Tag: Eusebius

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This is a busy time of year, when the government requires that we do unpaid labour as clerks, filling in tax returns.  It’s worse if you are self-employed, for your business also must be accounted for to the tax collectors.  That time is now upon me.  Still there is progress.

The Eusebius project is now awaiting a transcription of the Syriac fragments.  This will be done by the end of May, I have been told.  That date is now my target date for completion of the editing of the volume.  I’m also awaiting some tweaks to the Coptic translation, but these can be omitted if need be.

The Origen project has passed a milestone.  The final version of the text and translation of all the Greek fragments of Origen’s Homilies on Ezechiel and other works on the same book has now been done.  The introduction to that section needs a few changes, but the body is done.  The translation of the Latin needs some revision, but only five sermons remain to do.

The translation of John Chrysostom’s In Kalendas, on the pagan festival of New Year, is proceeding apace and another chunk arrived today.  This will be given away online.

My own translation of Chrysostom’s first sermon is about half done.  It’s not a great sermon — nor a great translation! — but it will get done as and when I can get time from chores.

A sample of Severian of Gabala’s sermon De pace is now with the reviewer.  The latter will also soon finish up his translation of Eusebius’ De solemnitate paschalis, which will also go online.

So … much going on.

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Thinking about fonts to use for book

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Professional publishers do not print using Microsoft’s “Times Roman” font.  Instead commercial fonts are used.  I don’t know much about these, but I’ve been looking around the web.

A font called “Bembo” seems widely used.  Unfortunately the character map does not include polytonic Greek.  I don’t expect these fonts to include Syriac, but that much is a minimum.

Another font is Adobe’s MinionPro, which does seem to include polytonic Greek.  This is my current candidate.  Apparently it comes free with Adobe InDesign CS3, or can be purchased separately.

I’ve also been looking at the text itself.  It needs to be kerned, which it seems can be done in Microsoft Word.  It also needs hyphenation, because justified text usually gets areas of whitespace in the middle of the line unless you do this.

What else?  Well, lots, probably.  I just wish I could find a useful guide to this, rather than working it all out by trial and error.

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Thinking about typesetting

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The two translations that I have commissioned are both very nearly complete.  In fact I hunger for the day when they will be entirely complete — which will probably be in a month or two.  It is remarkable how long it has all taken.

Then I need to create a book form of them both, so that I can sell copies to libraries.  This will ensure availability in that community, and perhaps recover some of the commissioning costs.

The unwary start with Microsoft Word, create a PDF and send it to a print-on-demand site like Lulu.com.  Then they wonder why it doesn’t look right.

Part of the reason is typesetting.  By default Word does not kern text — that is, move letters like AVA together so that there isn’t a big gap between them.  It can be turned on, under font formatting.

Likewise book publishers do not rely on Times Roman, but use professional fonts like Bembo and Baskerville.

I am profoundly conscious that this is a specialised area, which I have no real desire to learn.  Surely it should be possible to hire in the skill at a reasonable price?

I’ve found a forum here of people offering their services; I suspect that many of them have limited professional skills.  Someone who did seem to know what he was doing did write to me last year, but never replied to my last email.  I must pester him again!

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Eusebius update – Coptic transcribed

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Excellent news – the chap I commissioned to type up the Coptic text of the fragments of Eusebius in that language has done so and I have the file.  He did an excellent job.  In fact he inlined extracts of the page images, and then typed underneath in unicode.  He said:

I’ve used a Unicode font called Keft. You can download it from http://www.evertype.com/fonts/coptic/ if you don’t already have it.

I don’t know if there is a “standard” Coptic font to use, nor how he did his data entry — is there perhaps a Coptic keyboard?  All the same, I am very glad. 

I’ve now passed the file to the Coptic translator for comment, and since she is a little technophobic I am reasonably confident it will blow her socks off!  Very nice piece of work, very quickly done.  (Indeed I was so pleased I added a bonus for quick completion).

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A volume of papers from a Eusebius conference

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A year or so back there was a conference somewhere in Europe about Eusebius.  I never saw it announced, and the few people who seemed to know about it responded evasively to my requests for further information.  Possibly they were afraid that someone as unacademic as me might turn up!  Indeed I might have done.

The papers from the conference are being gathered in a volume to be published by Brill.  Interesting a translation of Eusebius of Caesarea’s De Sollemnitate Paschalis is among them:

Mark DelCogliano, “The Promotion of the Constantinian Agenda in Eusebius of Caesarea’s On the Feast of Pascha,” in Sabrina Inowlocki and Claudio Zamagni (eds.), Reconsidering Eusebius: A Fresh Look at his Life, Work, and Thought (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

My correspondant adds:

I don’t know when the volume is supposed to appear. It’s not yet listed on the Brill website, so presumably not soon.

Note that the article is not merely a translation. It is a study that argues that the short treatise was commissioned by Constantine as part of his campaign to eliminate the celebration of Easter on different dates around the empire. A translation is appended to the study.

The book is something to look out for, if not to buy — Brill volumes are so expensive as to be library-only purchases.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

What happened to my evening?!  It sort of disappeared!

First I had to deinstall Office XP from my PC, then install Office 2007.  Then Microsoft wanted to download some updates — about 1Gb of them!  I did some, and waited and waited, and then decided the rest could wait.

