Roger Pearse

Armenian sources online at Robert Bedrosian

Robert Bedrosian writes to say that he has created a new collection of Armenian patristic materials on his website here.  In this he is rather too modest.  It is a cornucopia of PDF’s of Armenian materials.

Anyone who has ever tried to locate an Armenian edition of an ancient text will know that it is a lesson in pain.  Those of us who are not Armenian-speakers find it impossible to construct useful searches in Google Books.

The page begins with catalogues of Armenian manuscript holdings; in Munich, Paris, Oxford and others.  Much material in this language is unpublished, so these are valuable insights into available materials, all by themselves.

Then we pass to editions of Philo, and then patristic and liturgical texts.  These include many of the publications of the Mechitarist Fathers of Venice, all valuable, often referenced in bibliographies, and dreadfully hard to find online.  I noted two editions of Severian of Gabala, also sermons of John Chrysostom, and material by Timothy Aelurus, Eznik of Kolb, and so on.

After this we pass into editions of the bible in classical Armenian (or Grabar).  Finally there are some very useful reference volumes.

I don’t know of anyone but Robert Bedrosian who could have made such a collection.  But in so doing he has made accessible a world of useful material!