Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
I came across a post online which made some curious claims about Origen, repeated from here. In particular: “The Scriptures,” Origen maintained, “are of little use to those who understand them as they are written.” But did Origen say this? At the Logos forums the same question is asked, but with little result. A Google [...]
A couple of years ago I commissioned a translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel. This ground away between 2009-2010, and then stopped. The fault, in truth, was mine, in that I diverted the translator onto Philip of Side, or so the emails show. The problem now is to work out what was, and was not [...]
I’m still working on Ibn Abi Usaibia. Yesterday I started going through the .htm files exported from Abbyy Finereader, to rejoin paragraphs and add in page numbers. I’ve so far found two pages which are out of order in the manuscript — the numerals at the bottom in pencil were clearly added after the pages [...]
I’m still proofing the OCR of the English translation of Ibn Abi Usaibia, and reached p.639 last night. The translation of Methodius De lepra is creeping forward. I prompted the translator last night, and another couple of (short) pages arrived this morning, and I have just annotated them and sent them back. These pages from [...]
At the end of book 1 of the papyrus containing extracts of books 1 and 2 of Origen’s Contra Celsum, is an interesting note: μετεβληθη και αντεβληθη εξ αντιγραφου των αυτου ωριγενους βιβλι[ων] Revised and corrected from the copy of the books of Origen himself. This is quite a statement, in a manuscript of the [...]
Wieland Wilker kindly sent me a copy of Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the transformation of the book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea. This arrived on Friday, and I read through it over the weekend. The first thing to strike me was the absence of footnotes. That’s because they had all [...]
An email has reached me, on an interesting topic: I’m trying to establish the authenticity or inauthenticity of a purported quote attributed to Origen. A brief English translation purportedly of Origen appears frequently in atheist polemic and on wikipedia. It reads as follows: “The island (Britain) has long been predisposed to it (Christianity) through the [...]
I’ve had an email from Charles Sullivan, another patristic enthusiast, who has dedicated the last 20 years to going through Migne and locating every possible reference in the fathers to speaking in tongues. He’s been translating them, and intends to publish A history of the gift of tongues, once he’s worked over all the texts. It [...]
Editions of the fragments of Origen’s commentaries on Ephesians and 1 Corinthians were published from the catenas in early issues of the Journal of Theological Studies. Unfortunately the editors chose not to include translations, thereby guaranteeing oblivion to their work. In JTS 10 C. H. Turner commented on some of the newly published texts: Certain [...]
My attention has been drawn to the remains of Origen’s Homilies on 1 Corinthians. These are not in Migne, but appear in a number of volumes in the Journal of Theological Studies. Manuel Crespo has kindly pointed out to me that there are a total of five articles published by Jenkins in the JTS, plus [...]