Then I had to scan a few pages of Iturbe’s edition of the Arabic version of a Coptic catena containing fragments of Eusebius’ Gospel Problems.  The Arabic is much more complete than the Coptic original, you see.  The translators of the Coptic wanted to see some more.  So I did that, and then uploaded the new PDF.  It took a while at 600 dpi, which is more than I would usually use.  But Arabic has all these little letters, distinguished only by dots.  Not much choice, but high resolution really.

Then a correspondant has sent me a sample of a translation of sermon by Severian of Gabala.  It’s a little awkward, and English is not his first language.  Bang that over to a reviewer.  Then the reviewer comes back to say that three sentences isn’t really long enough — true — and so I write again for some more.

Meanwhile the same chap turns out to be a Severian enthusiast, who has translated one of Severian’s sermons extant in Armenian, in a publication to which I have no access.  This is really interesting.  But he also asks if I have the Savile edition of Chrysostom which contains some otherwise unpublished sermons.  Well I do; but in PDF’s which are a Gigabyte in size.  How to upload those?

And so on it goes.  And somehow, there’s no more time, and the uploads are still going on, and I need to go to bed!

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Eusebius, De sollemnitate paschalis – translation done

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Angelo Mai retrieved various things from the margins of Vatican manuscripts in the 1820’s.  Among these was an epitome of another lost work by Eusebius of Caesarea, De sollemnitate paschalis (On the celebration of Easter).  This has never received a complete translation into English, although it is fairly short.

I commissioned a translation of it a couple of months back, and the first draft arrived today.  It’s an excellent and professional piece of work, as always with that translator. 

My original intention was to place the thing online.  I’m being slightly tempted instead to bundle it with the Gospel Problems and Solutions translation, and to think in terms of a volume of Minor works of Eusebius, rather than just the original idea.

Probably that’s a bad idea.  It’s taken long enough to get as close to completion with the Problems as we now are, and further delay would be involved if the scope expands.

Still tempting tho.

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Eusebius update 2

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I emailed someone this morning about transcribing the text of the Coptic fragments of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Gospel problems and solutions.  Rather to my surprise he did the first fragment then and there into unicode, and perfectly well.  I’m so used to delays on the Coptic that it is delightful to find someone getting on with it.

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Eusebius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Good news – the Greek text that the Sources Chretiennes sent me turns out to be exactly what they printed.  I had half the Ad Marinum checked, and there were no deviations. 

This means that all the Greek text has now been checked and is ready to go.

I’ve written to someone to type up the Coptic text in unicode.  That shouldn’t take too long.  I’ve put the translators of the Arabic and Coptic in contact, and they’re agreeing to disagree about the reading of some passage.  The Arabic is all done, translated and transcribed; the Coptic I think is probably the same.

I need to prepare the Latin text myself of the Ambrose fragments (unless someone else wants to, for money).  I need to assemble all the Greek in files in the right format.  And then…. we are basically done!  At that point it can be sent for typesetting.

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Eusebius’ lost work against Porphyry – extant in 1838?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Eusebius’ refutation of Porphyry’s attack on the Christians is lost; but it seems it may not have been lost that long ago.

Does anyone know whether there are manuscripts still in Rodosto, a town 60 miles west of Istanbul and now known as Tekirdag? Or if not, where the mss of the expelled Greek community now are?

I ask because of references to manuscripts of Eusebius of Caesarea against Porphyry. There is a statement in Harnack’s edition of the fragments of Porphyry’s Against the Christians, p.30:

A listing of manuscripts in Rodosto, written between 1565 and 1575, on p.30b: Eusebiou tou Pamphilou Kata Porphuriou (s. Forster, De antiquitatibus et libris ms. Constantinopolitanis, Rostochii, 1877; cf. Neumann in Theol. Lit. Ztg. 1899, col. 299). In 1838 a great fire broke out in Rodosto.

It would be most interesting to know whether this ms. exists anywhere.   Does anyone know who would know?

I wonder if Forster and Neumann are online.

Harnack’s next paragraph continues with a statement that an ms. in the Iviron monastery on Mt. Athos, codex 1280 (s. XVII) which contains Eusebius, biblos peri ths euangekiwn diaphwnias; Eis thn prophhthn Hsaian logoi t konta [sic]; [Kata] Porphyriou logoi l’ [sic]; topikon logos a’ etc (see Meyer, Ztschr. fur. K.-Gesch. XI, p.156).

But this last is probably a red herring.  Long ago I scanned and translated MEYER, Ph., Der griechische Irenäus und der ganze Hegesippus im 17. Jahrhundert, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte (1890) pp. 155-158 (English translation).

Iviron 1280 mainly contains church music, but at the end is a letter with a couple of pages containing merely a list of books, which mentions Hegesippus, Irenaeus, Methodius against Porphyry, plus Eusebius Against Porphyry and his Biblical Questions (diaphonias).

There are a number of these lists from the renaissance and later in existence. Nigel Wilson has written that at least some of them look like the productions of dealers in the East, intended to draw in the too eager western buyer in order to do a ‘bait-and-switch’ scam. One of them even looks like a deliberate joke.

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