Tag: Eusebius

I’ve been reminded that the Eusebius project has been running so long that many people may not recall what it contains.

Eusebius wrote a work on Gospel Problems and their Solutions.  This covered disagreements at the start of the gospels, and at the ends.  The work is lost, but a substantial selection in abbreviated form was discovered by Angelo Mai in the 1820’s and chunks quoted verbatim appear everywhere in Greek medieval gospel commentaries.  In addition there are bits of it in Latin, Syriac, Arabic and Coptic translation.  No critical edition of all this has ever appeared, nor any translation into English.  A critical text and French translation of the Abbreviated Selection (ecloge in epitome) did appear last year from Claudio Zamagni, who is attacking the problem.

The book contains an English translation of all these, with minimal notes.  It won’t contain a commentary — a huge task for what is already a lengthy book — but it will contain the original text, facing the translation.  This will be reprinted from wherever the best text is, and will include the Sources Chretiennes text (but not notes) from the recent edition by Claudio Zamagni.

The idea is to make this largely forgotten work as widely available as possible.  So I — or rather my company — shall sell printed copies initially, especially to libraries.  Once that drops off, the translation (but obviously not the text, because I don’t own all of it) will be made available online, perhaps under some open source license.  The earnings from the sales will make it possible for me to commission another translation of some untranslated text.

The Eusebius book is still coming along.

The ISBN agency have been sending me bumpf about customers ordering copies via themselves, as a free service, which is odd since I never asked them to.  I need to read all their tosh first and see what it all amounts to.   I also need to get a company website set up for “Chieftain Publishing”, which I will get done professionally, and have some ideas about.  And someone has to design the book cover.  I’m not sure what considerations apply for the latter.

I have a digest of changes — fairly short so far — to apply in proofing.  My thinking on proofing — I’m open to suggestions! — is that when we have the whole book setup, I will send the PDF to one of the online printing houses and produce a copy for each of the proofers, which we can go through in perfect bound form — a dummy, effectively.  I don’t know about most people, but I don’t work that effectively on-screen at this sort of thing.  I’m not quite sure that the fragments will look right with Greek with no footnotes and English the way it is, and some redistribution may be necessary. 

I also need to see how the book appears in the ISBN catalogue.  I hope they got it right!.  The British Library CIP record needs to  know the number of pages, so I can’t do that yet.  I just realised that sections 01-04 are 254 pages all by themselves <wince>.

The hardback is registered to be £50 (although I could change that), and I was thinking of a paperback at £30; and perhaps a “popular paperback containing maybe only the Abbreviated Selection in translation, perhaps with a more paraphrased translation to sell through Catholic bookshops or something with a rather more popular-style cover and contents.  But the important thing is the first two.

In the end, it will go online (minus whatever belongs to other people, such as the Greek text).  But let’s see how many printed copies we can sell first.  The idea of the project, of course, is that if we can recover most of the cost of commissioning the whole thing, then I can send the money around again and commission some more.  And the printed text serves a useful purpose, making the book available to the academic community as well as the general reader.

This evening has mostly been spent with the PDF’s which contain proof copies of the book.  No more has been typeset — we’re still with just the ecloge plus the Greek fragments of the Ad Stephanum.  But layout tweaks and minor changes abound.

One interesting issue of consistency has arisen.  For the ecloge we are simply reprinting the Sources Chretiennes text, and noting changes in the footnotes to the translation.  But for the fragments it looks as if we incorporated some of the translator’s suggestions, rather than just reprinting Mai / Migne.  Obviously we can do one, or the other, but we should decide!

So it looks as if we will go with the latter — contractually we can’t mess with the SC text — and the translator will be revising the text accordingly.

This raises the interesting issue of how to report changes.  I have found Adobe Acrobat “stickys” — postit-like notes you can add on the PDF — a very effective way to do this.  But it may mean that I have to purchase a number of licenses! 

The translator also has started to write to the typesetter directly.  I’ve had to step in and ask him not to.  Obviously with three people involved, unless all changes come through me we will quickly end up in chaos!  I hope he won’t be upset!

Next week I have to go back to work, so my ability to do a lot of this may be attentuated.  But the typesetter has been doing a super job, and at last the book is coming together.

Good news and bad news.  The good news is that the Bob the typesetter has done all of the ecloge — the abbreviated selection from the full work published by Angelo Mai — and the fragments of the “To Stephanus”.  This is great progress, and looks good.  He’s raised some interesting issues along the way.

The less good news is that it turns out that, while getting the Greek typed up, I managed to forget to include four of the fragments!  Eek!  Thankfully Tom who typed a lot of these is willing to help out again, and save  the day.

I need to spend some more time with the stuff the ISBN agency sent me, but no time today or probably tomorrow.

Another issue is the cover.  I haven’t really thought about this yet, but it needs to be designed.  Also I need to get some testimonials from scholars in the field for the back cover (and probably pay for them).  Finally I need to get a website up to sell the things.  Much still to do, still to do.

The text and translation which I am bringing out of Eusebius of Caesarea: Gospel Problems and Solutions now has an ISBN – 978-0-9566540-0-7.  Another step forward!

I do need to take a week off and just potter around. But I’m still hacking away at the Eusebius. 

I sometimes go out to a local restaurant.  I tend to find that it takes them a while to take my order, to serve each course, and so on, so I tend to take a book with me.  In this case I took the print-off’s of the Eusebius volume, and a red pen, and worked through  the Syriac fragments.  I came back and typed them up, and then did similar changes to the Coptic and Arabic.  And … somehow it’s 5 O’Clock! 

Looking at the Coptic made me realise how little related these were to the rest of the fragments.  I suspect that a good many of them are spurious.

I’ve passed the manuscript across to someone to advise on whether to get it professionally edited or to go straight to typesetting.

The testimony of Eusebius of Caesarea about Christian origins has often been found inconvenient by those determined to attack the church.  Ever since Gibbon, the accusation has been made that Eusebius deliberately suppressed material that might throw discredit on the church.  Indeed Gibbon insinuated, and fools have believed, that Eusebius actually made a policy of such activity; that telling lies for the glory of God was acceptable.

In Eusebius’ Gospel Problems and Solutions, To Stephanus question 4, I find the following statement on precisely that issue:

May such an argument, that a falsehood has been composed to the praise and glorification of Christ, never by any means prevail in the church of Christ and of God, the fathers of the strict truth!

Worth remembering, I think, when the headbangers howl.