The first is the discovery of a new Universal History of the early 8th century! This is being called “The Maronite Chronicle of 713”.
It has reached us in the collection of Mount Sinai, in Arabic translation, and Adrian Pirtea discovered recently. His article is open access, and published at Medieval Worlds 23 (2025), pp.155-167. Here’s the abstract:
This research note introduces the Maronite Chronicle of 713, a hitherto unknown Christian world chronicle in Arabic, recently identified by the author in the collection of manuscripts at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai.
Extant in a single thirteenth-century manuscript (Sinai Ar. 597), this Arabic chronicle is a translation of a lost Syriac work, originally composed in 712-713 CE, probably in a Syriac Monothelete milieu with close ties to the Monastery of Mar Maron.
The chronicle covers the history of the world from Adam to 692-693 CE and exhibits numerous parallels with the so-called »eastern source«, which informed the chronicles of Theophanes, Michael the Syrian, Agapius of Mabbug and the anonymous Syriac Chronicle of 1234.
To demonstrate the links between these sources and the new chronicle, the note analyses, as a case study, a passage discussing the main events of the year 633-634 CE.
The author argues that the Maronite Chronicle of 713 provides an alternative chronology of events for this year and thus represents an independent source for the early stages of the Arab conquests.
A more detailed study and a critical edition and annotated translation of this new chronicle are in preparation.
This is marvellous stuff, of course. This is the raw material of history.
The Byzantine tradition of writing history persisted in Syriac, and naturally entered Arabic also. It highlights once again how we really need to dig into Arabic sources, especially Christian Arabic literature. Basic stuff, about the Muslim conquest of the Near East – not without importance today – is still out there, unedited, untranslated.
Thankfully Dr P. is going to do both for his chronicle!
My other item may be known to others, but I had never come across it.
A new temple of Mithras was discovered at Regensburg in 2023. The cramped site is located at Stahlzwingerweg 6 in the old town. Even more interestingly, it’s a wooden rather than a stone construction. Some of the finds are now on display in the Historischen Museum Regensburg. Regensburg was a legionary town, and other finds connected to the cult have been found there.
The find was made during routine archaeological investigations carried out ahead of a residential construction project by SDI GmbH & Co. KG. Dr Sabine Watzlawik of ArchäoTeam GmbH led the excavation. As expected in Regensburg’s densely layered old town, the team encountered traces of settlement dating back to prehistory, the Roman period, and the Middle Ages.
It was only after months of excavation—conducted in several phases between spring and autumn 2023 due to the site’s confined conditions—and a comprehensive evaluation by archaeologist Dr Stefan Reuter that the significance of the discoveries became clear. Together, the finds pointed to the former presence of a Mithraeum, a sanctuary used by followers of the Mithras cult.
Although the temple itself was built of wood and has largely perished, a combination of clues proved decisive. Among the discoveries were a votive stone with an illegible inscription, fragments of votive plaques typical of Mithraic shrines, cult-niche fittings, and numerous coins.
The coin evidence dates the sanctuary to between about 80 and 171 AD, during the period of the Roman cohort fort in Kumpfmühl and the associated Danube settlement, before the establishment of the legionary camp at Regensburg….
Additional finds strengthened the identification: fragments of ceramic vessels decorated with snake motifs, incense burners, and handled jugs. Such objects are closely associated with Mithraic ritual practices, which included communal ceremonial meals. Drinking vessels, experts note, were an integral part of these rites.
For those who speak German, the story is on a number of sites, including this. There are a couple of videos here and here. Text from the latter:
Archaeologists first stumbled upon the remains of the wooden building at a construction site in the west of Regensburg’s city center in 2023. They were only able to proceed slowly, section by section, because construction work continued simultaneously at the site, says excavation director Sabine Watzlawik.
Among the remains, archaeologists found primarily fragments of drinking vessels, wine containers, and plates. While this could have indicated the presence of an inn, says Dr Stefan Reuter, who subsequently analyzed the finds, the researchers ultimately came across a different clue: much of their discovery was strikingly similar to other temples from the same period – not dedicated to a Roman deity, but to the oriental god Mithras.
