Medieval mss from Switzerland online?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Very good news from Switzerland, which has launched the e-codices site:

The goal of e-codices is to provide access to the medieval manuscripts of Switzerland via a virtual library. On the e-codices site, complete digital reproductions of the manuscripts are linked with corresponding scholarly descriptions. Our aim is to serve not only manuscript researchers, but also interested members of the general public.

At the moment, the virtual library contains 570 manuscripts from 24 different libraries. The virtual library will be continuously updated and extended.

This is what we want to see; the mss becoming accessible to us all.  Well done the Swiss!

When you access the site, they want you to click to “accept terms”.  Yes, well, that is just silly, lads — how are you going to enforce that on someone in Turkmenistan?  But at least they have recognised that the world and his wife use English!

I did a search for ‘Eusebius’, and up come various catalogue entries.  The mss seem to be mostly Latin; descriptions were in German, but none the worse for that.  ‘Tertullian’ brought up no results.  ‘Origen’ gave nothing; ‘Origenes’ 8 mss.  Interestingly this included a “Martin Bodmer” result — is it possible that all the Bodmer mss are now online?  If so, that would be very exciting!

And … there are 74 Bodmer mss online.  I wonder what treasures this contains?

H/t Open Access Manuscript Library of Switzerland at Charles Ellwood Jones.

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An introduction to Old Slavonic literature?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have spent a couple of hours online attempting to locate some evidence of an introductory work to Old Slavonic literature.  This has been in vain, although guides to the language are common enough.  The only text I have found is an 1883 SPCK publication here.

Does anyone know of such a guide to what exists in Old Slavonic; like a patrology in organisation?

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BBKL article on Ibn al-Tayyib

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The post on the Nestorian monk Ibn al-Tayyib and his commentary on the gospels, a source for the Diatessaron, has led to a very interesting set of comments and a large bibliography.  This is a text that really does need to be in English.  I shall continue to explore this in the comments on that article.

Today I learn that there is a BBKL article in German on Ibn al-Tayyib.  Since a lot of people find German difficult, I thought I would smarten up the Google translation and place it here.

Volume II (1990) Columns 1238-1239 Author: Michael Tillly

Ibn al-Tajjib, full name “Abu’l Farag Abdallah ibn at-Taiyib al Iraqi”, Nestorian monk, writer, philosopher, physician, priest, b. towards the end of the 10th century, † in October 1043 in Baghdad. – After studying medicine he worked ca. 1015 as a doctor in the hospital named after its founder Adud al-Dawla al-Adudiya in Baghdad. As a physician and teacher, over time Ibn al-Tayyib gathered a large group of disciples. He presided at the election-Synod of the Syrian Nestorian Church, which elected Elias I as Catholicos. As secretary he composed in 1028 the church’s approval of the report of Elias of Nisibis on his “Seven meetings”. Under the Catholicos Yuhanna ibn Nazuk he became Patriarchate secretary.

Ibn al-Tayyib wrote in Arabic many dogmatic, exegetical, and canonical works, as well as making translations from Syriac. However, of his literary work, only a fraction has been preserved. He wrote numerous works on teaching and explaining the scientific and medical works of Hippocrates and Galen, as well as on the logical and metaphysical works of Aristotle.

His main work in theology is the commentary on the whole Bible “Firdaus an-Nasraniya (Paradise of Christianity), the largest exegetical work in Christian Arabic literature. Other works are his exegetical commentary on the Psalms “Arraud an-nadir fi tafsir al-mazamir” (The flower garden – Explanation of the Psalms), with an introductory essay on the classification, origin and purpose of the Psalms and on the reading and linguistic peculiarities of the Psalms, a Translation and Explanation of the four Gospels, as well as several smaller exegetical commentaries. The most important among the dogmatic, ethical and canonical works is the apologetic compendium “Al-usul ad-diniya ar-rabbaniya” (The Basics of the religion of the Lord).

In the legal collection “Fiqu an-Nasraniya” (The law of Christendom), I translated and compiled the ancient Syrian collections of canons and compendia of laws, which he joined together in a collected work.

