Tag: Patristics

The decline of the legend of the Seven Sages and theosophical prophecies

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A. Delatte begins his article of the above title with the following words:

Never did anyone prophesy so much, in the special form known as prophecy post eventum, as in the first centuries of Christianity.  The rapid conquest of souls by the new ideal and the solid establishment of the Christian churches showed the hand of God, and this transfiguration of the face of the world so stirred some spirits that in order to explain it they felt obliged to fall back on the idea of a preparation stage for the gospel.  Similarly some were unable to believe that the brightest and most inspired of the pagans did not have some presentiment or secret revelation of the mystery of the Redemption. 

In order to satisfy this longing of faith, some people who were well-intentioned but too little scrupulous of their choice of methods composed new Sybilline oracles, and placed in circulation prophecies that had previously come, so they said, from the sanctuaries of Apollo, announcing the coming of the messiah.  They also began to search the books and the biographies of the philosophers for features and doctrines that could easily be misinterpreted as disguised evidence of foreknowledge of the great event. 

Did they find them?  Some apostles of dissident Christian groups, those whose followers were of limited education and unable to detect the fraud, did not hesitate to resort to the falsification of ancient literary works to nourish the faith of their followers.  It might seem, moreover, that this was an excellent means of propaganda among those lingering in paganism, who were not fleeing the embrace of Christianity so much as clinging to the debris of the too mystical teachings of the magi, astrologers, and the theurgists, and were therefore ill-equipped to detect imposters.

Perhaps for Christianity to become universal, it had to appeal to the irrational element in every society, as well as the rational and devout; to the people who waste their time on New Age frauds in our day, as well as to the university-educated who make up most evangelicals in our day.  The thought is an interesting one, and the parallel also.  But let us return to Delatte, who is not so far footnoting these comments, unfortunately.

But in putting Christianity back among paganism, in making Orpheus, Pindar, Plato, Hermes Trismegistus and many others be Christians before the fact, the Orthodox faith was at great risk of diminishing itself, or even being contaminated.  The church was cautious; some of these theologians  to the troubled soul learned this to their cost. 

A certain Aristocritus (5th century) used all the resources of an uncertain science and the powers of a too supple spirit of conciliation to compose a book entitled Θεοσοφία.  He wanted to show that the most eminent souls among the Hebrews and the Greeks had, by the grace of God, the divination of the mysteries and prior knowledge of certain Christian doctrines, but in the opinion of orthodox theologians he only succeeded in demonstrating the identity of the doctrines of Judaism, Hellenism and Christianity, which was a hopeless error.  This system of accomodation which resembles the methods practised by the Stoics in handling previous philosophies was not to the liking of the strong-minded and clear-minded.  As a result the book of Aristocritus features among the works tainted with the Manichaen heresy which are anathematised in an ancient formula used for renouncing Manichaeism.

Accomodation is indeed the chronic hazard of the apologist; to be coloured by the views of those you oppose, to insensibly move to resist certain views and unknowingly accept others equally fatal to your position.

Delatte then goes on to review the scattered remains of Greek texts which preserve supposed extracts from philosophers predicting the coming of Christ.  I won’t repeat all this here, in what is already too long a post.  But these texts deserve to be gathered and made more readily available.

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Iturbe on Arabic Gospel Catenas

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I had to scan the introduction to Francisco Javier Caubee Iturbe’s edition of a Christian Arabic catena on the gospel of Matthew.  I found myself wondering how well Google translate would handle Spanish.  After all, it gives Spanish as the default foreign language, so I hope it might be good!  So I experimented a bit. 

The following notes are abstracted from Iturbe’s comments.  Since both volumes of his work have a 50-page introduction, these are very much short notes!  Anyhow, he introduces his edition thus:

Studies and research on gospel catenas – comments by various fathers listed successively around the text of the Gospel – to date have been limited almost exclusively to those conveyed to us in Greek. As regards those preserved in Arabic, we can say that, nothing exists apart from some brief references in a few authors.  And yet there are several Arabic manuscript codices containing exegetical catenas on the Gospels, with markedly different characteristics from Greek catenas. The problems that these codices present with regard to their origin, their language, the patristic extracts used, the method and means by which they have been transmitted, and so on, are various, and often difficult. There are some differences, more or less marked, in the text of the comments found in the manuscripts, but fundamentally, at least for the Gospel of Matthew, they are all the same catena, conceived as an organic whole, with proper proportions, in this surpassing many of the Greek catenas, which sometimes comprise lengthy scholia joined with other tiny extracts by many different fathers juxtaposed against the same verse. The copies of almost all these manuscripts were made in Egypt, in the Coptic Monophysite church, and they were long in use, especially in the monasteries of Scetis.