One clue: Like other Mithras temples, the wooden structure, approximately seven meters long, was elongated and partially built into the ground. The followers of the mystery cult, to which only men were admitted, likely had to descend into the sanctuary via a ramp.
While a kind of trench ran down the middle, there were raised platforms on the sides where followers could sit or lie. Mithras temples were modeled after caves, since a central motif of the mythology was Mithras’s killing of a bull in a cave, according to Reuter….
The temple was illuminated by candles and oil lamps, says Johannes Sebrich from the Regensburg Office for Cultural Heritage. …
What exactly ended up on the participants’ plates at these feasts could be revealed by further analysis of the remains found. The investigations of the food containers, for example, are still ongoing. “I don’t want to preempt anything, but it seems that clearly high-quality food was consumed,” says Stefan Reuter.
According to researchers, the Regensburg sanctuary dates from between 80 and 171 AD. This makes it the oldest Mithras temple discovered in Bavaria to date. …
Even though no inscription bearing the name of the god Mithras was found, and therefore absolute proof is lacking, the archaeologists involved are “very certain” that their interpretation is correct.
The artifacts from the temple will be displayed in the Regensburg Historical Museum, which is currently redesigning its Roman exhibition. The Mithras sanctuary will occupy a prominent place in the new section of the exhibition.
Snake decoration on the handle of a broken pot.
Many thanks to Csaba Szabo who drew my attention to this exciting discovery!
I wrote in a previous post about CPL 2278, the anonymous 6th century text De Solemnitatibus Paschae, “On the Solemnities of Passover”, which is also letter 149 of St Jerome, or rather pseudo-Jerome. Since the existing translation by G.S.M.Walker is hard to access, I have made a translation myself. Here it is:
As usual, I make this public domain. Do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial. And just to make it easier, here’s just the translation without the notes.
It’s a text written during the arguments about whether the Roman or Irish method of calculation should be used for Easter, in the run-up to the Synod of Whitby (664 AD). The Irish method could potentially cause Easter to coincide with Passover, the 14th of the month. This left a powerful argument in Roman hands, which the author takes full advantage of. Now read on!
The Disputation of St. Jerome regarding the Solemnities of Passover / Easter
1. Regarding the solemnities, sabbaths, and new moons, which are commanded to be observed by the Lord in the Law, we are compelled by the authority of your Charity to say what should be rejected according to the letter, and what should be observed spiritually. First we are obliged to respond to those who love the letter and to the adversaries of the truth. Although I could reasonably strike back at them, I prefer to bring them to the recognition of the truth by addressing them in a winning and gentle manner.
In their desire to chew over the bitter bark of the root they are ignoring the fruit, and in admiring golden dust they are despising the finished metal. Because even if they contend that all things should be observed according to the letter of the Law, they cannot be enlightened by the Spirit of Truth because there is a veil placed over the face of Moses.
But even if they have not assented to the truth, let us bear them anyway upon the shoulders of our patience, “ready to give an account of that faith which is in us,” (1 Pet. 3:15), according to the custom of the scape-goat which is sent out to its destruction,(Lev. 16:20-26), and to wash our garments afterwards, so that we may not stay contaminated by the pollution of heretical thinking.
Now at the start of this little book we will follow the example of Jeremiah: we will first uproot and destroy, and then we shall plant and build. (cf. Jer. 1: 10).
2. Regarding the scriptures, we want to show first how these feast days of the Lord, which are commanded to be observed in the Law, must be celebrated, not as a shadow, but as a spiritual observance. And if anyone wants to treat the authority of one as unimportant as myself as of little account, let them listen to the prophets. These looked into the future by providential prophecy and with a clear voice foretold the condemnation of these things in the days of the gospel.
Indeed through them the Lord himself proclaims in advance, “Your feasts, new moons, and sabbaths, my soul hates” (Isaiah 1:13-14), and (in this way) the Lord declares that he did not command these things, when it is clear that He did command these things in the Law. What else is shown by these words, other than that, once Christ the end of the Law has come, He does not command them to be observed according to the letter?