I. is the focus of current research as the translator of the Syriac Diatessaron of Tatian into Arabic.

The importance for Church history of the versatile and learned Nestorian Ibn al-Tayyib is justified by his rich and diverse literary work on natural scientific, philosophical, theological and ecclesiastical matters.  His great tradition of teaching and interest is representative of the Nestorians as a zealous agent of Greek science, philosophy and theology among the Arabs.

Works: Diatessaron, ed. Augustinus Ciasco, Rome 1888; Firdaus annasranija (Paradise of Christendom), ed. v. fransis Miha’il, Cairo 1898, 49, 236-240; Ar-Raud an-nadir fi tafsir al-mazamir (The flower garden – Explanation of the Psalms), ed. Yusuf Manqurius and Habib Girgis, Cairo 1902; Tafsir al-machriqi, ed. Yusuf Manqurius, Bd. 1, Cairo 1908, Bd. 2, Cairo. 1910; Maqala fi ‘l-‘ilm wal-muchiza (Treatise on science and miracles), ed. Paul Sbath, Vingt Traités, Cairo 1929, 179 f.; Fiqu an-Nasraniya (The law of Christendom), ed. W. Hoenerbach and O. Spies, in: CSCO 16 1-162 (1956), 167-168 (1957).

Lit.: G. Chr. Storr, Dissertatio … de evangeliis arabicis, Tübingen 1775, 44-47; – Paul de Lagarde, Die vier Evangelien, Leipzig 1864, 16 f.; – Karl Georg Bruns and Eduard Sachau, Syrisch-römisches Rechtsbuch aus dem 5. Jh., Bd. II, Leipzig 1880, 176 ff.; – Ignazio Guidi, Le traduzioni degli Evangelii in arabo e in etiopico, Rom 1888, 14, 19, 23 f.; – Ernst Sellin, in: Theodor Zahn (Ed.) Forschungen zur Geschichte des neutestamentl. Kanons und der altkirchlichen Literatur IV, Leipzig 1891, 243-245; – O. Braun, Das Buch der Synhados, Stuttgart 1900, 315 ff.; – Arthur Hjelt, Die altsyrische Evangelienübersetzung und Tatisna Diatessaron, in: Theodor Zahn (Ed.), Forschungen zur Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanons und der altkirchl. Literatur VII, Leipzig 1903, 68 f.; – Georg Graf, Die Philosophie und Gotteslehre des Jahja ihn ‘Adi und späterer Autoren, Münster/Westf. 1910, 48-51; – Eduard Sachau, Syrische Rechtsbücher, Bd. 2, Berlin 1908, 23, 190-204, Bd. 3, Berlin 1914, 16 f., 289-344; – A. J. B. Higgings, The Arabic Version of Tatians Diatessaron, in: JThS 45 (1944), 187-199; – Brockelmann I, 482, I2, 635, Suppl. I, 884; – Graf I, 152 ff.; II, 162-176; – DThC XI, 276 ff.; – LThK V, 591. 

The last bit of biblio is interesting:

Samir Khalil Samir, I .- La place d’al-T. dans la pensée arabe, in: JEChSt 58.2006, p. 177-193.

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Old Slavonic manuscripts online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A comment on this post leads us to a wonderland of Old Slavonic patristic manuscripts, all online and in full colour.  I will repeat some of the information here.

I wonder if you know about this website: http://www.stsl.ru/manuscripts . This an online collection of manuscripts from the former library of St.Sergius Monastery near Moscow, now in the Russian National Library.

Now I know no Cyrillic.  But Google translate does!

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stsl.ru%2Fmanuscripts&sl=ru&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8

The Russian-text images on the left are not translated, but if you hover the mouse over them, English text appears!

Then I clicked on the “Main Library” link.  This takes you straight to a catalogue.  OK, it’s a bit wonky, and you have to be a bit imaginative, but it’s perfectly usable for English-speakers, thanks to Google; and this link takes us to a list of manuscripts in the main library collection.  And if you click on the book, you get a detailed catalogue of the ms, and then a box at the bottom to ask for the folio!  This is SUPER!!!

