Tag: Origen Homilies Project

Origen problem

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezechiel is going very well, and we are deep into fragments from catenas.  These tend to make sense only if you have the biblical (=septuagint) quotation before you.  The NETS text and translation is the modern standard, but of course is heavily copyrighted by Oxford University Press.  I’ve been meaning to approach them for permission to use this, little as I like the idea. 

But I have at this very instant had a horrible, horrible thought. I don’t think I can use NETS.  Indeed I cannot use anything copyright on the English side at all, or only for portions appearing only in book form.

The end objective is to make the translation freely available online.  I will never be able to do that if portions are copyright someone else!

Oh bother. I’ve literally thought of just now, so I haven’t a solution to hand.  What to do?  Any suggestions would be welcome. Maybe the answer is simply to translate the biblical passages ourselves in all cases.

Isn’t copyright a bother!!!

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Lemma-out of here!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The word lemma is widely used in the humanities.  Indeed it leaves confusion wherever it is employed.

Because no-one knows what it means.  When was the last time you went down to get your car serviced, and told the mechanic to look at the lemma?  When did you hear a TV announcement talk about the lemmas in the latest failed government IT project?  It doesn’t mean anything, chaps.

What brought this on, I hear you ask?  The answer is a deeply confusing exchange discussing the fragments of Origen’s comments on Ezekiel with the translator.  The said gentleman used the word, in an email discussion of how we are going to present the catena fragments, and communication promptly took a nose-dive.

You may think you know what it means.  You are wrong.  All you know is one use of the word.  There are many.

I first came across the term in connection with the MorphGNT file, containing a Greek New Testament, one word per line, with grammatical information for each word.  The help file — I use the term ‘help’ loosely — used the word to describe one item on the line.  As a normal person, or at least, not one of the in-crowd, I had no idea what it meant.  So I emailed James Tauber, who maintained the file and asked.  Answer came there none!  In the end I figured out that in MorphGNT lemma here meant “base form of a word, uninflected, in the form found in a dictionary”.  It is a little difficult to think of an English alternative, although “dictionary form” or “base form” would do.  Doubtless this difficulty led to the use of lemma.

What other uses are there?  Well, we just saw Devreesse use it in his description of catenas.  In this case he meant “name or abbreviation stuck in the margin of the book to indicate that this extract was by this author.”  Again, a short term is not immediately apparent; but lemma does not help.

The translator was using it in yet another sense.  Often in a catena, the discussion is preceded by a short quotation of the scripture under discussion.  You guessed it — he called that a lemma as well!  Nor was he to blame, when others have led the way.

In short, it is an omnipresent jargon word.  And I think it should be banned.  It is an example of language as a means of intimidation, rather than a means of communication.

Some might say that we could achieve this end by holding a convention, adopting better terminology, setting new standards.  But I think the answer is simply to find those using the word and chop their goolies off.  If we refer to it as mandatory de-lemmatisation, they won’t know until our posse rolls up and I shout the secret code phrase, “Grab him, boys!”

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Devreesse on the extracts of Origen on Ezekiel in the catenas

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve continued to work away at the monster article on the catenas by R. Devreesse, Chaines éxégetiques grecques, Supplément to Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 1 (Paris: Letouzey, published 1928).   The print-out that I got using the default settings in Adobe was very hard to read, very grainy and faint.  Fortunately I found a way to set the printer to denser printing, and this improved this.  So this morning I made a pile of print-outs, stapled them together in four sections, took my pen and … went off to lunch.  They went very well while waiting for a steak to appear!

The material concerned with Origen on Ezechiel is quite brief and begins on col. 1154.  Here it is in English, omitting chunks of Greek quoted where it would be a pain to transcribe them.  It is rather full of unfamiliar names.  Who, for instance, is Faulhaber? (<cough> A quick google search reveals that I have asked this question before, and that his book is online!).  Moving quickly on:

V.  EZEKIEL. — Faulhaber has placed the work by Pradus-Villalpandus, In Ezechielem explanationes et apparatus urbis ac templi Hierosolymitani commentario et imaginibus illustratus, 3 vols, Rome, 1596-1604, in its true context.  These volumes may have some importance for biblical topography, but they have nothing to do with the literature on the catenas.  There are again many manuscripts of Roman catenas derived from the ms. Chisianus which we must examine.