Regarding sacrifices, however, he says through another prophet (Ps. 50:8-9), “I will not reprove you for your sacrifices: your burnt offerings are always in my sight. I will not take calves out of your house, nor goats out of your flocks,” and the rest, as far as, “or shall I drink the blood of goats?” (Ps. 50:13)
The Apostle, filled with the same Spirit, fittingly says in these words, (Col. 2:16-17) “Let no one pass judge you in food or drink or in respect of a festival day or of the new moon or of the sabbaths, which are (just) a shadow of things to come” and the rest. With the utmost clarity he declares in these words that in observing either particular days or foods in the flesh he can find nothing but an empty shadow and a snare of deception.
The Lord Jesus also declared (implicitly) in the gospel that (the commandment about) the sabbath is abolished when he commanded the paralysed man, “Take up your bed” (cf. Mark 2:9; John 5:8), because it is clear that this was forbidden by the Law, namely to carry burdens on the sabbath. He also abolished the feast of Tabernacles when he said, “I do not go up to this festival day” (John 7:8), just as if He had said, “In this observance of this festival, the glory of my honour will not go up.” (cf. John 7: 39)
3. Regarding Passover, however, the greatest sacrament of our salvation, I shall speak a little more fully, although there is not the time to discuss everything.
Firstly, I wish to demonstrate through what regulations and how many it is commanded to observe the Lord’s Passover. Through Moses, the Lord commanded that, on the tenth day of the first month, a lamb, a spotless young lamb, should be set aside and kept until the fourteenth day. On the fourteenth day, in the evening it should be killed by the whole assembly of the children of Israel.
When the Lord himself, the true Lamb, was moving towards the true passover, He observed some of these observances, intending them to continue; but others he changed, preferring them not to continue. While He considered it right to be sacrificed according to the command of the Law in the first month, and made sure that the time of his passion did not in any way precede the fourteenth moon, the gospel reports that he still did some things contrary to the foreshadowing (of the Law), because although He was handed over to the Jews by Judas, he was not taken into custody on the tenth day of the first month, and although He had considered it right to give the sacraments of His body and blood to His disciples during his lifetime, it is revealed that He did this also contrary to the foreshadowing (of the Law), because that lamb, which at passover is ordered to be killed as a foreshadowing of Christ, was commanded to be roasted with fire and eaten by the people, together with its head and feet and entrails, after it was slaughtered.
Now it seems to me that God makes clear that he did this for two intelligible reasons. (Firstly), if he had not changed the (format of) the sacrifice afterwards, when he had eaten passover with his disciples, saying, “This is my body,” (Mt. 26:26) then they would suppose that it should still be observed going forward. The other reason is, I think, this: so that when they saw, prior to the passion, the body of the Lord whole and containing his blood in him, they would believe that they were being refreshed spiritually in the body; and so this should be believed by us now in the same way. And we must also consider this: that it was not on the fourteenth day at evening, as the Law commands, that “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,”(John 1:29) and “Christ our passover was sacrificed,” (1 Cor. 5:7) but on the fifteenth day. From this it is evident that the feast day of the Jews along with its sacrifice was abolished by the Lord.
But what are we to understand from this: that first they eat the body of the foreshadowing lamb (cf. Exodus 12), and then He refreshed the apostles with the food of his body; and, after the foreshadowing of the Jews, Christ was sacrificed in our passover? This, I think, is in order that the reality would not precede the foreshadowing, but the foreshadowing would precede the reality, because “The spiritual did not come first, but the natural; and after that the spiritual” (1 Cor. 15: 46). For this reason the whole church, the chosen and beloved bride of Christ, anathematises those who, like the Jews, decree that the fourteenth moon is to be celebrated on the passover feast, and the sabbaths and the rest of the shadow observances of this sort. And this only did the Lord deem worthy to observe, so that he decreed without ambiguity that, in the first month AFTER the fourteenth day, the passover festivity should be celebrated, although in this a difference has arisen in the church, some believing that it is sufficient to avoid celebrating passover with the Jews on the fourteenth, while others strongly and cautiously maintain this, that they do not dare to celebrate the sacrifice of the true “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” before the fourteenth, according to that legal precept which the Lord, coming to his passion, did not at all despise, but said, “You shall keep it until the fourteenth day,” (Exodus 12:6) which the Church, following the authority of the apostolic see, now especially observes.
