos of different divisions and numbers in the manuscripts caused a need for a unified system.  Perhaps it was the industrious Langton’s studies on scripture – we have glosses from him on almost the whole of scripture – which led him to consider a simpler division as desirable.

Denifle, in his work, Die Universitäten des Mittelalters, Berlin 1886, and in other places, and in his Chartularium Univers. Paris., tom. I, Paris. 1889, Introd. p. VIII-X, notes that the university of Paris was born from the union of different teachers between 1200-1208, pretty much around the time when Langton was teaching in Paris and performing his division of the scripture into chapters.  Possibly it was this circumstance that caused Langton to perform his work for the newly formed institution.

He continues that in the 13th century older divisions are still seen, but either the new ones are added and the old erased, or else the new ones would be added in the margin.  This was so even in old manuscripts like the Codex Amiatinus, where the new divisions appear in the margins.  In the new 13th c. mss. the new divisions were placed right in the text.  In older mss. notes appeared in the margin: hic non notatur/signatur capitolum (here the chapter is not marked); hic non incipit cap. (here the chapter does not begin); or, secundum libros bene correctos hic debet incipit cap.( according to well-corrected mss, here the chapter should begin.)  Mixed witnesses appear in some mss., such as ms. Graz c. 186.  Writing a bible took time.  In this case it was begun with capitulationem at the start of the book and stichometric numbers at the end, and divided according to older systems.  Suddenly the new system appears, and the old Capitula, Tituli, Breves  and verse numbering is omitted.

Schmid then discusses the evidence for further tweaking of the system from the manuscripts.  Some books that he had treated as one were divided into  two (e.g. Esdras).  But the difference between the original and the Clementine Vulgate is usually only a verse or two.  He says that there is still some variation, even once printing begins.

The new divisions also made their way into Hebrew mss. of the Old Testament, although only marked in the margins by Christian hands.  The first printed edition of the Hebrew bible to have them was the 1523 Venice edition by Dom. Bomberg.

Greek manuscripts of the New Testament acquired these divisions only in the 15th century, especially after the fall of Constantinople, as Greeks fled to the west with their manuscripts.

Interestingly Schmid also discusses (p.108) the modern division into verses by Robert Stephanus, the printer.  In the preface to his 1551 bilingual edition of the New Testament, Greek and Latin, Stephanus states:

Quod autem per quosdam ut vocant versiculos opus distinximus, id vetustissima Graeca Latinaque exemplaria secuti fecimus, eo autem libentius sumus imitati, quod hac ratione utraque translatio posset omnino e regione graeco contextui respondere.

That is, he split the work into what are called “versiculos”, because in this way anyone could cross-reference the translation and the corresponding passage of Greek.

Schmid then continues with further details of how the division into verses appeared in the early editions, but at this point we must leave him.

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  1. [1]B. Metzger, The early versions of the New Testament: Their origin, transmission and limitations, Oxford University Press (1977), p.347.↩
  2. [2] D. ALBINO, La divisione in capitoli nelle opera degli Antichi, in Università di Napoli. Annali della Facoltà di lettere e filosofia 10 (1962-63), pp. 219-234; see p.232.↩

Jerome’s Commentary on Jonah – online in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I discovered today that there is online a thesis containing an English translation of Jerome’s Commentary on Jonah.  It was made by Timothy Michael Hegedus in 1991.  It’s here.  I am OCR’ing the PDF as I write!

I learned about this via AWOL.  There is a website Open Access Theses and Dissertations.  This is a portal to other online sites of dissertations.  A query on “Eusebius” quickly brought up the item.

Magic!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via AWOL I learn that an edition and translation of Bar Hebraeus’ scholia on the Old Testament is now available in PDF form online from the University of Chicago.  The PDF is here (linked on that page under the red down-arrow next to the text “Terms of Use”.

In addition, an interesting volume, The Early Text of the New Testament, ed. Charles E. Hill and Michael J. Kruger, Oxford, has appeared and is discussed by Larry Hurtado here.  It has wider interest than merely biblical scholars:

There are cogent discussions of wider issues, including in particular Harry Gamble, “The Book Trade in the Roman Empire” (pp. 23-36), and Kruger (a former PhD student), “Early Christian Attitudes toward the Reproduction of Texts” (pp. 63-80).  …

Charles Hill (“‘In These Very Words’:  Methods and Standards of Literary Brorowing in the Second Century,” pp. 261-81) provides a valuable study showing that pagan and Christian authors followed a different set of conventions in citing texts than used by copyists of texts.  …

This volume (though expensive!) is now probably the most up to date analysis of earliest evidence about the state and transmission of NT writings in the second century CE.  Given the limitations of our evidence, scholars are required to make the best inferences they can.  This volume provides essential resources in doing so, and largely shows that we can with some confidence posit that the NT writings, essentially as we know them, were copied for both ecclesial and private reading.