This is a reference to various catena manuscripts in Rome, in the Vatican etc, which he has already referred to for other Old Testament catenas.

The catalogue of Karo and Lietzmann adds to these on the one hand ms. Coislin 17 (13th century), Ambrosianus E. 46 sup. (10th c.)  and on the other the two Laurentianus V, 9 (11th c.) and XI, 4 (11th c.).

The catenist, probably John Drungarius, prefixed his collection with a preface in which he declared that he had searched in vain for commentaries of the fathers on Ezekiel; he could only discover passages of the prophet referred to or explained by them, randomly, in one or another of their works.  Lacking works by the holy Fathers, he searched elsewhere for materials for his collection; the “heretics” Theodoret, Polychronius and Origen furnished him with scholia.    But he also came across an earlier catena which it seems contained anonymous extracts.  These he included preceded by the lemma  Ἄλλος.  Faulhaber, p. 141-2.  The sources for John’s catena — which we will call this, for convenience — are thus the following:  some anonymous scholia, based on a primitive catena and prefixed with the lemma Allos, some interpretations detached from context on odd passages of the prophet, and some fragments taken from authors of limited orthodoxy.  All this material has been treated with some freedom.  What is the Allos material?  Faulhaber has remarked that these extracts look very strongly like extracts from Polychronius.  These fragments must have come from some primitive catena, itself derived from a commentary by Polychronius.

I’m sure all of us are wondering who Polychronius is.  I certainly don’t remember the name!  A quick Google search reveals that he was bishop of Apamea in the early 5th century and the brother of Theodore of Mopsuestia.  No doubt his “heresy” consisted of following the Antiochene approach to the various controversies of the period, nearly all political in inspiration.  Quite a bit of his exegetical work has survived, including nearly all his work on Ezechiel.

But back to Devreesse:

Let us note, in passing, that in Ambrosianus E. 46 sup (10th c.), we find the commentary of Theodoret surrounded by scholia.

AUTHORS CITED.  — Origen. — We are told in the Church History of Eusebius (V, 32:1-2) that Origen began at Caesarea and completed at Athens a commentary (tomoi) on Ezechiel.  The work comprised 25 books.  Of this commentary there remains only a section from the 20th book, preserved in the Philocalia (Patrologia Graeca vol. 13, cols. 663-666; ed. Robinson, p. 60).

I ought to add here that the Philocalia is a compilation of extracts from Origen, which was made in the 4th century by the great Cappadocian Fathers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa.  It survives, and I long ago scanned the English translation and placed it online here.

The commentary was not the only exegesis that Origen undertook on Ezekiel.  A translation by St. Jerome has handed us fourteen sermons (PG vol. 14, cols. 665-768; also edited by Baehrens, Griechische Christlicher Schriftsteller, 1925, p. 318-454).  There is no question, both in Eusebius and Jerome, that Origen also left scholia or excerpta on Ezekiel.  The fragments given in the catenas (233 in the ms. Ottobonianus 452, according to Faulhaber, p. 153) are taken from the homilies.  An edition of them by De la Rue can be found in the PG 13, cols. 695-787.  The Ottobonianus 452 was exploited by Cardinal Mai to furnish four further extracts (Novum Patr. Bibl. vol. 7, 2, praef., p. v [1], reprinted as PG 17, col. 288).  The manuscripts Vatican 1153 and Ottoboni 452 permitted Cardinal Pitra to pursue this collecting further, and to discover some next texts (Analecta sacra vol. 3, p. 541-550; the first extract had already been edited by De la Rue, the last and next-to-last by Mai).  The edition of Baehrens gives the fragments taken from the Ottoboni 452, Vatican 1153, and Laurentian V, 9 manuscripts, but we know that the homilies, which were the object of this publication, were attached to specific passages of the prophecy and did not go further than Ezechiel 44:2.  The remainder of the scholia are perhaps all that survives of lost homilies and commentaries.  The study of these fragments must therefore begin by establishing from the best manuscript witnesses a complete list, and then determining their relationship to the texts preserved in the direct tradition.

Devreesse then goes on to talk about the fragments of Hippolytus, but we need not follow him.

What does all this tell us?  Much and little.  It is reasonably certain that we have most of the catena fragments on Ezechiel by Origen.  It is equally certain that we don’t know that much about them, and that some of them are bogus.