But let us turn our attention to the spiritual interpretation because there is not enough time to examine every detail, leaving these things in which it is commanded to eat the body of the passover lamb on the fourteenth day of the month in the month of new things: so that, while new fruits are being born from good works because the words of the Decalogue have been fulfilled by us, as we stand firm in the four-fold perfection of the gospel, we may eat the body of our Lamb in the evening of the world, in which the end of the ages has come, with unshadowed hearts, while the Holy Spirit is illuminating the night.
4. Regarding the Sabbath, for six days we are commanded to work, but on the seventh, that is the Sabbath, we are forbidden all servile work. By the number six the perfection of works is signified, because God made heaven and earth in six days.
On the Sabbath, however, we are forbidden to do any servile work, which is sin, because “whoever commits a sin is a slave to sin;”(John 8:34) so that, when we have completed the perfection of works in the present age without hardening our hearts, we may deserve to arrive at the true rest which is denied to the obstinate. As the Lord says through David, “They shall not enter into my rest.” (Ps.94:11, Heb. 4:3-7)
Regarding Pentecost, from the day after the Sabbath we are commanded by the Law to count seven full weeks until the day after the completion of the seventh week, that is the fiftieth day , on which the first fruits are offered. This numbering of full perfection is made through the number seven, and fifty, and five times ten, which I think signifies this: that through the number fifty, which contains forgiveness in itself, and through charity, which is poured into our hearts by the grace of the sevenfold Spirit coming upon it, we may have the five senses of our body placed under the Law of God, which contains within it the words of the Decalogue; and, as I said, through charity, “which charity covers over a multitude of sins.” (1 Peter 4:8) And so we shall offer a new sacrifice to the Lord in all our dwelling-places, offering up (ourselves) to our great Priest along with our peaceful sacrifices, just as we shall have made peace with the Lord by offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ, He who eats the bread of the first-fruits of our land, though leavened, yet consecrated to Himself.
This is our high priest, who, having entered heaven, is able to have compassion upon our weaknesses, (Heb. 4:14-15) and, since we have him as an advocate with the Father (1 John 2:1), He accepts the works which, leavened with the leaven of our frailty, through His compassionate mercy rise up through the upraised hand of prayer , to this priest. They do not bring to God an odour of sweetness, but rather demand His forbearance.
5. Regarding the Feast of Tabernacles. And at the end of the solar year among the Hebrews, i. e. in the seventh month, when the harvest is gathered into barns or storehouses, then it is commanded by Law to celebrate, i.e., on the first day (the feast) of Trumpets (Lev 23:24), and on the tenth day (the feast) of Atonement, days of rest should be celebrated; and from the fifteenth day for seven days, until they end on the eighth, the feast-days of Tabernacles are prescribed. But perhaps by these things it can be signified that we should not cease to learn, because we are consecrated at the end of the age by the triple sacrament of prayer: by the trumpet of proclamation; by the faith of the gospel and by sprinkling with the blood of Jesus Christ in which is the true atonement now that the time of the Law is over; and we, having gathered the “new harvest” of good works, having rested from every evil work, and having received perfection through the grace of the sevenfold spirit, we may deserve to attain the number of the eighth blessing. This, however, there is no doubt that we can achieve through the labours of fasting and prayer, because it is commanded in the Law that the soul should be afflicted.
6. Regarding the New Moons. At the “Neomenia” it is commanded to blow the trumpet, i.e. at the new moon, because he who is enlightened by the moon of knowledge should not cease to preach to others. Paul, enlightened by the brightness of the knowledge of Christ, did not at all disdain to observe this (command), and preached in the synagogues of the Jews.