 Of all the existing Arabic manuscripts, of which thirteen are known to contain gospel catenas, four are in the Vatican Library, three in Cairo, two in Paris and one in each of the following cities: Strasbourg, Oxford, Gottingen and Baghdad. All have the catena on the Gospel of Matthew, except for one in Cairo and another in Paris.

A description of the manuscripts containing the catena on Matthew is presented in this volume, beginning with the oldest of them, ms. Vatican Arab 452, which is the basis for the text published here; in the notes of the apparatus are the variants of the other manuscripts that rely on the same textual tradition.

He then lists the sigla for his edition.  It is interesting to learn of so many manuscripts.  M and P belong to a different family to the rest.

B  = Ms. Vatican Arab 452.
C = Ms. Arab Cairo 411.
D = Ms. Arab Cairo 195.
G = Ms. Gottingen ar. 103.
K = Ms. karsuni Vatican syr. 541.
L =  The catena in the coptic ms. of Curzon, as printed in the edition by P. de Lagarde, Catenae in evangelio aegyptiacae quae supersunt,  Gottingae 1886.
M = Ms. Vatican ar. 410.
O = Ms. Arab Bodleian Hunt. 262.
P = Ms. Paris ar. 55.
S = Ms. Arab Strasbourg or. 4315.

The copies all derive from the Coptic catena printed by De Lagarde, which is now sadly missing many of its leaves. 

Iturbe begins by describing the first of these.  Since Arabic catenas are probably almost unknown to anyone, I think it’s worth translating this as a sample of what the manuscript contains.

MS. VATICAN ARABIC 452 – Siglum B.

1214 AD. Paper, 250 x 165 mm., the written area is 175 x 110 mm., 376 folios, 17 lines per page.

The manuscript is divided now into two volumes, bound in white leather: one has 196 pages and the second 180. The missing folios at the end, probably about thirty-five, are more or less what is needed to complete a version of the Gospel lessons of the holidays, Sundays, Saturdays, and so on, for the whole year, introduced and started on f. 369v  at the end of the manuscript; as it currently is, it only goes as far as 4th Hatur, which is the third month of the Coptic calendar.

On the first page, in the center of a large rectangle, to whose sides are attached 16 identical circles, enclosing as many Coptic crosses – four circles with crosses, one on each of the horizontal sides, two on the vertical, four more identical at the corners of the rectangle all drawn in red and black –, the manuscript title is written in black ink, indicating its contents: Book of the Gospels, its explanation and calendar.

On most of the rest of the page, above and below the rectangle, there is a certificate of ownership of the book, dated 55 years after the composition. We will discuss this document later.

A few short sentences in Arabic, which can barely be read — some of which seems to be an essay written by an ignoramus — plus two seals of the Vatican Library and the indication “452 Arabic”, occupy the remaining free space on the page, which because of that, plus humidity and other stains, presents a sorry state, which is felt in part on the verso of the same folio. This folio 1 is the most deteriorated of the manuscript, except folio 135v. The latter was originally left blank, before the commentary on the Gospel of Mark.  But then four lines were written in Karshuni, also repeated in Arabic, which a few illiterates then wrote over and over again like vandals, which, added to the horrendous lines crossing at the top of the page, has completely smeared the page. Something similar on a smaller scale, has occurred in ff. 188v-189, which were almost completely blank between the gospels of Mark and Luke, and on ff. 368v-369, the end of the Gospel of John. Except for these cases and others of less importance, the manuscript has been preserved in good condition.

