I’ve today had an email from the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples. As far as they can tell, they do not have any manuscripts of Eustathius of Antioch. The last ever copy of Eusebius Gospel Questions and Solutions was attached to the back of a Sicilian manuscript in the 16th century, and I wondered if it might be there. Oh well.
Tag: Patristics
Sbath project – sample of Hunain gets the raspberry
An unexpected problem; the sample of a translation of Hunain ibn Ishaq has got the raspberry from the person I sent it to for checking. “Make sure the person you use has a solid training in classical Arabic”, I am admonished. Actually I think the translator has. Have sent the comments to the translator, and am awaiting the explosion!
Meanwhile I have offered a commission for treatises 15-19 (a grand total of 12 pages!) to an old and trusted translator. But with the new term coming up, now may not be the best time.
I’ve really enjoyed being on holiday this summer. How rarely can one take more than a week or two off at this time, as I have been able to do? Back to work on Tuesday. A little unenthusiastic, as is usual after a holiday. Also there is no air-conditioning in its offices, except for the offices of the directors. Still, it will be good to get back in the routine.
Hunain ibn Ishaq translation now underway
I’ve found a translator and commissioned a translation of the work of Hunain ibn Ishaq, the 10th century Christian translator of scientific works who worked for the Abbassid caliphs, plus a commentary on it by a Coptic author. The two make up 20 pages in Paul Sbath’s Vingt traites, although for the Hunain work there is a critical text by Samir Khalil Samir which we’ll use instead. It’s about valid and invalid ways to prove your religion is true. The result will be public domain and posted on the web so we can all access it.
If a scribe has two copies of a text in different bookhands, which will he copy?
At the renaissance there was an explosion of copies of manuscripts. These thick neat manuscripts will be familiar to all who have handled manuscripts at all, and are found everywhere. Fifteenth century copies are commonplace.
I’ve just been reading Emil Kroymann’s study of the transmission of the text of Tertullian in Italy, and the role played by the central book-collector of the renaissance, Niccolo Niccoli. Niccoli was one of us. If he lived today, he’d be a blogger. He was an awkward chap, who enjoyed poor health, and was difficult to deal with. He amassed a huge collection of manuscripts, which passed to Lorenzo the Magnificent after his death, and are today in the Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana in Florence.
Kroymann did a journey into Italy at the end of the 19th century, and collated all the Italian manuscripts he could find. In particular he found a manuscript in Florence, written in a gothic book-hand, and a copy of it in Niccoli’s hand, done in a Roman book-hand, both in the Laurentian.
The result of his collation was to discover that all of the Italian copies were descended from Niccoli’s manuscript. Not one was copied direct from the manuscript in gothic book-hand, despite the fact that the two copies have always been together. The scribes found it easier to read a copy in “Roman” font, rather than the gothic hand.
Yet the gothic manuscript was not ancient. It too was written in the 15th century, by two Franciscans at Pforzheim in southern Germany. Cardinal Orsini had made a journey there, and returned carrying a copy of Plautus — THE copy of Plautus, which alone contains a mass of his plays — and this Tertullian manuscript. Both were “borrowed” by Niccoli, to copy; Orsini was able to extract the Plautus from Niccoli’s hands, but the Tertullian he never got back.
We need to be aware of the “path of least resistance” that scribes will take, when technology changes. There are various doorways down the years through which an ancient text must pass in order to reach us. Probably one copy is made, in each case, in the new format; and that becomes the ancestor of all subsequent copies.
When the roll format was abandoned in the 4th century in favour of the parchment codex book, those texts not copied into the new format doubtless speedily ceased to exist. The compiler of the Theodosian codex ca. 450 complains even then that works by second-century jurists like Ulpian no longer are accessible. The flimsier papyrus rolls, no longer considered the most valuable or easiest to use, must quickly have fallen apart.
Likewise when the uncial and capital book-hand of antiquity gave way to the various minuscule book hands in the 9th century, which were both more economic in parchment and easier to write, the older copies must have become inconvenient. They were still readable, and parchment is forever; but if you had to carry a volume to a neighbouring monastery so they could copy it, would you want a big or a small volume?
We see the same phenomenon here in Italy in the fifteenth century. The scribes could have used the copy that Niccolo used; but found it easier to copy the copy, typos and all.
Then we all know how the first text to be placed into print tended to become the ancestor of all printed texts up to the 19th century. Again, this was a doorway. Yet the texts that were printed were by no means the best; they were often those which were simply most readily available.
Today we have texts being placed onto the internet. This too, I suspect, is a doorway. There will come a time, soon, when offline material is simply ignored. These texts too will perish.