Regarding the sacrifices, I had intended to say little. Since they contain within them the foreshadowing of the sacrifice of the true high priest, they must also be offered by us to the Lord in a spiritual manner. The calf represents our labour, the sheep innocence, the he-goat the mortification the pleasure of fornication, the she-goat, which feeds on the lofty pasture, the contemplative life, the ram the work of preaching, which brings forth lambs for the good shepherd, the turtledove the chastity of a solitary mind joined to no one but Christ, the dove a more perceptive understanding of the sacraments, the bread the solidity of the commandments, the fine flour the honesty of life, the wine and salt the truth of preaching, the oil the comforts of charity. All these things, whether feasts or sacrifices, the Law commands to be celebrated and offered in one place, because then all things are profitable when they are carried out within the unity of the Church without any error of schism. I, a poor man and a foreigner, did not fear to write these few things, this little writing, leaving many things in darkness, to a rich man and a citizen, because “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18); believing also this, venerable Father , that obedience with faith is worth more than the power of human intellect.
But these things were requested by you and spoken by me on account of those who, although they appear to be Christians on the surface, are not afraid to tear apart the body of Christ, that is, the Church, with their schisms through the impiety of Jewish thinking. These things we have run through in a brief way, which if they were treated in full, would require a large volume, which cannot be completed at this time, because they require a great period of free time.
Pray for me, venerable Father.
MS Geneva, Bibliotheque de l’Universite 50, fol. 121r top.
I’m still working away at producing an English translation of the “letter 149” attributed falsely to St Jerome, De Solemnitatibus Paschae, (CPL 2278) which probably dates to the 6-7th century.
This evening I ran into trouble with some variations in the Latin text. Now I don’t have access to Walker’s critical edition. I have two editions, that of Migne, based on a Vatican manuscript, and that in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, based on a Paris manuscript. It’s pretty clear that the author knew some Greek, and that he managed to confuse the copyists. What was the blighter actually trying to say?
Well, the text is preserved in seven medieval manuscripts, dating from the 9-12th centuries. Six are held in Oxford in the Bodleian Library; in Paris in the Bibliothèque Nationale Français; in Koln, in the Dombibliothek; in Geneva in the university library; in the Vatican; and in Tours in their Bibliothèque Municipale. To my great surprise, and no little delight, I was able to find digital facsimiles of all of these. That gives a big clue about the text.
The seventh manuscript is – deep breath – held in the British Library in London. Which means, of course, that the chances of accessing images online are basically zero. Their very limited collection of digital manuscripts was zapped back in October 2023, and very little has been done to rectify the position.
This is pretty shameful, when you see the relentless pace of digitisation of medieval manuscripts across Europe.
It made me think of the fire at Notre-Dame in Paris. This was an attack on a national institution in France, and the French government sprang into action. I think they’ve more or less completely restored it now.
The attack on the British Library was also an attack on a national institution. Yet it seems that the British government just shrugged.
In the end, just how hard can it be to photograph pages from medieval books? I’ve done it myself. Probably many of us here do it. Photographers are cheap. Just hire a few and let them crank it out.
Of course there is nothing that a civil servant cannot gold-plate, nothing that a greedy contractor cannot inflate. A massive price could quickly be conjured up by the usual suspects. But Covid proved that capable people do exist who can get things done very rapidly and efficiently through by-passing the senile British civil service. Why not let some of these people get to work on this problem? It is NOT a difficult problem.
I think we’ve all had enough of this collection being essentially offline. This evening I wrote to my Member of Parliament, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter MP, and asked if anything can be done. It’s not much, but it’s something that I can do. She’s a new MP and hopefully not completely ground down by the pressures of parliament.
If any of my readers reside in the UK, perhaps they could write to their MPs also. It couldn’t hurt.
If you don’t live in the UK, your country probably has an ambassador here. Would an email serve a purpose?