On ff. 1v-5v, after a preface, the Ammonian sections are arranged in the ten canon tables of Eusebius, and marked by Coptic numerals.
Ff. 6-135 contain the Gospel of St. Matthew with the patristic commentaries.
Ff. 136-188v: Gospel of Mark and their comments.
Ff. 189v-298: Gospel of St. Luke and comments.
Ff. 299-c68: Gospel of St. John and their comments.
Ff. 369v identifies the Coptic gospel lessons for the first part of the year, as I indicated above.

A little further on he adds:

The colophon to the Gospel of Mark says (f. 188v): ‘The text of the Gospel of Mark the Evangelist and the commentary on its meaning is finished with the help of God – may He be exalted! — and by the blessing of His grace, on Wednesday, 6 Tut of the year 921 of the pure Martyrs. May his blessing be with us. Amen’.

The date is 3rd September, 1204 – the same year as the sack of Constantinople by the renegade army hired for the Fourth Crusade, in which so much ancient literature perished.

Iturbe published his edition in two volumes, the first with a preface on the manuscripts and then the Arabic text, the second with a preface on the contents and a Spanish translation.  The introduction to the second volume begins as follows:

The patristic catena on the Gospel of St. Matthew in ms. Vatican ar. 452, the text published in Volume I, which we here give in translation, after almost all of the 68 sections into which it divides the Gospel text, has one or more pieces of commentary — scholia — each preceded by a very brief indication – lemma – written in red, which states, most of the time, who is the Father or interpreter who composed it. In total, there are 336 scholia with corresponding lemmas.

But there are 86 lemmas which are no more than the word ‘interpretation’, and we may wonder whether the compiler of the catena – or the copier – meant to assign the scholia which immediately follow to the named author of the preceding passage. That certainly agrees with the reading of the Coptic manuscript of Curzon and other similar Arabic manuscripts, and in a comparative study of them all we find that of the 86 scholia, 82 belong  to the author last named in a lemma; 3 to a different author than the one listed in B above, and only 1 of them is unknown.

Having clarified the previous difficulty, and incidentally shedding light on other such mss, Coptic and Arabic, we have 113 which are scholia by St. Cyril of Alexandria and 109 of St. John Chrysostom. The two great Eastern doctors thus cover two thirds of all the commentary of St. Matthew in the catena. Then comes Severus of Antioch, with 53 glosses. And then, with a much smaller number, the other contributors. The list of all those in B, with the number of scholia that each must be awarded is as follows:

Cyril of Alexandria = 113
John Chrysostom = 109
Severus of Antioch = 53
Hippolytus of Rome = 15
Gregory the Theologian = 8
Gregory Thaumaturgus = 6
Epiphanius = 5
Eusebius of Caesarea = 5
Clement (Alexandria) = 5
Athanasius = 4
Basil = 4
Severian of Gabala = 2
Simeon the Hermit = 2
Cyril of Jerusalem = 1
Titus (of Bostra ) = 1
Isaiah the Anchorite = 1
An elder of the Desert Fathers [the abbot Ammon] = 1

These, then, are the authors for which we may find textual witnesses in this Arabic catena.  Iturbe also states:

On the other hand there are various authors in Greek catenas who do not appear in Coptic-Arabic catenas: Apollinaris, Gregory of Nyssa, Irenaeus, Theodore of Heraclea, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, etc; and above all Origen, who in almost all Greek catena families has many scholia, such as in the third of type B, where Origen comprises 227 out of the total 874.

There is little point in looking for material by Origen in Coptic or Arabic, it seems.

Back in the first introduction, Iturbe discusses the Coptic catena published by De Lagarde, from which all the Arabic mss. derive.

The Curzon Coptic manuscript catena, siglum L.

In 1886 Paul de Lagarde (P. Boetticher) published the Bohairic text of a manuscript obtained by Robert Curzon in March 1838 in the Monastery of the Syrians, Wadi ‘l-Natrun. Never translated, little use has been made so far in the scholarly field of this good edition of De Lagarde.  But for the present study, however, we are particularly interested in this Coptic ms.

It contains a patristic catena on the four gospels – next to the Gospel text – divided into sections, as in B and other Arabic manuscripts. The text of the Gospels has only a short verse or verses, which are generally given before the lemmas and scholia: in this, then, it is similar to M and P. This codex was written in the year 605 of the holy martyrs (888/89 AD), more than three centuries before the oldest of our Arabic mss, codex B, which was written in the year 1214 AD as regards the part of Matthew. Because sixteen folios were lost, the comments on Matt. 2:1-5:5; 5:44-6:3; 7:24-29; 9:27-9:37; 12:48-13:10; 24:16-29 are missing; see the introduction.

