Eusebius update

Still trying to get the cover together.  At the moment it is one step forward, one step back!  I’ve now got the hardback and paperback covers, which look very good.  Unfortunately we have now lost in the process at least one important graphic element.  But Ben who is doing the final edits is picking up on various subtle problems that might otherwise spike the process.

The real cause of all these problems is Adobe, and the absurd prices that they demand for Adobe Indesign.  At $600 a copy, people just cannot buy it.  I can’t afford to buy it, even.  Nick the designer is forced to stick with Indesign CS3.  Bob the typesetter and Ben the editor are using CS5.  Adobe have made sure  that files cannot be exported from CS5 to CS3. 

If Indesign were cheap, I would just buy a couple of copies.  As it is, it’s like wrestling with a mass of sticky grass.

We’ll get there, I’m sure. 

Share

The headline-grabbers of yesterday

A curious and rather sad article by Mark Tooley, Celebrating the Resurrection, at the American Spectator, (via Curious Presbyterian):

The Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 to adjudicate over which Scriptures were historically accurate, and which always excluded any talk about miracles, once gained widespread attention for its routine objections to traditional Christian belief.  “Christ’s Body Actually Eaten by Wild Dogs!” was a typical headline from a Jesus Seminar gathering, where liberal scholars would vote with color marbles over which biblical verses were valid.

Eventually these self-selected academics ran out of incendiary claims, and the media mostly stopped heeding their pronouncements after founder Robert Funk died in 2005, if not well before.  Co-founder and former Roman Catholic priest John Dominic Crossan, now about 76 years old, still soldiers on.  He and other kindred academics routinely speak around the nation, gathering usually small audiences of gray-headed, mostly retired clergy.

. . . Another aging survivor of the Jesus Seminar is nearly 80 year old retired Episcopal Church Bishop John Shelby Spong, though his fame preceded his induction.  In the 1980s and 1990s, while Bishop of Newark, Spong penned books speculating that the Virgin Mary was a prostitute impregnated by a Roman soldier, and that St. Paul was a self-hating homosexual, among other saucy assertions that once gained headlines but now excite yawns.  He earned audiences with Phil Donahue and other breathless talk show hosts, most of whom are now themselves faded from view.

Spong always claimed that “fundamentalist,” i.e. orthodox Christianity, was dying, and he was its savior.  That his New Jersey diocese lost 40 percent of its members while he was providing enlightened leadership as bishop never seemed to provoke self-reflection.  One bemused observer who recently went to hear him speak at a New Jersey college campus remarked he was able to locate the event by following the trail of “old people.”

Liberal revisionism was always mainly the project of upper middle class, white Mainline Protestants, with advanced degrees and a certain disdain for the ostensibly superstitious masses who heed a more literal version of Christianity.  The evangelical mega-churches of today’s America, not to mention the surging faith of Global South Christianity, especially in Africa, usually befuddle and irritate this audience, most of whom are now long retired.

. . . These “intellectual tyrants” were long ascendant in liberal Protestant academia for over a century.  Despite their decades of turgid exertions, the fully resurrected Jesus remains as captivating as ever.  Happy Easter!

In retrospect, it was all just an exercise in self-promotion, wasn’t it?  They were a small group of people, who found themselves in jobs where their personal beliefs were at odds with what they ought to believe.  They resented those who did believe it.  Feeling inferior, they decided to make themselves superior.  They decided to make money and have fun, in baiting those they resented.  They were trolls, in truth.  Now they’re all old, and tired, and washed-up.  And now what?  The TV news has moved on.  The excitment has gone.  They sit alone at home, wondering what happened.

To say “Darkness, be thou my Light”, for whatever reason, even frivolously, becomes a choice.  It involves taking a road which proves psychologically irreversible.

Is it really possible for a man to throw away a life of mocking something; and instead embrace it, submit to it?  I do not think so.  And so a choice, made perhaps lightly, determines a life, and, of course, a death.  The wrong choice can empty that life of value.