Another untranslated bit of Greek – Philip of Side
I’m still turning photocopies into PDF’s, and in the process finding projects I’d forgotten about. I’ve found a couple of articles on the fragments of the 4th century Ecclesiastical History of Philip of Side, preserved in the Bodleian manuscript Barrocianus 142 (itself a mish-mash of historical excerpts). No-one has ever translated the fragments into English.
I wish I could hire people who know Greek. I’d solve that problem.
Chrysostom is better in Syriac than in Greek! And what about the Arabs?
If you look at the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collection, you will see a large number of sermons on books of the bible by John Chrysostom. The NPNF series was a pirate edition; it reprints the Oxford Movement translations, minus their notes, edited by Charles Marriot in the 1840’s and 50’s. You have to be struck by the sheer volume of these things. The sermons are of value to exegetes, of course. Pre-internet it was nearly impossible to access the Oxford Movement “Library of the Fathers” volumes. I suspect the notes would repay investigation.
But while turning photocopies into PDF’s, I came across an interesting article about the manuscripts of Chrysostom by J. W. Childers, Chrysostom’s Exegetical Homilies on the New Testament in Syriac Translation. This tells me that the earliest manuscripts of the Greek tradition are 10th or 11th century; not bad, but by no means early. I know that just listing medieval copies of Chrysostom takes volumes, so there is clearly a very great number of manuscripts. So it is a surprise to learn that no earlier copies exist.
But Childers article draws attention to the fact that the manuscripts of the Syriac version are far earlier. Thus for the Homilies on Matthew, the first 32 sermons (of 90) are preserved in four manuscripts, all from the Nitrian desert in Egypt, all of the 6th century. Another translation existed, referred to by Philoxenus of Mabbug in an anthology composed before 484 AD. The translations were made using the standard techniques of the 5th century, and show that the text of the Greek did not alter appreciably between the 5th and 10th centuries. The translations are insufficiently literal to be much use for text-critical concerns. But for the homilies on Paul’s letters the 6th and 7th century manuscripts are even more literal, and so can be used to correct the Greek.
The homilies were also translated from Syriac into Arabic, and catalogues of manuscripts invariably contain some. There is quite a section on these in Graf’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur vol. 1. While the manuscripts may not be early, they will reflect a Syriac text that may be. It might also be interesting to wonder what exists in Armenian.
PDF files of New LXX translation online
Rather to my surprise, the new English translation of the LXX is online here:
Undoubtedly the funniest reason to refuse work I ever saw
Well the project to translate the untranslated passage of Chrysostom’s Adversus Judaeos has collapsed; and for such a curious reason! The translator who offered himself turns out to be politically correct. My experiences with Lebanese translators who expect to be paid for writing gibberish “translations” has led me, invariably, to ask to see a sample page or two first, and to explain why I ask. The translator himself is not Lebanese, of course. I received this delicious epistle in reply:
After serious consideration concerning your conditions I feel in the need to decline your offer. I have too much respect for people coming from any other country and from any background (religious included) to accept an offer from somebody commenting about “awkward experiences with people in Lebanon offering translations”. I find this regional specification rather politically incorrect. Saying that you have experienced problems with other scholars is enough to justify your conditions, without reference to their place of origin.
Can any of us imagine writing to someone who is offering money and lecturing him on how to write a private email? But best to know now.
I’ll seek out another translator, then.
Untranslated portion of Chrysostom vs Jews – translator found
Further to this post, a Chrysostom scholar has written to me and expressed interest in having a go at translating this “lost” portion of Oratio 2 against the Jews by John Chrysostom. I’ve offered my usual terms, and he’s going to look at the Pradels text and (German) translation and see what he thinks.
My intention is to make the translation public domain. Chrysostom’s sermons against the Jews are found in English in various places on the web (some of them polemical anti-Jewish sites). My intention would be to try to get all these sites to add the extra material on the bottom of their version, and thereby ensure that the full text is the one available everywhere, rather than the mutilated version.
In that way the damage would finally be healed, and become a historical footnote. If I don’t do that, it is likely that the translation of the extra material will simply be forgotten, and the “vulgate” text of this oration (about 30% of the whole thing) will remain the standard text.
The lost part of John Chrysostom’s second sermon against the Jews
Another forgotten paper has emerged from my pile during scanning of articles, and reminds me that I need a translator; someone who can handle Chrysostom.
John Chrysostom preached eight sermons against the Jews during his time at Antioch. The second of these is markedly shorter than the others; about 30% of the size. This led researcher Wendy Pradels to wonder whether the text was damaged, and to search for manuscripts. Her article on the search is here, and in 1999 her persistence was rewarded by the discovery of an unknown manuscript in Lesbos which contained the full version of the sermon. In 2001 she published the extra text, with a German translation, and I have just come across my copy of it.
But as far as I know, no English version of this exists. I wonder whether a scholar would be interested in making me a translation!