Author: Roger Pearse

Barsabas of Jerusalem – the earliest witness to the Trinity?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the Iviron monastery on Mt Athos, there is a Georgian manuscript (shelfmark: Athos Iviron 11) which contains a work with the title, “The Word of Saint Barsabas, Archbishop of Jerusalem, about our Savior Jesus Christ and the Churches [and about the High Priests].”  The text itself is a homily, in which various Old Testament figures and events are shown to be “types”, prefigurings, of Christ and the church.  The Georgian text is itself a translation of a lost Greek original.   The work is assigned the reference number CPG 1685.

The text was first published, together with a French translation, by Michel van Esbroeck in the Patrologia Orientalis 41 (1982), pp.151-256.  A draft text and English translation has been made by David P. George, which is accessible on Academia.edu here.

There seems to be only a limited amount of scholarship about this work.  Esbroeck considered that the theology of the work meant that it should be dated early, to the second or third century AD.  He dismissed the identification of the author as an Archbishop of Jerusalem, still less Barsabas Justus, the third bishop of Jerusalem, but agreed that it was probably written at that location.  Quite sensibly van Esbroeck refuses to call the author “pseudo Barsabas”, when we know so little about any Barsabas at all.

There is a useful discussion of the work and its contents by Dmitry F. Bumazhnov, “The Jews in the Neglected Christian Writing “The Word of Saint Barsabas, Archbishop of Jerusalem, about our Saviour Jesus Christ and the Churches” of the Second – Early Third Century”, in: Scrinium 4 (2008), 121–135.  Online here.  A search on Bumazhnov indeed brings up a number of other papers discussing Barsabas.

On his Twitter account recently, Dr. George included a quote suggesting that, at such a date, this could be the earliest mention of the Trinity:

Now this is very interesting, but obvious raises issues.  The word “Trinity” is a fingerprint, and we all know that that word originates with Tertullian, around 217 AD.  I don’t feel competent to enter into the various issues about the supposed date of the work.  But I would be very wary of interpolation or gloss here.  Generally when a word or phrase is the badge of a controversy, we need to date any text using it later than the beginning of that controversy.  When a work clearly written earlier uses it, we may well suppose that a later copyist has added a clarifying note.  I would suspect that this is what has happened here.

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PDFs and the perils of “I’ll get one of my students to do it.”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was hunting around the web for an article from an Italian encyclopedia, when I struck lucky.  All twelve volumes had been digitised to PDF, and they were available to download from Archive.org.  Great news!

Well, I only needed volume nine, so I grabbed that.  To my shock, the PDF was over 3 GIGABYTES in size!  That would mean the whole encyclopedia would take a massive 40gb out of my disk space. Yet each volume is only 1200 pages, and I think all of the pages are black and white.

Nor was this the only problem.   A 3Gb PDF is such a large file that Abbyy Finereader wouldn’t open it.  My anti-virus picked it up and complained about it.  My long outdated copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro 9  wouldn’t extract the three pages that I actually needed.  Nor would it print those three pages.  I thought about just buying a copy of whatever the latest version of Acrobat Pro might be; but dear old Adobe, an evil company, has quietly removed the option.  All you can buy is a monthly subscription.

So what on earth to do?  Why was the file so large anyway?

Thankfully I found a free downloadable tool for Windows called PDFSam Basic.  This allowed me to split off the first  few pages, and then I could work with them in Adobe Acrobat 9 as usual.  I extracted the first page to png format, and found that that one page alone was more than 3 megabytes in size.  That’s the same size as a full-colour photograph on my digital camera.  Whoever had made the scans had done so at maximum resolution, in full colour.  For black-and-white text pages.  [Update: do NOT use PDFSam!  It also silently installed it’s paid for model, and the uninstall did not work.]

Well, I used PDFSam to chop the 3Gb monster up into three files, and then I used Adobe Acrobat to “save as” these out to PNG, with settings RGB=off, colourspace=Monochrome.  This produced a directory full of .png files, one for each page, none larger than 150kb, and often much less.  The first page was no longer 3mb but 36kb.  Then I gathered these up into a PDF using Adobe Acrobat and… the PDF file for all the pages was now a  mere 109mb.  Much more sensible.