They sold themselves for the bright lights and the flattery.  The flatterers despised them, of course, even as they interviewed them; but Crossan and co never realised that.  As with all such bargains, they found that the sale was binding, but the money they received for their souls just evaporated from their hands.  The damned get nothing for their self-betrayal.

For all of them knew what they were doing was wrong.  How could they not?  Their consciences told them that it violated, in the simplest terms, the moral golden rule.

They chose not to listen.  They told themselves and others that it was not so.  But of course it was, and such choices have consequences.

May God have mercy on them.

Share

Dumping Falco down the charity shop

It’s time.  I’ve had enough.  I’ve decided to dump all the Falco novels by Lindsay Davis after The Jupiter House down at the charity shop.

This series is one that I used to really enjoy.  I even bought some of the hardbacks, rather than wait for the paperback.  But it has got steadily less good.  I suspect the author has changed editor.  The results are less than inspiring.

Sorry, but I find I do not reread these later novels, so they have to go.

Share

How to send a bunch of books from the UK to the Czech Republic?

I have a bunch of books which I should like to send from the UK to a scholar in the Czech Republic.  Trouble is, this could easily get pricey!

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how best to do this?

Share

From my diary

We all know Franz Cumont’s Textes et Monumentes, which collected all the ancient sources on Mithras known a century ago.  What few realise is that a translation was made of most of the literary fragments that he published.  It’s A. S. Geden, Select passages illustrating Mithraism.  It was published by SPCK in 1925; and since Mr. Geden died in 1936, it should be out of copyright in the EU and probably everywhere else too.

Last night I scanned it to PDF and made it searchable.  I’ve uploaded it to Archive.org, here.

I’ve been going through my own page of Mithras testimonia, and was struck by how he rendered some passages from Tertullian.

For instance in De praescriptione haereticorum 40:3-4, the ANF version reads:

… if my memory still serves me, Mithras there, (in the kingdom of Satan,) sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers; celebrates also the oblation of bread, and introduces an image of a resurrection, and before a sword wreathes a crown.  What also must we say to (Satan’s) limiting his chief priest to a single marriage? He, too, has his virgins; he, too, has his proficients in continence.

While Mr. Geden gives us:

…  if my memory does not fail me marks his own soldiers with the sign of Mithra on their foreheads, commemorates an offering of bread, introduces a mock resurrection, and with the sword opens the way to the crown. Moreover has he not forbidden a second marriage to the supreme priest? He maintains also his virgins and his celibates.

Let’s see the Latin:

[4]  et si adhuc memini Mithrae, signat illic in frontibus milites suos. Celebrat et panis oblationem et imaginem resurrectionis inducit et sub gladio redimit coronam. [5] Quid, quod et summum pontificem in unis nuptiis statuit? Habet et uirgines, habet et continentes.

The ANF material in brackets is the opinion of the translator, struck by the sudden switch from “the devil” to Mithras as the subject.

Now I know that “Mithrae” in this passage is thought to be a gloss itself.  Some have thought that the sense demands that the subject of all these remarks is “the devil” — the devil has his chief priest, who can only marry once, the devil has sacred virgins.  Both are, after all, part of ancient Roman religion.  The Roman state priests had to marry only once; the vestal Virgins are well known.  Nothing of either is known to be associated with Mithras; and indeed the idea of Mithraic nuns is strange, for a male-only cult.  Tertullian, then, is listing a set of features of Roman paganism, from various sources, on this theory.

Maybe so.  But it is curious, all the same.

Share

Montaigne’s tower and other delights

Just a quick note on a piece that I have found on Laudator Temporis Acti, Montaigne’s tower.  It is always good to find a blog which is a scrapbook of fascinating stuff.  After reading The foundation of all Greek scholarship, I found this, invoking the spirit of the French essayist Montaigne:

Geoffrey Grigson, Montaigne’s Tower:

Was it really here, in this tiled room
In this tower that Montaigne wrote?
I hope that it was so. Never was there
A place better for recalling, I would say —
For being benign and wise, for loving
In words. I see him back a chair
Across these tiles, and stand and stretch, and then
Descend this newel stair, and going
Slowly as if arthritically outside.
He looks down, with feeling he sees again
How exceedingly sweet is this meadowed
Small valley below and how half-reddening
Vines in such a light cast straight
Black bars of shadow in row after row.

