Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
It’s always nice when my blog posts attract attention. I learned last week that an old post of mine, from 2013, has attracted a response from a professional atheist polemicist named Richard Carrier. In a rather excitable post here on his own blog he roundly denounces my casual remarks, and indeed myself (!), and offers […]
Few today will have heard the name of Earl Doherty. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, if you were one of those posting online in the religion groups in Usenet news, you would inevitably encounter some atheist gleefully parotting his theories. Doherty was a Canadian atheist, who used the nascent internet to push the claim […]
C. Musonius Rufus (c. 30-100 AD) was a Stoic philosopher of the reign of Vespasian. He belongs to the group of four Roman Stoics which comprises Seneca, Epictetus (who was a pupil of Musonius Rufus), and Marcus Aurelius. He has been referred to as “the Roman Socrates”. Naturally he spent time in gaol under Nero, and was exiled under Vespasian. […]
Last year Josephus scholar Louis Feldman wrote a tentative article in support of the hitherto fringe idea that Eusebius of Caesarea composed the so-called Testimonium Flavianum found in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, book 18. On p.26 we find the following statement: There is one phrase in the Testimonium that, while it has been noted […]
While reading James Hannam’s blog Quodlibeta I noticed this post, discussing the history of vivisection and dissection. It references a rather bad-tempered post by atheist polemicist Richard Carrier here. The nice thing in the discussion is to see ancient medical writers discussed and quoted. James shows that the Hellenistic physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus carried out […]
I have received an email from Nathan Porter, who has an article due out in Vigiliae Christianae, “A Newly Identified Letter of Valentinus on Jesus’s Digestive System: Ps.-Basil of Caesarea’s ep. 366”. Thankfully the article is available at Academia.edu here. It seems that Basil of Caesarea’s Epistula 366 (De continentia) is verbally identical, in places, with portions […]
Earlier this week I saw a reference online to a work by Hero of Alexandria, the ancient constructor of machines who lived at an uncertain time, possibly even in the late 1st century AD. The reference was to his Mechanics. In the Mechanica, I am told, Hero explored the parallelograms of velocities, determined certain simple centers of […]
The translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel is proceeding well. But the Migne edition (PG 13) also contains Greek fragments, labelled Selecta in Ezechielem. The question has arisen as to what to do about these; to translate, or not? A google search revealed that this is mentioned in E. A. de Boer, John Calvin on […]