Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
A very useful list of these is here at Fourth Century. Very useful indeed!
I’ve noted an omission from their page on Eusebius of Caesarea, tho: they do not list the translation of Eusebius Quaestiones that David Miller &c made and I published. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to contact them!
Alin Suciu has another marvellous post on an item entirely new to me.
When the High Dam was built in the 1960s, almost the entire Nile valley between Aswan and Wadi Halfa had been inundated in order to create the Lake Nassar. As the waters were rising, many archeological sites were destroyed, while others, such as the well-known temples of Abu-Simbel, were removed from their original location and re-erected elsewhere. During the construction of the dam, more precisely in October-November 1965, the archeological team from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago was excavating a Christian monastery at Qasr el-Wizz, situated just a couple of kilometers north of Faras, in Lower Nubia. …
Perhaps the most exciting discovery of the Chicago team at Qasr el-Wizz was a small parchment book written in Coptic. The manuscript was found almost intact, virtually the entire text being preserved. The Qasr el-Wizz codex was initially housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, but was later been moved to the new Nubian Museum in Aswan.
The codex is quite short (only 17 folios), is dated to the 10th century, and contains two items:
The first item has long been known in Old Nubian, and was published by F. L. Griffith in The Nubian Texts of the Christian Period, Berlin, 1913 (online here).
The second is more interesting: it is an abbreviated version of the “Hymn of the Cross” found in the so-called “Gospel of the Savior”, P. Berol. 22220, published by Charles Hedrick back in 1997-ish — a report about it was one of the first items on my newly created website — and apparently this is also found in the so-called “Strasbourg Coptic Gospel”, which is unknown to me.
An English translation was prepared in typescript by Egyptologist George R. Hughes in 1965, for private use, which Alin rediscovered in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. He did place it online, but felt obliged to remove it after a communication from Artur Obluski, whom he may have thought was writing on behalf of that institution.
That is rather a pity, surely. I have always thought of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago as a rather forward-looking body. The availability of an admittedly obsolete translation of this obscure item can only benefit everyone by raising awareness of the text. It is, after all, very obscure. I had never heard of it, and, given my interest in ancient texts, that means that practically no-one has ever heard of it.
Perhaps I might write to that institution and ask whether they really have any objection.
An interesting article in New Scientist here.
Anyone who has downloaded pirated music, video or ebooks using a BitTorrent client has probably had their IP address logged by copyright-enforcement authorities within 3 hours of doing so. So say computer scientists who placed a fake pirate server online – and very quickly found monitoring systems checking out who was taking what from the servers.
The news comes from this week’s SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy, where computer security researcher Tom Chothia and his colleagues at the University of Birmingham, UK, revealed they have discovered “massive monitoring” of BitTorrent download sites, such as the PirateBay, has been taking place for at least three years.
Quite right too. One can imagine the conversation in a Pall Mall club:
What business have the plebs in reading or watching, unless they pay someone for it? Another glass of something, minister?
I imagine that these companies — they like to call themselves “creative industries”, presumably in reference to their attitude to the law — are keen to get a law passed that will allow them to demand money under threat from all those people.
At Alin Suciu, an invaluable tool has been posted in PDF form; J. A. de Aldama’s list of the spuria of Chrysostom. These are interesting as preserving material by people who were later considered heretical, or were just unpopular. A good portion of the works of Severian of Gaballa in Greek are preserved in this way.
When I made a translation of the Apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun, I was missing a couple of pages of F. Nau’s introduction, and was therefore unable to give a version of that. I have now added in the extra material.
This evening I found a copy of a PDF of volume 56 (works of Chrysostom, vol. 6) of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca edition on my desktop. I paged down a bit, and looked at the table of contents.
Then it occurred to me; shouldn’t the PDF have bookmarks? Rather than forcing me to guess, each time, just which PDF page is “column 514” (or whatever), so that I can inspect the particular work that I really had in mind?
It’s the sort of idea that instantly runs away with you, isn’t it? To do one PDF would take a bit of time; but to do several, never mind all, would be impossible for one man.
Yet it could be crowd-sourced. The end result would be a bunch of PDF’s which were useful to everyone.
Of course you need Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, to edit the PDF files. That cuts down the contributors.
I’m not going to do it. But it’s very tempting!
Mark Vermes published translations of the Letter of Secundinus the Manichaean to Augustine and Augustine’s reply Against Secundinus, as part of his thesis in 1997. The first item was then republished in Sam Lieu and Iain Gardner’s book on Manichaean texts in 2004; the second remains unpublished.
Dr Vermes has very kindly made it possible for both items to appear here.
https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/augustine-against-secundinus-the-manichaean-in-english/
I would like to thank Dr Sam Lieu very much for his help: he kindly obtained the permission necessary from Cambridge University Press for the Letter to be included.