The opening text of De Solemnitatibus Paschae in the Bodleian manuscript. (MS Bodl. 309, fol. 82v)
UPDATE: It seems that the manuscript I wanted – MS Cotton Caligula A xv – is indeed online already here. I couldn’t find it because, when I searched, I searched for “Cotton Caligula A”, which gave only one result. In fact I needed to search for “Cotton MS Caligula A”. Aargh! But the general point stands.
The British Library needs to update its search engine handling so we can find these things through Google, but that’s secondary.
A couple of interesting items have reached me this week.
Firstly, John Litteral has prepared and published a translation of Oecumenius, “Commentary on the Apocalypse” (CPG 7470). It’s based on the editions of Hoskier and De Groote (see the Wiki article here). The author has made it freely available online at Archive.org here. He’s also included excerpts from other commentaries by Oecumenius, where he references the same passage. The work is perhaps the earliest commentary on Revelation, and probably dates to around 700 AD. A look at Amazon shows that the translator has made a number of translations of material by Oecumenius. Grab yours there!
The second item is by the excellent Rob Bradshaw, who will be known to many as the digitizer of theological papers at his website, http://theologyontheweb.org.uk/. It’s a tutorial in how to scan books and articles, using a mobile phone, and doing so carefully! It’s on his blog here. Useful if we need to do it!
Finally – I’ve been adding these as I work down my inbox! – a note about the translation of ps.Hegesippus which was made by Wade Blocker and was uploaded in 2005 to my site by the permission of his son David Blocker. Carson Bay in his “Biblical Heros and Classical Culture in Christian Late Antiquity: The Historiography, Exemplarity, and Anti-Judaism of Pseduo-Hegesippus”, Cambridge (2022), p.33, comments on modern translations (emphasis mine):
De Excidio will have been accessible to many European readers by the seventeenth century. Yet, for all that, in recent years it has hardly been translated afresh. Dominique Estève’s dissertation does include a French translation of Books 1–4, but this translation was never formerly published and is very difficult to access.101 The only other modern translation of which I know is that produced by Wade Blocker in 2005 and made available online by Roger Pearse.102 While this translation cannot be used uncritically, it has rendered the text popularly accessible. Blocker’s was always a nonscholarly translation, not designed for publication, and criticisms like those lodged by Leah Di Segni (published on Roger Pearse’s website) are unnecessary and unhelpful. More apt is Richard Pollard’s comment that Blocker’s translation is “useful if inelegant.”103
So: Historically De Excidio has been widely accessible. The Latin manuscript tradition was robust and diffuse, the early print tradition witnessed many printings and translation into at least three languages, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries issued two critical editions. The lack of a usable modern translation has surely contributed more than a little to the text’s anonymity and disuse in more recent years. I anticipate producing a translation of De Excidio in the future, and the block translations in the present book mark a step in that direction.
Myself I am grateful to Leah Di Segni for her feedback, but Dr Bay is undoubtedly right in the line that he takes. The fact is that there is no scholarly translation, and we are all the richer for Wade Blocker’s work. If Dr B. follows through with his intention to make one, that would be wonderful!
Some fantastic news from Oxford! It seems that Steven Firmin is working with a team of cool dudes to create a critical edition with English translation of Ibn al-Tayyib’s “Commentary on the Psalms”! In fact, if he can get some major funding, the team will work on a series of Christian Arabic texts!
Few will have heard of Ibn al-Tayyib. He was an Arabic-speaking Christian writer belonging to the Church of the East – basically in Persia. He lived in Baghdad in the 11th century, and worked for the Abbasid caliph. He wrote a tremendous amount of interesting material. There’s a summary of his life and works at Beth Mardutho here.
There are some curious parallels between Ireland and the native inhabitants of the Near East. When the latter were conquered by the Muslims in the 7th century, the Christian peoples of those lands preserved their identity, language and culture through their church. Over time they were forced to largely adopt the language of their conquerors, just as the Irish were, but they retained a fierce loyalty to their own culture. This therefore manifests in ecclesiastical literature, or in apocryphal compositions “predicting” the events of their own time in a disguised form. Consequently Christian Arabic literature preserves a millennium of lived experience among largely voiceless and unknown communities, in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere. Today these communities are also found in exile in the USA and other western nations today. The lack of awareness of this material is therefore a huge void. Access to it must begin with texts like this; and people in the west may learn from the commentaries on the bible, seen through eastern eyes living in a very different culture.