Which is what we would tend to expect, surely, of any ancient literary text not belonging to the corpus of astrological handbooks or similarly fluid literature?

Michael Kruger adds a note here.

I’d very much like to read this volume: it seems likely to be relevant to classical and patristic scholars.  It’s about $175, tho, which is a bit above my budget!

UPDATE: A corrrespondent writes to point out that I have confused two books in the above.  I referred to The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis. Second Edition (eds M.W. Holmes & B.D. Ehrman; NTTSD 42; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2012), which appeared at a ridiculous price ($314).  But the book that I was discussing was actually the Charles Hill volume!  Many thanks for the correction.  Friday night tiredness, I’m afraid, is responsible.

The Holmes volume, however, is also likely to be interesting, as may be seen from the list of chapters given by Peter Head here.  But at $341 is way out of reach.  However I suspect it will be quickly pirated in PDF form, unless students have become wealthy in the last few weeks!

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Notes on Walter Bauer, “Orthodoxy and heresy” – part 1

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A little while ago I was encouraged to read Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy.  Last weekend the book (in English translation) arrived by ILL, and last night I started to read it.

At the moment I have no overall verdict on the book, but a couple of passages struck me, and are worthy of comment for themselves.  That I have not discussed other parts of the same chapter does not mean, of course, that I do not have a problem there also; merely that they did not stick in my head in the same way.

First a couple of methodological items.

From the introduction:

In our day and age, there is no longer any debate that in terms of a scientific approach to history, the New Testament writings cannot be understood properly if one now looks back on them … as sacred books, and prizes them as constituent parts of the celestial charter of salvation, with all the attendant characteristics.

It’s good to know that there is “no longer any debate” among some bunch of deadheads that the New Testament cannot be understood “properly” other than on the basis that it is not scripture.  Quite why a scholarly approach requires a formal creedal statement of unbelief is not explained.  In the next paragraph he utters the following:

We can determine adequately the significance the “heretics” possessed … only when we … without hesitation cast all our preconceived ideas aside. We must remain open to all possibilities.

But only, apparently, those possibilities which exclude the idea that the Christian religion might be true? 

Methodologically this is very bad stuff.  But something must be allowed for the fact that we’re reading a translation of an author writing in German, and evidently not very critically minded.  If he had said something like the following, few would have objected:

In order to study the early history of the church, we must be wary of allowing later perspectives from a more fully developed orthodox position to be back-projected onto the period.  It seems unlikely that the first possessors of the New Testament documents recognised them as scripture in the way that they did the Old Testament; and our analysis cannot presuppose that they did.

This, probably, is what Bauer would like his readers to suppose is being said here, and it’s all testably true.  There is, however, a measurable distance between this and what Bauer actually says.  And Bauer exploits this fact to slip in points that are not discussed or evidenced.

In chapter 1 there was a positive gem:

When we ask how and when Christianity gained influence in this region, it is unnecessary to begin with a survey of the sources – – which are in Syriac, Greek, and a few in Latin. Instead, for the sake of convenience, we will combine the information concerning the sources with the evaluation of them and with the collection of discernible data made possible thereby.

Convenience?  Whose convenience is it, one wonders?  The reader will usually not have all the relevant data in his head.  Any reasonable analysis of the data must start with tabulating it.

There is only one situation in which people try not to allow the data to speak for itself; when they are engaged in trying to debunk it to peddle some theory of their own.  This I always think of as the Von Daniken approach, after the Swiss hotel-keeper whose efforts brightened my teenage years and for whom I retain some affection even now.  I regret that I feel no such affection, however, for such manipulation in scholarly works.

Now for something substantive, and much more interesting!

