Tag: Patristics

Catalogue of digitised medieval manuscripts online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A new catalogue of medieval mss online has appeared.  It’s here.

The man responsible, Matthew Fisher, in this article in Science Daily makes exactly the right points.

A member of a new generation of scholars who cut their teeth in the San Francisco Bay Area during the dot-com era, the Los Angeles native is motivated by a commitment to democratize access to some of the world’s most exclusive repositories.

“The price of admission shouldn’t be a plane ticket to a library in Europe or even Australia,” he said. “These documents are part of the world’s cultural patrimony. Everybody should have access.”

After all, we’re paying for them.  Most mss are owned by state-funded libraries, or are state-owned.

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Recipient names in Isidore of Pelusium

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The recipient names in the letters of Isidore of Pelusium have a different textual history to the body of the text.  These names appear at the top of each letter, sometimes followed by a one-line summary.

I learn from Pierre Evieux’s excellent study that in the manuscripts, these items were not copied at the same time as the rest of the text.  This is because they are written in red, and are therefore done by a rubricator.  The copyist had to leave a space for them, and then someone — himself or another — would come back and fill in the gaps in red ink.

The same approach was taken in medieval texts to decorated initials.  Quite a large number of those initials were never done, and there are many manuscripts which still have a gap at the appropriate place.  So we can see immediately that the names can be lost in transmission far more easily than the rest of the text.

Nor is this all.  In a modern edition the names would be on a separate line.  But in a manuscript, saving parchment is all — especially if you had to kill the sheep necessary to make that parchment!  So the names would be inline, and distinguished by the colour to indicate the start of a new letter.  If you didn’t leave enough space, what then?

The only possible answer would be to abbreviate the words.  But names are hard to abbreviate.  Consequently the result could well be obscure symbols, also leading to loss.  This would be hard to fix next time the text was copied, especially as the next copyist would be liable to leave the same amount of space, thereby preventing the abbreviation from being expanded.

Finally the red ink tended to fade more than the black ink, leaving portions illegible.  A few scattered letters would be all that could be copied.

A further factor is the nature of the manuscript.  When it contained a copy of the letters of Isidore of Pelusium, the names of the recipients were important to the reader, and are generally included.  But there are also manuscripts which only contain a selection by subject of his letters, e.g. on some point of scripture.  In these manuscripts the name of the author was important, as an indicator of authority, but the recipient names hardly so.  In these type of manuscripts the recipient names suffer much more damage.

All these features are found in the manuscripts. 

These interesting comments by Pierre Evieux would seem to have wide application to many other sorts of texts.  They explain how letters can easily be combined in transmission; how the names can easily be corrupted or mistaken.  All these little details help us to understand what we see in any text that has reached us.

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Problems with the CSCO edition of Jacob of Edessa’s Chronicle

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Chronicle of Eusebius may not be his best known work, but it is still fairly widely known.  The second half of this consisted of tables of dates, rulers, and events, in a form which has now been imitated and continued for some fifteen centuries (Jerome’s version here).

Among the continuators was the 7th century Syriac scholar, Jacob of Edessa.  His main claim to fame is that he realised that Syriac needed vowels, and was able to induce his Syrian Orthodox co-religionists to adopt Greek vowels, albeit written as tiny letters above the line.  Their rivals in the Church of the East dogged stuck with swarms of dots above and below the line to indicate vowels; a practise disastrously followed by Arabic.  Indeed Jacob even tried to get the vowels written on the line with the consonants, but here he failed.

His chronicle starts where Eusebius ends, in the 20th year of Constantine.  He begins with several pages discussing an error of calculation in Eusebius, and then a table of kings of Rome and Persia, years of their reign, “total years” (from the start of his chronicle) and events against each year makes up the rest of the Chronicle.  A badly damaged manuscript from the Nitrian desert in Egypt now in the British Library contains what survives of the text.  The work is of importance as one of the earliest mentions of Mohammed — as king of the Arabs — in a non-Moslem text.

The tabular portion of the work was printed in the ZDMG 1 early in the 20th century by E. W. Brooks, who appended a non-tabular translation in English of the events.  He revisited the text for the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium series; vol. 5 consists of the Syriac text in a volume of Chronica minora, while vol. 6 contains a Latin translation in tabular form, including the introduction. 