Dr Firmin also tells me that the results of their work will be open-access or public domain, and this is really important for public access.
An edition of some sort of this Commentary on the Psalms does exist, according to the Beth Mardutho site: Y. Manquriyūs and Ḥ. Jirjis, al-Rawḍ al-nadīr fī tafsīr al-mazāmīr, Cairo (1902). With my non-existent Arabic, I was unable to locate this online, although it must be out of copyright. There’s probably a PDF somewhere. But in my experience such texts printed in Cairo at that date are simply copies of whatever manuscript came to hand, always a very late copy, and often corrupt or interpolated. Establishing a good Arabic text is certainly the first step.
An email reached me about a new initiative in Mithras studies. This is led by Dr. Csaba Szabo, who has just created a new research group in Hungary, at the university of Szeged. This will undertake the “Remithra: reinventing Roman Mithras. Materiality and appropriations of a Roman cult in Central-Eastern Europe” project. The project has been funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences over five years to do something really very useful.
The aim of the project is to use modern methods to collect – and digitize! – all the material evidence for the cult of Mithras in the Roman provinces on the middle and lower Danube. This includes Pannonia Inferior, Superior, Moesia Inferior, Superior and Dacia.
These provinces contain an immense amount of archaeology and other primary material for the cult, and the results of the project must be of considerable scientific and scholarly interest.
There is a project website here, with full details of the project and its participants. And a nice logo!
Our existing information is either scattered in journal publications, or else very elderly and focused primarily on major artwork-type images. So this is solid stuff, which can only do good. Well done Dr. S.
Although I no longer sell the QuickLatin parser, it still exists. I use it myself, and I still work on it from time to time, adding additional meaning or syntax information. When I discovered that first declension neuter nouns existed, like “pascha”, I wondered whether these were in the dictionary files. They were not. So I started to wonder how to add them. For it has been a while since I worked on it, and I could not even remember how the dictionary files were generated! This led me to poke into the code.
Currently QuickLatin exists in a Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate project. I used this because it gave me code coverage, which I greatly miss otherwise. Curiously Microsoft never made this elementary tool available unless you bought the “enterprise” version of Visual Studio. These are hideously expensive, so I made do with a second-hand copy of a long-outdated version.
Yesterday I discovered that Microsoft had added a “Community” edition to recent versions of Visual Studio. This, designed for one-man developers like myself, has the right licensing, and is free. But I did not know that today it also includes code coverage, as it does.
So yesterday I downloaded Visual Studio 2026 Community Edition, and started trying to set it up to work with unit tests and code coverage. I created a “noddy” solution and projects, for I have long experience of how dreadful it can be to get started with Microsoft’s premier development tool. Nor was I wrong. It was simply hideous to work with, and I nearly abandoned it. The main project would not work with the unit test project, giving odd errors of subtly different versions of .Net.
Eventually I deinstalled, and tried again, this time with .Net 8.0. I found a page showing how to get unit testing working in Visual Studio using C#, and it did work. Then I redid it in Visual Basic, and that worked too. The experience was bad enough that I actually documented the whole thing in a .docx file with screenshots and uploaded a noddy project with full details to GitHub here. This may be useful to others – but with my forgetfulness, one day I might need it! It is beyond me how any newcomer can start out and expect this to work tho.
Microsoft put other barriers in the way. When you download the installer, it’s a trivial little thing. But I don’t want to rely on the existence of Microsoft’s servers if I need to reinstall. So I need a proper offline installation. Microsoft don’t make that available. Instead you have to download a special tool named vs_community.exe and run it at the command line to pull down all the installation packages and create a directory full of what you need, which you can turn into an ISO. This I did today, and the resulting directory was 80 gigabytes in size. Talk about bloatware! But anyway, I have it.