Bauer is trying to debunk all evidence of Christianity in Edessa, presumably — I haven’t reached that part of the book yet — in order to argue from an absence of evidence, which he is manufacturing here, that this is evidence of absence.  It’s a charmless process that does nothing to gain the reader’s respect.   But it includes this argument, which caused me to scratch my head:

 … the existence of ecclesiastically organized Christianity in Edessa at this time cannot be asserted with any confidence … Eusebius …

d) EH 5.23.4: At the time of the Roman bishop Victor (189-99), gatherings of bishops took place everywhere on the matter of the Easter controversy, and Eusebius still knows of letters in which the church leaders have set down their opinion. In this connection, the following localities are enumerated: Palestine, Rome, Pontus, Gaul, and then the “Osroëne and the cities there.”

The phrase “and the cities there” is as unusual as it is superfluous. Where else are the Osroëne bishops supposed to have been situated except in the “cities there”?

But what speaks even more decisively against these words than this sort of observation is the fact that the earliest witness for the text of Eusebius, the Latin translation of Rufinus, does not contain the words “as well as from those in the Osroëne and the cities there.” This cannot be due to tampering with the text by the Italian translator, for whom eastern matters are of no great concern.

In those books with which he has supplemented Eusebius’ History, Rufinus mentions Mesopotamia and Edessa several times (11.5 and 8 at the end; see below, n.24).

Thus the only remaining possibility is that in his copy of EH 5.23.4 he found no reference to the Osroëne, but that we are dealing here with a grammatically awkward interpolation by a later person who noted the omission of Edessa and its environs.

Over paragraphing is mine.  We should note the absence of discussion of the Syriac and Armenian versions, which I likewise am not equipped to examine.

Let’s put that argument into a systematic form, with one or two additions from my own knowledge:

  1. Eusebius refers to “church officials” in Osroene and its cities.
  2. The earliest extant Greek texts of Eusebius’s Church History are 9th century.
  3. Rufinus translated/condensed the 10 books of Eusebius into 9, and then added 2 books of his own.
  4. The earliest extant copies of the Latin translation by Rufinus are earlier than the Greek of the original.
  5. Therefore we can presume that what Rufinus omitted was not part of the text of Eusebius, but was interpolated later.

On the face of it, that is a weird, weird argument.  Why on earth would we argue from the absence of text in an epitome?  But is Rufinus an epitome?  I learn[1] that in fact it is largely a translation: in his preface, given at the link below, he states that he omitted most of book 10 of Eusebius, added what was left to book 9, and then composed 2 additional books. 

I can’t say that I have ever compared the Latin of Rufinus with the Greek text — Schwartz’ GCS edition prints both on facing pages.   However in the Schwartz edition, there seems to be a lot of commonality.  I learn from a web search that somewhere there is an article on the differences, by Schwartz himself, but not the bibliographic reference.

It would be interesting to know better what the differences are. 

Is the argument sound?  I’d be very sceptical about arguing from a versio like this, and likewise from the argument that the existence of earlier mss is proof of better preservation necessarily.  It’s possible.  It’s just a bit weak.

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  1. [1]Rosamund McKitterick, History and memory in the Carolingian world, p.228 f., in Google Books preview here.↩

A new work by Aristotle in the Green collection?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I  learned of the Green Collection, a large private collection of manuscripts and papyri.  It is owned by the Green family of Oklahoma, who are (a) billionaires and (b) Christians.  In consequence they have been collecting material of wide interest. 

Brill have announced a new series of publications for the papyri:

The new series fits well among Brill’s strong portfolio of Classical Studies and Biblical and Religious Studies publications, as well as its extensive list of digitized primary source manuscript collections. Comprising of one to two new volumes per year, the new series will publish approximately 20 papyri with a thorough description, commentary with images, and web-based support for further resources.

The first forthcoming volume in the series, planned to be released in early 2013, is dedicated to an early 3c BCE papyrus containing an extensive, undocumented work by Aristotle on reason, and is currently being analyzed by a research group at Oxford University.

The Green Collection contains over 50,000 items, and now holds nearly 15,000 papyri acquired from private collections in Europe, and continues to grow. The collection is approximately 70% Greek, 15% Coptic and 15% late Egyptian. The collection is currently unpublished and contains items of extraordinary importance, including some of the earliest Greek literary texts known, dating to the early 3c BCE. A major building near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. was purchased in July 2012 to house an international museum for these items.