The items remain the copyright of CUP and Dr Vermes respectively, which is why I have not included them in my collection of public domain material here. If you would like to support the commissioning of more public domain material, there is a CDROM of the Fathers and Additional Fathers collection available from here. All funds from sales go to pay for translating things, and sales have been a little low lately, so I hope no-one will mind my mentioning it!
UPDATE: I was wondering where else I might usefully announce the availability of new material in translation online. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Jona Lendering has written a thoughtful article here on the problem on online websites and the classroom. As the author of the respectable Livius.org site, he isn’t theorising, and his words need to be listened to.
If students cannot check the information – if they cannot know how the facts* have been established and which explanatory model is used – students must avoid a website. That’s the first basic lesson.
This means that in the present situation, students must just avoid the internet and check their library. Books are a far better source of reliable information.
Note that I would prefer to use the word “statements” here, for the website probably is not giving facts.
Now Jona is right. You can use the web to gather lists of possible sources, as a first stab (only a first stab) at a reading list. But it is entirely possible that the selection of sources presented online is itself misleading. Manipulation of the reader by omission of reliable sources and inclusion of unreliable sources is, sadly, becoming commonplace.
Nor is this all.
There used to be a time, not so long ago, that the universities “sent out” information, which society “received”. This is the “sender-receiver model”. The internet now offers society a possibility to talk back: the “debate model”.
Look at the Wikipedia, where activists can change articles to make them suit their own agendas. Or, if activists create a lot of noise, they can silence the voice of reasonable scholars.
I have experienced this myself, and I know others have had the same experience. Yet Wikipedia is the first result in most Google searches.
He then goes on to a rather political question, where Jona perhaps does not make his point as clearly as he might. But the point is a critical one. So let me paraphrase.
A government minister in his country has referred in a non-condemning way to Intelligent Design.[1] Scientists have attacked her. Non-scientists have defended her. But anyone doing a web search will only find the non-scientific stuff. Why? Because the scientific publications are all behind paywalls! So … anyone who looks into this will only get one side; and it happens to be the non-scientist side.
And worse yet, because only one side is heard:
You get the impression that she is the victim of a smear campaign by unthinking scientists.
Silencing one side, while the other occupies 100% of the public perception is an incredibly powerful a weapon to manufacture opinion. It has been used for this purpose by the political left in our society since around 1980, as a way to advance and normalise crazy causes, with great success. It is now being used to promote freakshow causes like “gay marriage”, and opposition — and everyone was opposed to this as recently as two years ago — is hardly heard. It’s a very, very powerful way to control what people think.
So it is not a trivial matter to observe that, for practical purposes, a situation has been created where bad information is the only kind available. Not at all.
The second basic lesson about online information is that, as long as there is no free access, bad information drives out good.
And to some fields of research, the damage is already done.
I hope that this verdict is overly negative. But it is hard for those of us who remember a world before the internet to imagine how the generation thinks, that does not remember a time before Wikipedia. Perhaps Jona is right here too.
Jona sums up:
To sum up: at this moment there is no good reason why students should use the internet. Let’s face it: the internet has failed.
As a tool for classroom learning, it most certainly has, although not for popularisation.
Paywalls are one of the reasons why.
Over the last year or two I have noticed some curious reporting on the BBC website and Ceefax. Whenever there are violent attacks on Christians around the world, the story is often titled “Clashes between Christians and <whoever>”. It’s usually Moslem attacks on Christians, of course.
They did it again on Wednesday.
At least 16 people have been wounded after Muslims attacked a church and Christian homes in a village near the Egyptian capital, Cairo, officials say.
And how was it titled? Yup:
Coptic-Muslim clashes erupt in Egypt
The article tries to create a false equivalence to back this up. We are solemnly told that, four days earlier, some Moslem was complaining a Copt burned his shirt while ironing, and a punch-up ensued, in which firebombs were traded to and fro and a Moslem died. But the BBC didn’t report that. And even the BBC can’t conceal the one-sidedness of the “clashes”.
Last October, a suicide attack on a church in Alexandria killed 24 people.
Police in Dahshur early on [the previous] Wednesday fired teargas to stop a Muslim mob from setting fire to a church, but the rioters instead torched several Christian properties and three police cars, officials said.
Ten policemen were among the 16 injured, according to the authorities.
The office of the local Coptic archbishop of Giza said the entire Christian population of Dahshur had now fled, according to the Associated Press.
Doubtless the BBC would head that last detail “Moslems and Christians flee violence.”
I prefer honest information, myself.
The Biographisch-Bibliographisches KirchenLexicon site is no more. Or, what comes to the same thing, has vanished behind a paywall.
It was free from 1996 until this year. From 2011 they asked for voluntary donations to fund the work, with little response. So now they have imposed a pay wall.
It’s not very clear why they suddenly need to monetise the site. It looks rather as if the decision was a commercial one. Bautz.de seems to be a publisher, with all that this implies.
But … there goes one of the very few worthwhile internet sites in the German language. Oh well.