All this detail  may swamp us; but we need to recall that almost no-one working on New Testament texts or on the patristic comments on them found in catenas — is there anyone working on the latter? — has any awareness of material that has made its way into Arabic.

When my Eusebius volume appears, at least those dealing with the Gospel problems and solutions will be aware that there is material that should be consulted in Christian Arabic.

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Eusebius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still trying to get the manuscript of Eusebius Gospel problems and solutions completed.  We’re getting ever closer, tho!

I’ve started working on the text of the Latin fragments myself, faux de mieux, which I will get done by the end of the week. 

The two extra Syriac fragments, culled from Severus of Antioch and Ishodad of Merv, will be translated by the same time (I am promised).

I’ve got all the Greek in electronic form.  The passages from Cramer’s catena have all been proofed excellently, but I’ve now got a friend looking at the material from Migne: the first three chunks from Nicetas’ catena on Luke are with him.

I’ve heard nothing from the people doing the Coptic for a month, when I last prompted.  Time to prompt again.

I’ve also ordered a copy of the Arabic translation of the Coptic catena on Matthew.  I need someone with Coptic and Arabic to translate the relevant bits and compare it with the Coptic.

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Grafton & Williams on Origen, Eusebius and the library of Caesarea

Posted on by Roger Pearse

grafton

Wieland Wilker kindly sent me a copy of Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the transformation of the book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea.  This arrived on Friday, and I read through it over the weekend.

The first thing to strike me was the absence of footnotes.  That’s because they had all been banished to the end.  This habit of American publishers is a nuisance to the reader.  It necessitates flipping to and fro the end of the book.  Doing so is weary; consequently it is impossible to glance at the note while reading more than once or two.

The book also places two further difficulties in the way of the critical reader. 

Firstly the numbering of the endnotes is broken up by chapter.  In order to find a note, therefore, I have to memorise both the endnote number (23) and the page on which it appears (15). 

Secondly, once you have found your note, it will not infrequently have a reference in the form “BLOGGS, 1997, p.123”.  Now unless you have memorised the bibliography, this may not take you further forward.  To get an idea of which book is being referred to — a study?  an edition? a paper? — you must then locate the bibliography, hunt through that, then return to the note, reread that now you know what the book is, and then return to your place in the book.

It’s obvious why the book is so arranged; it is very convenient and concise for the author and publisher.  But it is rather a problem for the reader.  I wish that publishers in the US would avoid these habits.

But on to the book.  Grafton’s prose style is a fluid as ever and the book slips down easily.  The view expressed is that we all owe rather more to the innovations in book design required for the Hexapla of Origen and the Chronicle of Eusebius than is generally realised.  The argument is made well, and is one that I have long wished to hear made.  The description of the Hexapla is very clear, and I read it with deep attention, while cursing my inability to glance at the bottom of the page to see the footnotes and assess the data behind the claims.

The authors  also make the valuable point that Eusebius’ innovation of verbatim quotation was itself a useful innovation.  The links that Grafton makes with the activity of renaissance scholars are also useful and interesting.

Another very useful aspect of the book was how G&W related the activity of Origen, supported by the private sponsorship of Ambrose, to the way in which freelance teachers of philosophy operated in the period.  This must be the right approach to take, and such links must be illuminating.  A letter of Origen in which he describes how Ambrose kept Origen’s nose to the grindstone in his enthusiasm was new to me, and most interesting!

The plates are good, although the quality of images supplied by some of the institutions is risibly poor.  The book came out in 2006, at which time many manuscript libraries were waging a die-hard campaign to prevent access to their collections. I think really the page images need to be in colour, and there seems no reason technically not to do this now. 

The content of the book is mainly an essay of interpretation.  To cover the ground, the authors reply mainly on the secondary literature and reflect the consensus of US-based scholarship without too much discussion.  The breadth of the topic necessitates some such approach, indeed.  This is handled well, and there is certainly a need for such books.  The translations that are given of some texts are fresh and readable.  