Share

From my diary

Still busy with dull stuff, but I have been revising the Wikipedia article on Areimanios

“Who he?” I hear you cry?  Well Areimanios is the Greek name for Ahriman, the Persian evil spirit, used in descriptions of Zoroastrianism in Plutarch and the like.

Except … there’s more.  There are some odd traces of a non-evil Areimanios.  And there are five Latin inscriptions which seem to be all to a deity associated with Mithras, saying things like “To the god Arimanius in fulfilment of a vow”.

Some of the commentary I have read has said that it is fairly unlikely that anyone would set up altars to an evil god in their temples dedicated to good gods.  But I’m not so sure about this, because, in a dualist world view, you might well say that both need to exist.  We’ve all heard enough smelly hippies talking about “Yin and Yang, man”.  Won’t a true dualist see both as a part of the world, necessary in their own way?  Rather like having a toilet in the vestry, if you like?

I can see such a person making offerings and vows to the “dark side”, when in mortal danger — “let me off this time and I’ll give you a nice altar”?

We need to remember that we do not understand how ancient religion worked.  We can only guess at much of it.  I claim nothing for what I have just suggested — it is pure imagination — but we must avoid being too positive about what “must not” have happened.

On the other hand, maybe the critics are right.  Maybe the name of Ahriman was transferred (in its Latin form) to a different deity, the lion-headed god found in Mithraea and usually anonymous.  The name “Areimanios” appears (I am told) on the foot of one such statue, although that interpretation relies on expanding abbreviations and might be a personal name of a donor, not of the god. 

If so, then perhaps there is a pattern.  Roman Mithras, born from a rock and killing the bull, is not really at all like Persian Mithra, although they share the same name.  Rather someone took the name of the Persian god and applied it to their “export version” religion, rather like the Hari Krishna’s did for Krishna.  Did that same someone take the nice, authentic Persian “Areimanios” and apply it to their own made-up lion-headed god too? Is that how the cult was created?

Share

A curious quote from one of the Greek magical papyri

I happened to see this claim in an online puff for the curious theories of Acharya S:

The salvific death and resurrection at Easter of the god, the initiation as remover of sin, and the notion of becoming “born again,” are all ages-old Pagan motifs or mysteries rehashed in the later Christianity. The all-important death-and-resurrection motif is exemplified in the “Parisian magical papyrus,” a Pagan text ostensibly unaffected by Christianity:

“Lord, being born again I perish in that I am being exalted, and having been exalted I die; from a life-giving birth being born into death I was thus freed and go the way which Thou has founded, as Thou hast ordained and hast made the mystery.”

This followed remarks about Easter being celebrated in pagan Mexico (!).

It is a golden rule, when dealing with supposed quotations in twaddle, always to verify those quotations.  A look in Google books shows that these two paragraphs are quoted verbatim  from Acharya S, Suns of god, 2004, p.503.  A reference ’18’ is given, but unfortunately the preview does not include the references.

A quick search in Betz, The Greek Magical papyri in translation, reveals no matches for “born again”.  Hmm.

Searching for the words reveals a possible source: the “Pagan Background of Early Christianity”, p.244 by W. R. Halliday (London, 1925: not a headbanger source) might be the source.  I’ve not been able to find this book online, tho.  But in a Google books preview it seems to refer to Dieterich’s publication of the so-called “Mithras liturgy”, so the words should be at the end of this.  But I can find nothing relevant in Meyer’s translation here.

UPDATE: It is indeed in Meyer:

O Lord, while being born again, I am passing away; while growing and having grown, I am dying; while being born from a life-generating birth, I am passing on, released to death– as you have founded, as you have decreed, and have established the mystery…

Share