Only afterwards did it occur to me that this sort of task is what ImageMagick is for.  It’s a very powerful command line tool.  But I don’t currently have that installed because it has so many switches and options that I use it rarely.  And working out what option to use takes a while.

Inspecting the new PDF, I saw that the scanning had been done extremely carelessly.  The opening pages had a large stain across them:

Anybody who has used a photocopier knows that this happens when you haven’t got the page flat on the copier.  Sheer carelessness.

And that’s actually the cause of the huge page sizes too.  Whoever did the scan didn’t bother to set the copier up correctly.  They just scanned at max resolution, full colour, and let the output be whatever size it might be.  Whoever did it was NOT the person who was going to need to use the file.

I think we can all guess how this might happen.  What sort of person has young people at their disposal to do chores like this?

So… my friends, whenever you get a student to scan a book for you, do please remember that they don’t want to do it, and CHECK the results?  Thank you.

Update: Further experiments show that I don’t need to use PDFSam – Acrobat will save as the whole file to .png, even if it won’t do much else.

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Ancient Homilies for All Saints Day?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

November 1st is All Saints Day – the day in the Roman Catholic church calendar on which all the saints not otherwise commemorated are remembered.  It’s also known as All Hallows Day in English.  The night before is Halloween, which is the annual occasion on which a huge volume of sewage appears online, claiming that “Halloween is pagan,” often with “haw haw” following.  In fact Halloween is modern, post-Reformation.  In his book “Stations of the Sun,” Ronald Hutton gives a very good account of the real origins of the event, and also its supposed earlier roots.

All Saints itself is not an ancient feast.  I thought initially that it might be interesting to look at some sermons delivered on All Saints Day in antiquity, but I found a surprising dearth of these. There are some sermons commemorating all the martyrs; but that’s not the same thing.

So I could only find three possible candidates.  The first is by pseudo-Bede, Sermo in sollemnitate omnium Sanctorum, CPL 1369 (text PL 94, 450), also attributed to ps.Augustine, sermo 209.  It seems in fact to be 9th century.

A second one seems to be unpublished.  It is not included in the CPG, and I only found out about it because it is listed in Pinakes.  It’s Michael Hierosolymitanus the Syncellus (d. 846), Sermo in Festum Omnium Sanctorum.  It’s preserved in two manuscripts in the Dochariou monastery on Mt Athos, one 17th century, the other 17-18th century.  Michael is not that obscure a guy, but I could learn nothing about this work.  However I  gather that he translated material from Latin into Greek in other works, and so he may have been influenced here also by western practice.

The third was by Eusebius Alexandrinus, Sermo viii. De commemoratione sanctorum, CPG 5517, PG 86 357:361.  This also exists in Georgian.  This is part of a collection of 22 homilies, of uncertain authorship, where the manuscript just says “Eusebius”.  It’s thought that the sermons are 5th or 6th century.  But this item is not actually a sermon, but rather an answer to a question about why the martyrs should be commemorated.

The lack of a mass of festal sermons again indicates the late date for the feast of All Saints.

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You cannot trust the footnotes in English translations of German handbooks!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today is All Saints’ Day, and I have been looking at the entry for this in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, and attempting to learn some real history about the origins of the medieval festival.

The ODCC has no footnotes, just a short bibliography.  The first of these is Eisenhofer’s Handbuch der katholischen Liturgik, erster band (1932), which I was delighted to discover online at a magnificent German site devoted to Catholic literature, the Deutches Liturgisches Institut.  In the entry, the dedication of an oratory in St Peter’s by Gregory III (731-741) “in honor of the Redeemer, his holy mother, all the apostles, martyrs, and all the perfectly righteous who have fallen asleep throughout the world,” is referenced to Duchesne’s edition of the Liber Pontificalis, vol. 1, 194-204; but also to “Kellner, Heortologie 241”.  The latter is “Heortologie oder das Kirchenjahr und die Heiligenfeste in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung.”