But the approach also means that sometimes a view is expressed without any backing other than a scanty reference, if that.  Some of the views so skipped over are very controversial, as anything to do with christian origins tends to be.  Do we wish to be told, as fact, that the gnostics were Christians, for instance?  The apostles did not think so, the Christians did not think so, modern Christians do not think so.  This idea seems to me to reflect more the desire of the Selfish Generation to evade the moral teaching of Christianity than anything in the historical record.  But doubtless Dr. G and W just picked this nonsense up from their sources.  In view of the tendency of said Generation to promote daft ideas by incessant reiteration, we must always check whether some agenda is being promoted when we read stuff from US sources. 

Another bit struck me as unintentionally funny.  At one point the book offers as fact the theory that Demetrius, the enemy of Origen, was in fact the first Bishop of Alexandria.  This contradicts the sources, which tell us of an episcopate beginning with St. Mark.  The idea that in fact Mark created some form of presbyterate, or whatever, is of course possible; but our sources do not say so.  But G&W treat this theory as fact, with the odd result that they are forced to describe the statement of Eusebius as “the conjectures of Eusebius”.  That is, the primary source written a century later around 100 miles away is “conjectures”, while a theory contradicted by the data written 2,000 years later by someone in a culture which possesses no more than 1% of the ancient literature is fact.   Really?  That seems quite unlikely to me! 

When nonsense is offered as fact, and fact is described as conjecture, there is always a reason. To debunk the idea of a succession of bishops is a standard of anti-Catholic literature.  The agenda of those who control university appointments peeks through again.

We mustn’t pillory G&W for this sort of thing, tho.  This is what happens to any of us when we don’t stick close enough to the data, and spend too much time with the secondary literature.  Doubtless the authors repeated the stuff in good faith.

Overall verdict?  A useful book.  I imagine it is aimed at undergraduates.  It must raise the reputation of Origen and Eusebius in that audience, and also connect these authors with their late antique milieu.  Both objectives are praiseworthy.

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Dancing with the Greek

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Electronic texts are wonderful things.  But you always wonder how accurate they are.  I now have the Greek portions of Eusebius Gospel Problems and Solutions in unicode in Word format.  But I can already see errors.

I’ve advertised for someone to read through it, and correct it against the printed editions.  It will be interesting to see what the response is like.

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From my diary – Chrysostom and Eusebius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just spent a busy couple of hours writing emails to people who host copies of Chrysostom’s Sermons against the Jews online, asking them to update the page with the extra material I’ve had translated.  Paul Halsall is going to update the Fordham site, which is probably the parent of many of the others.  No replies back yet, but I am hopeful.  In some cases the material had been posted to fora, and all I had to do was register and reply to the post.

Menwhile I’ve been making progress with the Greek text of Eusebius Gospel problems and solutions.  Now I have this all in unicode, it’s a much better proposition to deal with.  I need to spend some time working it over, tho.

One nice bit of email today: from a medievalist interested in Porphyry’s Isagogue who discovered the reference to it in Abu’l Barakat’s catalogue of Arabic Christian literature.  He found the latter on my site, because I’d had it translated and put online.  It’s nice when my endeavours visibly help others!

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Chrysostom, Against the Jews homily 2 (missing part) is now in English!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Ever since the eight sermons against the Jews by the 4th century writer John Chrysostom were published, men have noticed that sermon 2 is only a third of the length of the others, and speculated that some of it is missing.  The missing portion was discovered in a manuscript on Lesbos a decade ago and published, but no English translation has ever been made of it.

One now exists, and it is here.  I commissioned it and own the copyright, but I make the translation public domain.  Do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial. 

Now to communicate with the owners of copies of the Eight Sermons online, and try to persuade them to host the missing chunk as well!

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Recent studies on the Coptic catena of de Lagarde?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Looking at the summary of information on catenas on the gospels in Di Berardino’s latest volume of Quasten’s Patrology, I notice an intriguing couple of entries:

E. J. Caubet Iturbe, La Cadena arabe del Evangelio de san Mateo,1 Texto; 2 Version, Vatican City 1969-1970.

and

E. J. Caubet Iturbe, “La Cadena copto-arabe de los Evangelios y Severo de Antioquia”, Homenaje a J. Prado. Miscelanea de estudios biblicos y hebraicos, ed. L.Alvarez Verdes, E.J. Alonso Hernandez, Madrid 1975,421-432.