  • No 6 is the Explanation of Revelation by the catenist Andrew of Caesarea.
  • No 7 is the Instructions of Ephrem Syrus.
  • No 8 is Gregory the Theologian.
  • No 10 is The Ladder of John Climacus.  There are loads more of this further down.
  • 124-5 are Cyril of Jerusalem
  • 126-8 are Ephrem, although 128 is not online.
  • 129-135 are Basil the Great
  • 154 is Antiochus the monk — I’m pretty sure he turned up in Harnack’s catalogue.
  • 172-5 is Isaac the Syrian, although whether anyone can stomach his mystical teachings I don’t know.  (Maybe it’s just that the English translation of his work is so bad)
  • 176-7 are John Damascene.
  • 178 is Theodore the Studite.
  • 180 is Symeon the New Theologian
  • Lives of the Saints start to appear around 680-ish
  • 687-690 are “Barlaam and Joasaph Indian and Theodore edesskago”; i.e. Theodore of Edessa.
  • 728 is a chronography!  Yes, it’s a world history.  The catalogue is worth a read here.

There are loads of biblical manuscripts in here.  Of course you have to wade through synodicons, and all the stuff that makes up the bulk of ecclesiastical libraries.  But … this is simply splendid!

My next stop was the search facility.  As expected, entering “eusebius” made no sense to the Cyrillic engine.  So I went back to Google translate, entered “Eusebius” into it and got out “Евсевий” in Russian.  I tried this; but it didn’t work.  Then I tried “Gregory”, got “Григорий” and tried that.  That didn’t work either.  Hum.  Lack of a search engine we can use is a problem.

Another collection is here.  These are not as well catalogued, but the images are top-notch.  Dionysius the Areopagite, the “Creation Methodius of Patara”… hmm!.  #75 is a Slavonic ms of Cosmas Indicopleustes!  #100 is the Annals of George Hamartolus; 102 is Cosmas again; 146 is Chrysostom.  I got to ca. 239, but have to stop there.

The mss are late, but so what?  They’re accessible!!!

But all the same, this is really wonderful!  The images are gorgeous, undefiled, and quite fit for any scholarly study imaginable (other than examining the stitching of the book!)  Frankly this is how it should be done!  Who, I wonder, did this?  I wish I knew the names of those involved, for they deserve a big cheer!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Snow here. I had to leave work at lunchtime on Wednesday and have been home since. This morning I couldn’t see where my driveway was! I tried to drive to work this morning, but I had to turn back. The roads were not too bad, but accidents were happening, and a bridge near me was closed.

On the way to and fro, I saw that the temperature on my car thermometer dropped to -8.5°C and stayed there for mile after mile. My screenwash froze, but I fixed that by adding anti-freeze to it. However at that temperature, I was pretty nervous whether the anti-freeze in the engine coolant would be OK, if I left the car outside all day.

But one positive effect of all this (unpaid) time off is that I have been working on editing the Eusebius, Gospel Problems and Solutions.  Today has mostly been about tidying up.  There is such a large amount of physical labour involved in doing a book.  This evening I’ve been adding references to each extract given by Mai from Jerome’s Commentary on Matthew.  Simple stuff, but time-consuming.  I posted off materials to correct the Latin fragments to the translator yesterday.

I’ve had to order various books.  My original plan was a day-trip to Cambridge, but this has gone out of the window with the snow.  So I am reliant on an inter-library loan system that is both expensive — $8 per loan — and slow and unreliable.  Here’s hoping!

The snow has also brought other problems, with plumbing and health.  Fortunately I have been able to deal with them all!

But … aside from the urgent unimportancies of life… the snow is beautiful.  I am reminded of the line in the Silmarillion where the evil of Morgoth in devising bitter cold produces a wonderland of ice.  So it is here. 

I found myself yesterday evening, when I had put the car away, just standing outside my front door and pausing.  All was still.  The road was full of snow.  The sky was dark, but light was reflected from the snow onto the underside of clouds, and the world was light anyway.  I just stood there… and watched the magic of winter.  We must, we really must stop, and look around us.  Store up these memories, memories of beauty.

