Tag: From my diary

I find it convenient to use Google mail for my email, mainly because of its excellent spam filtering.  But it is also an advantage that it is online wherever I am.  However I do want to hold a local copy which I can backup, and I have recently installed Mozilla Thunderbird for this purpose.  It required quite a bit of setup to get it to store its files in the place where I could copy them.

One advantage of this is that, when I download messages received and sent since the last download, I get an idea of how busy I am.  Today I sent or received 43 emails at that account.

No wonder I never have any time.

I wonder how many of us made new year’s resolutions.  I seem to have forgotten to.  Instead I’ve been too busy scrabbling to earn a living.  But our lives are very short.  5% of the year 2011 is already gone. 

I need to schedule some things which store up sunshine and happiness in my soul.  It is so fatally easy to march from one urgency to another!

The review of the four letters of Isidore of Pelusium that I commissioned from a new translator has come back, generally positively.  But I haven’t had a chance yet to examine this in detail.

An email draws attention to some remarks, supposedly by Markus Vinzent, here.

… let me just mention, that Marcion could take the place that was previously given to Q, yes, but Marcion provides, of course, not just a sayings source, but a Gospel that includes narratives. Moreover, he seems not only to have cooined the terms ‘Gospel’, as suggested by H. Koester, and ‘New Testament’, suggested by W. Kinzig, but has oriented Christianity towards a literature based new religion. In addition, I suggest that we have to revise our understanding of 2nd century school relations. Instead of reckoning with antagonistic schools, divided along the divides between orthodoxy and heresy, it seems that the various school teachers were more closely related than later apologetic literature wants to have it.

Considering that Tertullian has Marcion’s works before him, and works about Marcion before him, and lives within half a century of the time when the heretic got the bum’s rush from the Roman church, this is all rather cute.  It can only be advanced by ignoring the data in the historical record — selectively, of course — in order to fabricate a fairy-story.

But Dr Vinzent is someone I have met (a rare event).  That Dr Vinzent is a very capable patristic scholar, doing much excellent work, including getting Cyril of Alexandria, Contra Julianum, into a critical edition and modern languages.  It’s hard to imagine such a man peddling such stale old revisionism.   After all, we’ve all seen this kind of trick before, haven’t we? 

It’s always done in the same tired old way.  You take whatever the historical record says, imagine the opposite, then find excuses to selectively ignore the record until you create a vacuum on the subject you want to fake, and then proclaim that the vacuum proves that Jesus was an astronaut (or whatever).  Of course it isn’t very honest, but the faker often hides this from himself by various excuses.  It also tends to bring the humanities into disrepute. 

Can anyone even find this trick interesting these days?  Haven’t we seen it so many times before? 

So I have a theory.  Clearly Markus Vinzent has been abducted by aliens, and replaced with a clone.  The pseudo-Markus is vainly attempting to establish his place as a scholar, but has not realised that revisionism is now old hat.  And obviously we must now all campaign to have the real Markus Vinzent back. 

Some may protest that there is no actual evidence of abduction, and this is true.  But then, it’s more evidence than there is for a first century Marcion!

From RogueClassicism I learn of a new book which is more timely than we might suppose:

Prostitution has been called arguably the world’s oldest profession. And the world can now get rare insight into some of the earliest prostitution from ancient Greece in a new book that was co-edited by Madeleine Henry, a professor in Iowa State University’s department of world languages and cultures and chair of the classical studies program.

Henry and co-editor Allison Glazebrook, an associate professor of classics at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, brought together an international team of scholars to contribute to the book, “Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE-200 CE,” which is being released this month ( The University of Wisconsin Press ). …

“Historically, we like to focus on the glamorous upper class aspects of prostitution. We don’t focus on buying the right to rape a child,” said Henry …

Dr Henry’s point is right, as any reader of Martial can tell.  But the need to deglamourise is more important than we might suppose.   I cannot imagine a prostitute as glamorous — more likely a sad, drug-addicted, diseased woman dragging out her life in misery and waiting to die.  But thanks to Hollywood and the TV producers of the selfish generation, I find that many ignore this.

Recently someone in the UK called for brothels to be legalised.  This means making pimping and procurement legal, the enticement of women into a trade that has use for them only for so long, and then sells them on to still more degraded institutions.  You don’t need to know very much about English literature to realise what an awful business this is, how brothels function as a gateway into a world of buying and selling women.   A post appeared in an online forum, and I wrote a quick post pointing out what it really would mean.

To my astonishment, there were posters calmly accepting the spin that this would benefit the women, that a house in which women were sold to enrich a pimp would be a safe place.  A few posts and queries, and it became clear that those so speaking cared nothing about the women; they just wanted brothels, they were prepared to make all the usual excuses that we hear whenever some evil is to be legalised — haven’t we seen so much of this? — and the consequences were of no concern to them.  Thus the 60’s revolution reaches its inevitable conclusion.  This is not the place to recount that debate.  But I took away from that the conclusion that it is really important not to glamourise this evil trade. 