A quick Google search reveals that the Kellner book – by our old friend Heinrich Kellner, who translated all the works of Tertullian into English – exists online, in a 1901 edition; and also, blessedly, in an English translation of 1908, both issued by Herder.

The 1901 edition seems to be the wrong edition, but I can find no later one before 1908.  The material is on page 178.  The English translation is p.323.

But a worm of doubt entered my soul as I looked through the English material.  Because sometimes, in books of this vintage, the English translation omits some of the footnotes.  I encountered just this with Franz Cumont’s book on Mithras, translated into many languages.  And it was utterly infuriating.  Fascinating claims, unreferenced: but if you looked at the original, there was indeed a reference.

So I looked at the German.  And… I cursed heartily.  Yes, the English translation had two footnotes: the German had five!

Footnotes in English translation

And…

This is laziness by the translator and publisher and nothing else.

And there is worse.  Note that the English in footnote 1 gives the Patrologia Graeca reference with “l” instead of the correct volume, 50.  Mysteriously the Liber Pontificalis entry is different in footnote 3.

Check these things, boys.  Don’t take it for granted.

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Ps.Chrysostom, “Homilia in sanctum pascha” (CPG 4408) now online in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Greek text CPG 4408, “Homilia in sanctum pascha”, is one of quite a number of homilies on Easter attributed to John Chrysostom.  According to the most recent editor this one is not genuine, but rather a production of the end of the 6th century to the middle of the 8th.1  It was composed around extracts from the works of Chrysostom, for use as part of church services during Easter.

The Greek text appears in the Patrologia Graeca 52, columns 765-772, with the usual Latin translation.  Rather remarkably a modern critical edition with French translation exists, made by Nathalie Rambault, “Jean Chrysostome, Homélies sur la Résurrection, l’Ascension et La Pentecôte, t. 1”, Sources Chrétiennes 561, Paris: Cerf (2013), pp.267-301.  In this volume Dr. Rambault is editing a set of Chrysostom homilies which appear together in the manuscript tradition, and this spurious item formed part of that collection.

The text exists in three recensions; a long recension, a revised version preserved only in one manuscript, and a short recension.2  There is also a translation into Old Slavonic.3

A colleague was asking whether a translation existed.  In fact I was unable to locate any English translation, although Dr. R. states that an English translation was proposed back in 1992 in J. Fotopoulos, “John Chrysostom: On Holy Pascha,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 37 (1992): 123-34.  This is not accessible to me, but no such translation could be found using Google.

So, just for fun, last night I quickly converted the French translation by Dr Rambault into English.  All the mistakes are my fault, of course.  But it might be helpful to others, so here it is:

Happy reading!

UPDATE: A kind colleague has sent me the 1992 Fotopoulos article and… it contains a complete English translation!  Oh well!

  1. SC 561, p.232.[↩]
  2. The short recension is also edited and translated in SC 561.[↩]
  3. So the CPG.[↩]
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The Latin hymn “Tantum ergo sacramentum”, and its 19th century translation by Edward Caswall

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In yesterday’s post, there was a reference to a Latin hymn beginning “tantum ergo sacramentum,” whose English translation misled Knox’s schoolboy.  At the time I knew nothing about this.  Thankfully a kind gentleman online knew more.

It seems that this is an excerpt from the medieval 13th century hymn by Thomas Aquinas; and the  translation used is that by Edward Caswall, which was first published in 1849. According to Wikipedia, this translation can be sung to the same tune as the Latin, although this useful feature is achieved at the price of some juggling of lines and words.

An 1854 manual of Catholic devotion happily includes the Latin and this English version in parallel:

Tantum ergo sacramentum
Veneremur cernui:
et antiquum documentum
novo cedat ritui;
Praestet fides supplementum
sensuum defectui.

Genitori genitoque
laus et jubilatio,
Salus, honor, virtus quoque
sit et benedictio!
Procedenti ab utroque
compar sit laudatio!