I think it is time to clarify who the modern editors of Origen have been.  Schaff as always gives us something, but here is a little more:

Charles de La Rue (d. 1739) was the Benedictine editor of the complete works of Origen, reprinted by Migne in PG 11-17 after 1850.  He was one of the Maurist fathers, whose fabulous erudition was only brought to an end by the French Revolution, when their headquarters at St. Germain-des-Près were stormed by the mob.  Most of their books went to the National Library; a certain number were acquired by a Russian agent, Petrus Dubrovsky, and shipped out and sold to the Tsar, and are in St. Petersburg.  Dubrovsky himself was denounced to the Committee of Public Safety and had to flee, leaving some of his manuscripts to be scattered over Paris.

C. H. E. Lommatzsch also seems to have reprinted De la Rue, in 25 small volumes: Opera omnia quae graece et latine tantum exstant et ejus nomine circumferuntur … Ediderunt Carolus et Carol. Vincen. De La Rue … denuo recensuit … Carol. Henric. Eduard. Lommatzsch, Berlin: Haud and Spener (1831-1848).

The most  modern text on Origen on Ezekiel is that in the Berlin Griechische Christlicher Schriftsteller  series by Baehrens, which was reprinted by Borrett in the Sources Chretiennes edition.   Fortunately Baehrens is out of copyright, so there is no barrier to using his text.

I wonder what Baehrens thought of De la Rue’s work?

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Origen update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Translations of some more catena fragments from the work of Origen on Ezekiel have arrived.  These are useful and help get a complete picture.

The second is a translation of Delarue’s introduction where he discusses what he does.  It’s very interesting!  These old introductions are often full of useful info.  Delarue frankly confesses that in many cases he has no certain idea of whether the material is by Origen or not!  He writes:

The trustworthiness of these catenae, however, is very questionable.  For in them the names of the writers from whose fragments they have been patched together are so very often mixed up and confused that those which one catena ascribes to Origen are attributed in another catena to Didymus or Eusebius or Theodoret or some other interpreter.  Add to this the fact that even when the unanimous consent of the catenae ascribes a certain fragment to Origen, I have often discovered it belongs to Eusebius or Theodoret or to some other writer, on the basis of the published commentaries of these Fathers.

He goes on to discuss his approach.  We will definitely have to include this preface somehow in the book.

But … the more work I do with catenae, the more evident it becomes to me that we need new modern editions, not of extracts from catenae, but of catenae themselves.  They are compositions, and should be edited as such, a stemma established, and so forth.

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Doing the numbers

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A comment asked how much the various elements of the projects I am doing actually cost, aside from the hours and hours of time.  I thought a post on this might be of interest.

My trip to Cambridge to look at Anastasius of Sinai was 120 miles and cost me around $45 in petrol, plus about $7 of copying.

Translating has no fixed cost; it is entirely about supply and demand.  There are other considerations also, which I will come to.

Some translating can be got for nothing.  Much of this is worth what it costs, but an academic will tend to do a good job, even if unpaid.

As a rule I offer 10c per word of the original language, for smaller amounts, and I find that I can usually get someone decent at this price.  For larger amounts I tend to have Migne as a control; I offer $20 per column of Migne (about 400 words).  These numbers apply to Latin, Greek and Christian Arabic.

I have found it quite impossible to get people to translate Syriac at less than 20c per word.  While a lot of people claim to know it, in practice those able and willing are not available for less.

This leads me into the other important aspect — reliability.  There are few things as infuriating as someone who agrees with you to do the work and just doesn’t, or does it to an inferior standard if at all.  I always follow my gut; people who are going to be a pain tend to be a pain pretty early on.  It doesn’t get better — if it isn’t any good initially, it will be worse later. 

You do have to check what you’re being offered, of course.  I always make the first chunk of stuff a sample; if it’s OK, I pay them; if it isn’t, I don’t and cancel the job.  This is essential, unless you want people who wish they could translate offering you gibberish.   The price bears no relationship to the quality of work done, by the way.

Checking means hiring someone to do some work which is really time-related.  I tend to pay $20 an hour for odd bits of work, setting a maximum if I don’t know how long it will be.  Again, this is probably too high, and I try to constrain the price in other ways.