Now I recall from Graf’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur 1, p. 318, n.1 and p.481-2, that the Coptic catena on the gospels published by Paul de Lagarde also exists in an Arabic version in the Vatican.  I came across this reference while searching for material by Eusebius of Caesarea in Arabic.  He’s listed in Abu’l Barakat’s catalogue:

Eusebius of Caesarea: He has explanations on passages of the holy Gospels and other separate religious treatises.

which Graf discusses, referring to a catena with 6 passages from Eusebius on Matthew and material from Severus of Antioch on Luke.  Page 481f discusses an “anonymous gospel catena”, which turns out to be that of Paul de Lagarde.  I’m not sure I’ve read the entry before.  Written in Bohairic, and almost certainly based on a Greek catena now unknown, H. Achelis dates the catena before 888 AD.  The manuscript used by de Lagarde is incomplete, however.   The manuscript turns out to be Vatican Arab 452, and most of the scholia are at least under the name of Eusebius.  A long quotation from Luke, and five chunks on Matthew, are ascribed to Eusebius, or so Graf says.

It is an interesting sight, therefore, to see this in the modern bibliography, and no mention of de Lagarde’s publication.

Is it possible that Iturbe published a critical text of the Arabic version of the catena?  It looks very much like it.  I wish I could obtain the article and see what he says.

UPDATE: After typing those words, I started searching for the book in Google.  Slightly amazing to find my site listed, and this article listed, less than a minute after I pressed save.  Is Google really watching these words that intently!?

I find in COPAC more details of the book:

A compilation of patristic commentaries, with the text of the Gospel, in the Arabic of Codex Vaticanus ar. 452 and in a Spanish version.

which also aligns with my understanding.  Another states:

Studi e testi 254-5.  Half title: Cod. vat. ar. 452, ff. 6-135. Originally presented as the editor’s thesis, Pontificia Commissio Biblica. Based on a Coptic version entitled: Ermēnia n̄te pieuangelion ethouab kata Matheon. cf. the editor’s introd., v.1, p. [li]-liv; H. Achelis. Hippolytsudien. 1897. p. 163-169. Originally presented as the editor’s thesis, Pontificia Commissio Biblica. Arabic text; Spanish introduction, notes and translation.

So there we have it.  This is indeed a critical edition of the Arabic catena.  The next question is whether I obtain this and include it in the Eusebius!  For there is a copy available for sale online…

UPDATE 2: I cannot resist.  It would be cheaper to order the books by ILL, and copy them, etc; but it is far easier to just buy the things. 

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More on Abu’l Makarim

Posted on by Roger Pearse

evettsIt’s been a while since I wrote about the 13th century Arabic Christian history once ascribed to Abu Salih the Armenian and today to Abu’l Makarim.  But a friend has sent me a new article on the subject, by Mouton and Papescu-Belis, in Arabica 53, p. (2006), which discusses the unique manuscript.

B.T.A.Evetts in 1895 published part of this text from Paris Arabe 307 with an English translation.  Coptic monk and bishop Fr. Samuel published the rest in 1984 in four volumes.  His manuscript is now Munich Arabicus 2570, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.  An English translation of the new material, undertaken by a collaborator, is apparently not that reliable.  But Fr. Samuel’s own corrections are in the main sound.

The combined manuscript was originally 365 folios in length, disposed into 37 quires.  The first 21 quires are in the Munich ms, and the last 16 in the Paris ms.  The two quires 21 and 22, where the manuscript was broken in half, are mostly missing as the leaves became detached.  The manuscript seems to have been written in 1338 AD (explicitly stated in the Paris ms.); the work itself refers to no event later than 1220.  It is possible that later events were written by a continuator.

The Munich ms. contains descriptions of monasteries and churches in the north of Egypt, as far as Cairo; then those of the Near-East.  The Paris ms. contains the same material for Egypt south of Cairo, into Nubia, and the rest of Africa.

The remainder of the article discusses the description of the monastery of Mt. Sinai and its environs at the period of composition.

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