Then I hastily ran into the house!

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Supposed quotation by Hypatia

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An atheist post online used the following as a signature:

“Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.”

No reference was given, but the passage can be found attributed to a letter by Synesius.  Unfortunately it seems clear that this is not part of the standard English translation by Fitzgerald, which is online at Livius.org:

http://www.livius.org/su-sz/synesius/synesius_cyrene.html

http://www.livius.org/su-sz/synesius/synesius_letters.html

So… does anyone know where Synesius says anything like this?

I am suspicious.  Much of this doesn’t sound right.

UPDATE:  No sign of this anywhere in Fitzgerald’s translation.  Looking in Google books, I find the saying in Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the homes of great teachers, 1908, p.84-5 (without reference, of course).  I can’t find anything earlier than that.

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Fathers in Old Slavonic – 2

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A number of ante-Nicene writers exist in an translation in Old Slavonic.

  • Portions of the Shepherd of Hermas, from the Similitudes.
  • The Letter of Barnabas.
  • Ignatius of Antioch, Letters.  I don’t have any details of which ones, tho.
  • The martyrdom of Polycarp
  • The quotation of Papias in the work of Apollinaris on Judas.
  • Barlaam and Joasaf also exists in the list, although it isn’t ante-Nicene!
  • Justin Martyr
  • Irenaeus

I think all of these are extracts, tho.

  • Hipploytus, on the anti-Christ, the end of the world, and the Commentary on Daniel.  Also on the Song of Songs; on Revelation 20; on Proverbs 30; on the 12 apostles and 70 apostles.
  • Origen, On the psalms.
  • (ps).Origen, Dialogue of Adamantius.
  • Dionysius of Alexandria.  There is quite a section of materials by him.
  • Methodius.  Likewise there is a long list of manuscripts containing material.
  • Eusebius.  There’s some sort of explanation about the Psalms.  The Letter to Carpianus, and the canon tables.

Unfortunately now I look at it, I’m finding Harnack’s text almost impossible to understand!

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Patristic literature in Old Slavonic – 1

Posted on by Roger Pearse

What do you do, when you find that the mediaeval Greeks carelessly forgot to preserve a copy of some patristic text in which you are interested?  Well, you have a couple of choices.

Firstly you can go and search manuscript libraries and see if you can find it.  This option is rarely exercised, since dealing with many Greek libraries is only just preferable to torture.

Your other alternative is to see if anyone translated it into something else, before it was lost.

This happened a lot.  Back in the 5th century, the Armenians sent off an expedition to Edessa, got a whole load of Syriac books, and translated these into Classical Armenian.  They also set up a monastery in Jerusalem, which translated books and sent them back to the old country.  As a result we have works by Irenaeus and Eusebius extant in no other language.

Old Slavonic is another language group that came into contact with the Greek world during the Dark Ages.  The language was spoken by Old Slavs (of course).  Once these had been taught literacy, they too acquired Greek literature.

I’ve found in Harnack’s Geschichte der altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius, Theil I, halfte 2 — which I can’t find online — a list of ante-Nicene patristic authors whose works are extant in Old Slavonic.  The list is more than a century old, but I think it would be interesting to look at, for those of us who know almost nothing about that language group.  More in my next post!

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The last Byzantine ecclesiastical historian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There’s nothing quite like having a book on hand in paper format.  Last night, troubled with insomnia, I browsed along my shelves for something gentle to read, and in vain.  But then my hand fell on a cheap modern reprint of Harnack, Geschichte der altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius, Teil 1, Halfte 2.

This is the sort of book I just do not buy.  It’s best consulted in PDF.  But … for some reason I had seen it in PDF form, and had felt the urge to have a copy.

Basically it’s a patrology.  It’s stuffed full of Harnack’s notes on authors, full of untranslated bits of Greek and Latin and even Syriac.  Readability it has none.  But as a source to mine for untapped materials, it can’t be beaten.  I have it because of the Gospel Problems and Solutions of Eusebius.  Unlike any other source, it lists bunches of manuscript fragments.