Transcribing text is something I have just started to do.  The web suggests a price of $10 per 1,000 words.  This is probably too much also, but we’ll see how it goes.

Typesetting the book; I haven’t actually done any of this, but the quotes I have are between $300-$700.

Copying in libraries tends to be 15c a sheet.

Are there other costs?  Probably, but these come to me off the top of my head. 

Searching for people to do work: these days I post an ad in BYZANS-L for Greek stuff,  HUGOYE for Syriac.  For Christian Arabic I now have a little pool of people I know are reliable.

So … it can be an expensive business.  But translating the Eusebius and the Origen is turning out to be around $3,300 each.  Now that is not a small sum.  But … it isn’t the end of the world, is it?

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Typing up Origen

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel are mostly extant in a Latin translation by Rufinus.  For the book version, we’re going to need an electronic text.  I’ve scanned a few Latin texts in  my time using OCR, and the results have often been variable.  Back in 2000, the quality of software was lamentable.  Today it is better, but even Abby Finereader 10 doesn’t include recognition for Latin.

So I’ve decided to hire someone to do it manually, and we’ll see how it goes.  Market rates seem to be about $10 per 1,000 words, which is liveable with.

I ought to apologise, by the way, for all the project-related posts at the moment.  These are occupying every minute of my time, so I really am thinking about nothing else right now!

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How big is my Migne, part 2?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I need to get an electronic text created of the polytonic Greek in Selecta in Ezechielem by Origen.  The Selecta are cols. 767-825 in PG13; but of course alternate columns are the Latin translation, so there’s only 29 columns of text.

How many words per column?  Well, it seems to be about 400 words (although columns vary a lot).  So word count might be about 11,600 words.

I’ll advertise and see what people want to transcribe this.  One could transcribe 100 words fairly quickly, I think?

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Origen update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I commissioned a translation of Origen’s fourteen homilies on Ezekiel earlier this year.  Today I had what must be very nearly the final versions of homilies 11-14, including translations of relevant Greek fragments from the catenas.  This means that the job is nearly done.  It also means, less pleasantly, that I need to start thinking about how to market these, in order to recover at least some of the money, so that I can then put them online.

The sermons are lost in the original Greek; what we are translating into English for the first time is St. Jerome’s Latin translation of them.  We’re using the GCS critical text.  In the Patrologia Graeca is a pre-critical version.  But also present is an excerpt from Origen’s Commentary on Ezechiel — also mostly lost — which is about a page in length.  We’ll do that as well.

In Migne there is also a collection of Selecta in Ezechielem.  These are fragments of Origen’s original Greek text, found mixed with excerpts from other authors in the medieval Greek commentaries or catenae.  The labelling of which father contributed which excerpt can be pretty erratic in the catenas, so not all his material labelled “Origen” is probably authentic.  Migne prints what there is, tho.

Translation of the Selecta has begun, and the fragments on chapters 1-3 of Ezekiel have been completed.  Interestingly the catena fragments are much more readable than Origen at full length.  Probably the brevity of the chunks has something to do with this, but I think people will find them interesting.  Here’s one on chapter 1, verse 3.  Origen writes:

“in the land of the Chaldaeans.”  “Chaldaean” is translated as “all work.” And these [i.e., Chaldaeans] are astrologers, who talk about fate, and are completely tied to perceptible things, and work hard among them, making them into gods.  The “land of the Chaldaeans” is the worst position and attitude.  Indeed, the Chaldaeans represent a symbol of those who are arrogant in impiety.

I smiled when I read this, since later Syriac fathers would identify with the Chaldaeans.  I think we may be sure that they never saw this comment when doing so!

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More Origen and James of Edessa

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve now finished skimming through James of Edessa, and straightening it out.  I did about half of it in the last couple of days, interestingly.  All those evenings in the hotel trying to do a page or two didn’t really achieve a lot.

The first draft of Origen’s 13th Homily on Ezekiel has arrived.  With luck I’ll be able to comment and return it this evening.

A knock on the door downstairs tells me that the blasted American custom of “trick or treat” on middle-class estates on Halloween has started.  It never happened when I was young; this is purely the effect of the mass media.  I don’t have a door-bell, so they won’t be sure I heard.  With luck I shan’t suffer any harm.

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