Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
In the Patrologia Graeca 12, col. 93-4, we have a further interesting fragment of Origen’s thought on Genesis 1:22. The PG is a reprint of the Delarue edition, and these Selecta in Genesim are extracted from the medieval Greek bible commentaries, or catenas (=’chains’), which were made up of quotations from earlier authors on each [...]
Today I found myself wondering just what the early Christians would have to say on various controverted passages in Scripture, passages where modern issues cause us to look urgently at the text. If Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans is any guide, not much: but I would like to know, all the same. This naturally caused me [...]
This evening I found the following snippet in Google Books, given as in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1989, p.380: … Ethiopia’s access to foreign commentaries (including that of Iso’dad of Merv and the other Syrian scholars) is through the Geez version of Ibn at-Taiyib’s exegetica and the Geez adaptation of Coptic-Arabic Catena…. [...]
The PDF is a useful thing. If you have a copy of the editor software, Adobe Acrobat, you can do many useful things. I got hold of Sickenberger’s study of the catena of Nicetas a couple of days ago. Because I had Acrobat, I added a set of bookmarks for the bits I wanted. I [...]
Something I had meant to do, when I wrote about the catena of Nicetas, was to track down the works of J. Sickenberger mentioned as published in TU. I have, in fact, now updated that page with some links to Google books, although, as ever, non-US readers will not be able to read them. TU [...]
…, erm, <cough>, me. “Why so?” I hear you cry. (At least, I hope that’s what you’re saying.) Well, it’s like this. I’m interested in the Coptic catena on the Gospels, published without a translation by Paul De Lagarde back in the 1850′s-ish. I knew that an Arabic translation exists of that catena, and that [...]
Continuing from yesterday, here is another excerpt from Christophe Guignard’s book La lettre de Julius Africanus à Aristide. As I remarked, one of the charms of this book is that, in order to establish a text of the fragments of the letter of 2nd century writer Julius Africanus to Aristides on the genealogy of Christ, it provides a [...]
In my last post, I mentioned the existence of an Armenian catena on Acts, published in Venice in 1839, and evidently of interest for the study of the so-called ‘Western’ text of Acts. Since then I have been attempting to locate a copy online, or, indeed, to determine its title. This is no easy task, [...]
Medieval commentaries (=catenas) on the bible were composed out of chains of quotations from earlier writers, with each verse of the bible having a chain of comments. The Greek catenas have been classified by Karo and Lietzmann, but I have often wondered about Armenian catenas. Robert W. Thomson refers to “the first Armenian catena of patristic [...]
Homer and other poetical texts were used in school rooms during the classical period, and after. Inevitably this led to a need for explanation of unusual or obsolete words, summaries of books, and explanations of mythological events — the same sorts of things that modern students seem to require in order to read Jane Austen or Shakespeare. Ancient [...]