They are also working with scholars at Tyndale House in Cambridge:

The Green Collection has announced that the Codex Climaci Rescriptus – containing the earliest-known texts of Scripture in something close to Jesus’ household language – will return to the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the collection’s international research arm, the Green Scholars Initiative.

Top manuscript scholars from Cambridge’s Tyndale House will conduct intensive, high-tech research on the codex’s 137 reused vellum leaves, which feature overlapping layers of text. Recent technological breakthroughs developed by Green Scholars at the University of Oxford allow once unreadable, underlying text from the codex to be “lifted” to the surface for enhanced study through a process known as “multi-spectral imaging.”

In selecting Cambridge as the official research home of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, Green Scholars Initiative Director Dr. Jerry Pattengale said, “Tyndale House is a perfect fit for this project given both its excellent scholars and its reputation in biblical studies. We are pleased with the strength of their ancient languages, from Aramaic, Syriac and Hebrew to Greek and Coptic – and, just as important, their passionate interest in biblical studies.”

They have launched the Green Scholars Initiative:

The Green Scholars Initiative is an international research project involving dozens of institutions under the auspices of The Green Collection, the world’s newest and largest private collection of rare biblical texts and artifacts.

Through thousands of cuneiform texts and papyri, Dead Sea Scrolls and Coptic texts to Gutenberg, Wycliff, Tyndale, Thomas à Kempis, Erasmus, King James and a litany of Reformation and post-Reformation original texts, the Green Scholars Initiative brings established and young scholars together to pioneer groundbreaking biblical discoveries

There will be a new museum in Washington:

A sampling of the Bible museum’s offerings — from the collection of more than 40,000 artifacts — have been displayed in the Passages Exhibit at the Vatican and in Oklahoma City and Atlanta and will soon appear in Charlotte, N.C.

All this is very encouraging for papyrus and manuscript studies: a family with the resources to collect and publish materials, and the desire to do so.  And for once it is being done from a Christian perspective too.  Well done!

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May God curse the NIV committee and its owners!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have, just this instant, come across an example of how the NIV is being corrupted deliberately, for politically correct reasons, in order to deceive.  It nearly caught me out, as I was doing a bible study. 

I was asked to do something on St. Paul and leadership of women (why me?!).  So I looked up 1 Corinthians 11:34 in the bible gateway.

34 Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. 35 If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

OK, that’s fair enough.  But then I noticed something relevant to my bible study of the place of women in a congregation:

26 What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.

And that clarifies the subject, and is relevant to my subject: that “sisters” are taking part in the service, speaking and giving instruction, revelation, etc.

At this point a warning bell went off, and I went to consult my old printed NIV.  And I find … that “and sisters” is a modern interpolation!  It isn’t there in the Greek, which simply reads “adelphoi”, and which would never be translated any other way but “brothers” except through special pleading.  Verse 26, on this highly controversial subject, does NOT contain a relevant statement.  Yet I could have taught on this, to a congregation who knew no better, something that is actually not in the bible.

This is not trivial.  This is deliberate corruption of the scriptures, on a subject where the world is demanding that Christians follow its dogma.  I confess that I am furious.  The people who will be receiving this teaching are under every kind of moral pressure.  We should be able to rely on our bible translations!!!

Let us pray that God will vindicate his judgement on those who have chosen to do this evil, who have chosen to corrupt the word of life and to poison it with material designed to mislead and disarm Christians faced with urgent temptation by the evil one.  May these wicked men endure every evil that can befall a man; for they have chosen to pour contempt on the Holy Spirit.

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Early papyrus fragment of Romans 9-10?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via Paleojudaica I see a report on Evangelical Textual Criticism of an interesting CNN report.  The statement is that “within the last 48 hours” a fragment of Romans has been discovered, dated to the mid-2nd century AD.  The interview is vague, but it sounds as if a team somewhere in the US has been taking something — cartonage from an Egyptian burial? — and separating out the layers, and finding fragments of all sorts of things.  What else, one wonders?

I don’t suppose that I am alone in feeling rather uncomfortable with the context in which this announcement is made — essentially a non-specialist talking to a reporter about an exhibition for the general public.  I think we need to be very wary here.

There is no reason why such a discovery should not be made, it must be said.  It’s not really that early, for New Testament papyri.  Second century Christian papyri are familiar to us all.  Classical and patristic scholars are less fortunate, of course.

But before we get too excited, let’s be sure of the facts.

Hope it’s true!

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