I have not seen the book.  Let us hope that it is not some waffly study, but a solid digest of sources, texts, inscriptions, and as little speculation as possible.

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 Wikipedia Mithras article and removed the vandalism of the last 6 months.  There was no useful contribution in that time, needless to say.  This morning some anonymous person promptly re-added a slur on one writer quoted.  Re-reading the discussion page, it is striking how much time I wasted trying to reason with people making no useful contribution but determined to edit the article to suit their own ignorant prejudices. 

An email arrives, asking about translations of Cedrenus and Nicephorus Callistus.  As far as I know neither has ever been translated into any modern language.  The problem is partly that both quote verbatim earlier writers, I think.

I’m still hunting around for material about Cedrenus.  There might be an Italian version of part of it.  I’ve also updated the Wikipedia article and added a bit more solid info.

F. L. Griffith’s publication of Christian Nubian texts peeped out of my bookshelf earlier today.  I bought it, intending to put it online.  A quick search at Archive.org, and I find it is already online in PDF.  I have transferred it, therefore, to the pile of academic books in the next room, intended for disposal somehow.  How few academic books we really need to own in paper format!  Many of my Tertullian books will need the same treatment.

By contrast I have ordered two books; copies of Robert Schmidt’s translations of Antiochus of Athens and Hephaistio of Thebes.  These are astrological texts, and I daresay best converted into PDF form.

A sample translation of letters of Isidore of Pelusium arrived on Saturday from a new translator.  I need to get this reviewed.  Unfortunately I have had a virus since Saturday which makes me feel dizzy, so it will have to wait a bit.  It arrived in HTML format, which was unusual.

2010 is nearly at an end.  It is my custom, at this time, to look back over the last year and see what I can remember of it.  Which bits of it left a lasting memory?  What did I achieve in the year now gone?

Of course there are unpleasant memories in every year.  There is the endless treadmill of employment and earning, just to live.  I don’t need or want to review them.

Rather, I mean the things that added value to me.  I mean the things that made me feel happy — even if there was annoyance mixed in.  I mean the things that leave a sunshine in my memory. 

I am somewhat sorry to discover that, of the whole year, only a few days left any trace — the patristics conference in Durham, and a visit to Cornwall to see relatives and friends.  The rest of the year … well, I can give no account of it, other than just surviving.  Every day spent working, every evening tired and preparing a meal, slumping in front of the TV, reading some book, then off to bed, in order to rise and do the same.

This treadmill is the lot of us all, unless we make it otherwise.  The pressure of just doing what we have to do will crowd out everything else.

So at this time of year I also look forward.  What could I do this year?  What will I do with 2011?   I need to start to plan.  Because without a plan, it won’t happen.  Without a plan, I shall be just too tired to do more than routine. 

At the start of 2010 I did have a plan.  I was going to go to Syria.  But illness washed that out.  It might still be a problem this year.  But I still need a plan!

We only have so many years.   Use them!

An interesting email arrived today, asking about the manuscript tradition of this work.  The email ran:

I was wondering if you could offer me any comments on the textual tradition of the treatise “de Christo et Antechristo,” the authorship of which is typically attributed to a Hippolytus of Rome (I understand this to be debated considerably).

To my knowledge, there are four major ms traditions that Hans Achelis identified back in the late 19th cent; the first three are Greek and the last one a Slavonic translation-H (10 cent.), E (15th cent), R (16th cent.) and S (old Slavonic, date I’m not sure).

According to Achelis, H is the superior ms. My question is, other than because of its age, why should this be the case? Please let me know any thoughts you have on this question or any of the broader issues at hand.

I confess that I knew nothing about this work before now, but of course I am always willing to learn.   My first port of call was Quasten, of course.

Quasten tells me that the authorship is certainly Hippolytan because H. refers to it in his Commentary on Daniel.  The edition by Achelis is online at Google books.  But Quasten also tells me of a study by Achelis in TU, NF 1, 4, 1897, p.65 f. which perhaps would clarify things?  This must also be online, I would have thought.  I wonder if anyone has indexed the TU volumes?

He also says that there is a Georgian version, and fragments in Armenian, as well as the three Greek and several old Slavonic mss, all 15th century or later.  In languages that did not acquire printing until later than the rest of us, late manuscripts are the norm, I sometimes feel.

I wrote back to this effect.  An English translation of the work appears in the ANF 5, and there is also a German translation in the 1873 BKV.

Happy Christmas, everyone, particularly to those on their own.

Bloggers tend to have families and tend not to write on Christmas day.  I’ve got a journey to do — unusually for me –, but with luck there will be more of Antiochus of Athens later on!