I have scanned the English translation from the ZDMG, with the intention of placing it online.  I obtained the CSCO volumes, and intended to format the text in tabular form, and simply replace the Latin translation with Brooks earlier English translation.  Simple?

I am encountering several problems doing so, which seem interesting themselves. 

Firstly, it is by no means as clear as it might be what the layout on the manuscript page actually is, when these seem to start in the middle of a page in the printed edition.  Are those running headers “PERSIANS: Sapor” really present half-way down the manuscript page, as Brooks suggests by printing them at the top of the page of the printed edition?  How is it that alternate pages seem to be non-tabular; is that a feature of the original; table and facing text?  Are any of those headings colour coded, as Eusebius coded his original text?   The only way to find out is to consult the original manuscript.

In addition, Brooks was unable to read the text in many places.  In some places he resorted to patching it from Michael the Syrian, who quotes extensively from Jacob, it is true.  But this is a risky thing to do.  We want Jacob’s text, as it exists.  We don’t want Michael here, except in a footnote.

As for the unreadable text, I wonder whether it would become readable under UV light?

Comparing the English translation with his Latin translation, the latter is longer, and words that were uncertain the first time are not so the second.  His use of Michael is probably the reason for this new certainty.  But there are worrying differences.  I have already come across one event which is labelled as one year in the English, and the following year in the Latin.  There is no indication of why the event is supposed to happen a line later in the text.  Which is right?  Did the printers do this?

Clearly we need a new edition of this work.  It’s not a long text, perhaps 20 pages.  We need an English translation of the discussion of Eusebius.  We need good pictures of the text, not the partial ones that Brooks had – perhaps using Multi-Spectral Imaging.  None of this should be beyond the skills of any Syriacist. 

Is anyone interested? 

1. Zeitschrift fur deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, 53 (1899) 261-327

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Isidore of Pelusium: some more letters

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Here are two more letters of this 5th century monastic:

311. TO THE EMPEROR THEODOSIUS
How to provide assurance to the synod

If you could personally take the time to join them in deliberating at Ephesus, I am sure that there will be no censure of you on their part. If you leave the voting to the crowd’s antipathies, who would free the synod from all of the mockery? You would also remedy the situation, if you would stop your servants from dogmatizing, since they stand uncertainly between a great chasm of serving the emperor and quarreling with God, for fear that they make waves for the empire, dashing against the rock of the Church the contrivances of their bad faith. That Church has been set up, and cannot be lorded over by the gates of Hell, as God announced when He was creating it.

322. TO THE READER TIMOTHEOS
On how you cannot argue with an ignorant person.

Just as it is not safe to travel through an uninhabited land with a belligerent person, so it is not very easy to have an educated conversation with an ignorant person. The former will unleash his full force on you when you are alone if something is said or done not to his liking, while the latter, unless everything said is dumbed down to his lack of education, will single out for disgrace and ridicule everyone intelligent in the world, including learned philosophers and virtue-loving men. Frequently, people’s lack of letters tends to spread and at the current time you will find it preeminent everywhere. Even the Church is not without its share of it as well as the State and even the empire itself cannot be governed without it. Because of this, our troubles grow and the spirit of slavery has taken hold through the empire. So be very patient with the unlearned person, because you gladly abstain from the mindless, being mindful of our Lord.

What a picture these give us of the conditions in the fifth century.  The emperor, drawn into pointless dogmatic quarrels, while the nation drifted towards ignorance and contempt for learning.

I’ve now obtained Pierre Evieux’s study of Isidore of Pelusium.  It’s entirely discussion; none of the letters are included. From it I learn that the letters have been highly regarded.  Mainly they deal with Old and New Testament exegesis.  In some cases they quote Demosthenes and are a source of readings for establishing his text.  Isidore was definitely in favour of using pagan learning, so long as it was baptised.

Interestingly many scholars have denied the authenticity of the letters.  They point to the fact that the collection of 2,000 letters emanates from the “Sleepless” monastery of Constantinople — so called because the monks took it in shifts to keep the services going 24 hrs — and suggest that it was forged by them.  We thus have the absurd situation where scholars demand that we call him “pseudo-Isidore” and claim that these letters are not by the otherwise unknown father of the 5th century, but by someone else of the same name!   Evieux remarks that the existence of additional letters in Syriac, outside the “Sleepless” collection, disproves the idea of a later forgery.