But then my attention was drawn to the fact that Harnack says that Nicephorus Callistus (who?) mentions the Quaestiones ad Stephanum.  Who is this guy?

Well, he turns out to be the author of an Ecclesiastical History in 18 books.  In fact he lived in the 14th century, so was at the end of the chain of authors, extending and extending the basic HE of Eusebius.  There seem to be some letters of his extant also.  A web search revealed little more.

His HE is in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, of course, vols 145-7.  But is there an English translation?  A search on the name revealed almost nothing since Migne, which is very curious.  I wonder if perchance people have started to spell his name differently, with K’s and ‘os’ instead of C and ‘us’, “to be more accurate”?  Such twiddling is a curse for an obscure author.

I did find an elderly text on Google books, W.F.Hook,  An Ecclesiastical Biography, vol. 7, which had something on him, p.411 here:

Callistus Nicephorus, an ecclesiastical historian, son of Callistus Xanthopulus, flourished in the fourteen century. Born with a taste for letters, at a period when there was no means of pursuing them but in the cloister, he became a monk, and passed his time in prayer and study.

He composed an Ecclesiastical History, in twentythree books, but only eighteen have been preserved, which extend from the birth of our Lord to the death of the Emperor Phocas, in 610, and the summaries of the five others, which include the reigns of Heraclius to Leo the philosopher. Callistus dedicated this work to Andronicus Paleologus the ancient; he had completed it before the age of thirty-six. It is only a compilation of the histories of Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, &c., but it contains fragments of some authors, whose works we no longer possess, and is written in a pleasing manner.

Schurzfleisch has called Nicephorus the Ecclesiastical Thucydides, on account of the beauty of his style; and Vossius calls him the Pliny of Theology, because he ornaments his accounts with so many fabulous details. The only MS. known of this history is at Vienna, in the Imperial Library. There is a Latin version by John Lang. Bale, 1553, fol. A French translation by Jean Gillot, Paris, 1567, fol. The Greek text was printed with the version by Lang, corrected by Fronton du Due. Paris, 1630, 2 vols., fol.

Besides this work, there remain some Verses of his; A Catalogue of the Emperors and Patriarchs of Constantinople ; A Short Abridgment of the Old Testament ; A Catalogue of the Fathers of the Church, &c.

Nicephorus is considered to be one of the principal compilers of the Synaxarius, or Abridgment of the Lives of the Saints; Combefis accuses him of having disfigured them, by inserting fables drawn from legends.— Weiss.

Hmm.  Surely a text worthy of a translation?  Let’s try searching for the barbarous-looking “Nikephoros Kallistos”…

A BBKL article in German hides him under Xanthopulos.

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How different is a critical text from a pre-critical text?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We like to work from a critical text, don’t we? And rightly so; a text established in a scholarly manner, from a proper analysis of the witnesses and due consideration of the style of the author and the period is a good thing.

But an awful lot of texts don’t exist in that form.  So … how usable are those pre-critical texts?

Today I compared the text of excerpts of Eusebius from Jerome’s Commentary on Matthew, published by Angelo Mai in the 1820’s from, no doubt, some older edition, with the latest critical text in the Sources Chretiennes.  I was struck by the lack of differences. 

Differences there were.  An ergo for an igitur, a quum for a cum.  A late antique peccatricibus is given by SC for Mai’s peccatores — but the sense is the same.  Indeed I couldn’t find an instance where the text changed meaning. 

I did find that Mai had punctuated his excerpts inadequately.  He didn’t indicate omissions properly.  Where he introduced the “Magi” as the subject of a verb, to clarify the sense, he didn’t indicate that he had added this word.  But what he did quote really differed little if at all from the SC text except in details such as above.

I am rather heartened by this.  I had expected worse. 

It will be interesting to do the same exercise with Ambrose’s Commentary on Luke, where again Mai quotes excerpts and the SC is the critical text, and see what the results are.

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