So I haven’t achieved anything, except that it looks as if I can abandon Visual Studio 2010 at long last. It will be a bit of work to do, but certainly worthwhile. This will allow me to reorganise the code, and particularly the code that handles the database of dictionary endings etc. That is, it will if I don’t get distracted! For I need some clear days of work. Tomorrow I have something else to do, but soon, I hope.
In chapter 3 of “letter 149 of Jerome”, de solemnitatibus paschae, the author accepts that different approaches to calculating the date of Easter have been used in the church:
… licet in hoc varietas ecclesiae orta est, aliis sufficere credentibus, ut non in decima quarta cum Judeis Pascha celebrarent, …
… some believing it sufficient that they do not celebrate passover/pascha on the fourteenth with the Jews…
Here “pascha” must be accusative, the object of the verb. So why is this not “pascham”?
The answer seems to be that “pascha” is actually a Greek word, and basically indeclinable, and therefore weird stuff can happen.
In the first place, since it is a noun, and ends with -a, there was a tendency to treat it as a first declension noun, and therefore feminine – nom: pascha, voc: pascha, acc: pascham, gen: paschae, dat: paschae, abl: pascha. As you would. There’s plenty of references to this, apparently.
But on the other hand, sometimes you didn’t. There is, it seems, something called a first declension neuter noun, where the accusative is “pascha”. This is attested in the medieval teaching grammar, the “Ianua” of ps. Donatus. Federica Ciccolella – whom we met recently as the translator of the letters of Procopius of Gaza – produced a study of renaissance efforts to produce a Greek “Donatus”, and although this isn’t what we’re looking at, her book is online and gives the text.
In fact – blessedly – she printed the Latin of the “Ianua” in parallel with four of those different attempts at a Greek text. The referemce is Federica Ciccolella, Donati Graeci: Learning Greek in the Renaissance, Brill (2008), online here, p.271, lines 53-55, in the section on the noun (“de nomine”):
Nominativo hoc Pascha, genitivo huius Paschae, dativo huic Paschae, accusativo hoc Pascha, vocativo o Pascha, ablativo ab hoc Pascha, pluralia non habet.
It’s actually fascinating to the see the old grammatical text:
Federica Ciccolella, Donati Graeci: “Learning Greek in the Renaissance”, 2007. p.271 (top)
I’ve started making a translation of the “letter 149” of Jerome, De solemnitatibus paschae. I believe that an English translation does exist, by G.S.M. Walker in his Sancti Columbani Opera, Dublin (1957); but it would require a day trip to access this. So I wasn’t going to bother.
Indeed I wasn’t at all keen on working on it – computistical texts are a specialised subject! -, until I remembered all the Jehovah’s Witness posters on twitter, all calling on Christians to observe Jewish customs. I’ve had a few brushes with them myself – they don’t seem genuine, but rather like hired bots.
But De Solemnitate is really about the Solemnities, Sabbaths and New Moons of Passover, and so it addresses squarely the question of why Christians do not observe Old Testament ritual, and with quite a few bible references and arguments. So I have been able to get into it by looking at it this way. It will take a few days to complete, I expect. It’s more interesting than I had thought.
Another subject that I have begun to take an interest in is “Eusebius Gallicanus”. This is a modern name for a Latin sermon collection, of about 76 sermons, which circulated in the 5-6th century. It’s extant in 140+ manuscripts, so it was clearly popular. There isn’t even a Wikipedia page about it.
I think that a selection from the collection was published by Buytaert from a Troyes manuscript in the 50s under the name of Eusebius of Emesa. Unfortunately this volume also is inaccessible, so I can’t be sure.
I recently discovered that the Corpus Christianorum issued an edition in three volumes (CCSL 101, 101A and 101B), and these I was able to lay my hands on. I don’t yet know whether these sermons are worth exploring very far, but I won’t know until I’ve looked at them.
It’s the dullest days of the year, and it’s very hard to wake up. On the other hand these dull, rainy days are perfect for staying indoors!