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Bringing projects to an end

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The recession is biting, and I need to reduce my outgoings.  Luckily the Eusebius is all but done, the al-Majdalus is done, and I have a promise of the Cyril text for a week hence.  I’ve cancelled the translation of letters by Isidore, and decided not to commission a translation of the medieval biographies of Hunain ibn Ishaq.

I have enjoyed doing all these things, but I don’t have a guaranteed source of income, and so must be prudent in hard times.  At the moment I don’t know where my income will come from after March.  This is by no means unusual, but this year there may be no business in April.  It was nervous enough this time last year, when I spent three months hunting for work.    Let’s see what the new financial year brings.

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Eusebius project progress

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Regular readers will know that a year ago I commissioned David Miller to translate all that now exists of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Quaestiones Evangelicae ad Stephanum et Marinum.  This consists of an epitome of the work, plus a large number of fragments from catenae and the like. 

The subject of the work is differences between the gospels, at the start and at the end, and how they should be resolved:  Why are the genealogies in Matthew and Luke different?  Why is there more than one ending in Mark?  As may be imagined, this makes it an interesting book indeed!

I’ve not been posting updates, because every week there has been a new chunk translated.  But we’ve now reached the end of the text.  The last few fragments of Greek and Latin reached me today in English translation.   The quality has been improving all the time, and the notes are extremely interesting.

The next stage will be to revise the whole and make sure that formatting is consistent, etc.  This will probably take place in a month or two, to allow the translator a bit of distance from the process of actual sentence-by-sentence translation and to see the text as a whole.

The Syriac and Coptic have made only limited progress, and I fear that I will have to go with what has been done and ignore the rest.  This is unfortunate, of course.

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The curse of too much reading

Posted on by Roger Pearse

JPS points us to a post by Kevin Edgcomb:

I curse my studies. Sometimes, anyway. What good is it to be following a Bible reading plan for the faithful when half of what is going on during my reading is (Lord, have mercy!) a critique of the translation, a mental retroversion to the Hebrew and/or Greek involved, mental notes on historical illumination and literary parallels, and all manner of distractions. The wonder is often gone. I hate that.

The same experience can afflict the classicist, who can no longer sail with Telemachus in a black ship across the wine-dark sea to see fair-haired Menelaus, for all the scholarly footnotes that howl in his head. 

Is there much practical difference between this and being unable any longer to read the book in question?  Is a textual scholar — let us say one with perfect command of Homeric Greek, who has memorised the scholia and knows every volume of important scholarship published in the last millennium — perhaps the least able, of all men, to read the Odyssey any more?

Kevin rightly observes the problems in bible reading for those with too much head knowledge.  It has been many years since the ordinary off-the-shelf bible-reading guides have been of much service to me.  They are aimed at some common average, of sympathies and intellect and attitude; and perhaps few of those inclined to study, even as amateurs, will fall into that group.

I say this with regret, not pride.  I am the loser, not the gainer thereby.  I have not gained in knowledge of God; I have merely become unable to learn from some who know more than me on every important point, except in matters of manuscript studies.

How easy it is for the less perceptive to suppose that they have “risen above” this sort of guide, when in truth they have merely become  unable to read it and profit from it, for all intents and purposes.

What shall it profit a man, if he knows every footnote in Nestle-Aland, and loses his soul?  In my time of dying, which may be very much sooner than I suppose, how much of that to which I have devoted my life will seem other than dry and dusty shreds of paper?

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A Syriac summary of the Iliad

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting discussion in the BYZANS-L list on attitudes to Homer in Byzantium has produced the following fascinating comment from J. J. van Ginkel:

A very interesting reference to Homer can be found in a `pseudo-byzantine’ source. In a Syrian Orthodox Chronicle (written in a ecclesiastic context, in the Syriac language) there is a summary of the Iliad running for more than 10 pages of the text edition. Intriguing is that according to this Chronicle the Iliad was to be found in books 43 to 51 of the Chronography of Homer …

See J.-B. Chabot, Anonymi Auctoris Chronicon ad Annum Christi 1234 Pertinens I (CSCO 108 (text), 109(latin translation)), Paris 1916, 1920, pp. 66-78 (txt); 50-59 (tr)

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