Down in adoration falling,
Lo! the Sacred Host we hail,
Lo! o’er ancient forms departing
Newer rites of grace prevail;
Faith for all defects supplying,
Where the feeble senses fail.

To the Everlasting Father,
And the Son Who reigns on high
With the Holy Ghost proceeding
Forth from Each eternally,
Be salvation, honour, blessing,
Might, and endless majesty.

The volume in question is “The Golden Manual, or, Guide to Catholic Devotion, Public and Private, Compiled from Approved Sources“, Burns & Lambert (1854).  The excerpt above is on page 665.    It is interesting that the rubric takes the time to discourage the prostration (cernui) that might otherwise inevitably occur.

Caswall’s translation first appeared in “Lyra Catholica: containing all the Breviary and Missal hymns, with others from various sources. Translated by Edward Caswall M.A.”, London: Burns (1818), page 112.  Edward Caswall himself was a friend of John Henry Newman, and the origins of the Lyra Catholica are discussed in his 2005 biography by Nancy Marie De Flon.1  Caswall made the translation after converting to Catholicism and thereby losing his Anglican living, which left him with time on his hands.  Having independent means, he had no need to seek employment, which means we today benefit from his efforts.

Other translations of the Tantum ergo sacramentum” do exist, of course.  This one seems rather closer to the meaning, although the lines have again been transposed.

Let us worship, humbly bending,
This so glorious sacrament;
And let ancient rites, here ending,
Yield to worth, new rites present;
May faith too, assistance lending
Aid where sense proves impotent.

To the Father, ever heeding
Our petitions, glory be:
To the Son, on Calv’ry bleeding,
Raise the song of jubilee:
And of Him, from both proceeding,
Chaunt the praises equally. Amen.

This example is from “Select Hymns and Prayers. Translated from the original Latin into English lyric verse. By a member of the Society of Jesus. Lat. & Eng“, Dublin (1852), in this case pages 43-44.

English translations of material from the Roman breviary are always handy to have!

  1. Nancy Marie De Flon, Edward Caswall: Newman’s Brother and Friend, Gracewing Publishing (2005), p.152.  Google Preview here.[↩]
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An anecdote on “living Latin” by Ronald Knox

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is a 1923 book titled “Church Latin for Beginners: An Elementary Course of Exercises in Ecclesiastical Latin” by Miss J. I. Lowe (online here) which contains two prefaces, as well as an appendix with a handy list of syntactical usages. At the time Catholic services were still held in Latin, so such a book had an obvious value.

The first preface, by a Canon William Barry, opens with the words:

I was very glad to see in print this little volume, which deals with our Church Latin; and I hope that it will be widely read and studied. The want of such a help has long been evident. Classical or heathen Latin is a beautiful creation of genius ; but as a language it is dead. The Latin of Catholic Christendom is a living literature; great portions of it are every day read and recited all over the world, by thousands on thousands of priests, seminarists, religious orders of men and women. But they have never been taught the grammar of it, seldom have learned by reflection how marvellous a transformation it is of a language singularly hard to refashion ; yet the miracle stands perfect in their sight.

Perfect I call it, and take my position close to such masters of style as Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and J. A. Symonds, whose hearty recognition of what another has termed “baptized Latin” was enhanced by their Oxford training in the classics. Not a degenerate offspring of Roman speech in decay, but a most original and happy adaptation of the popular idiom to sacred uses, our literature of sanctuary, cloister, and the schools is a world in itself.

This is followed by a preface by Ronald Knox, which makes many interesting points, but begins with this:

There is a story told in one of our Catholic Colleges (and probably in all of them) which throws, it is to be feared, a sinister light upon the easy familiarity with which altar-boys, choirs, and even congregations patter out their ecclesiastical Latin. A boy in Latin class was exhibiting a mulish ignorance as to the meaning of the word tantus, and the class master, with that fatal tendency we all have to adopt the method of cross-examination, was trying to get the right meaning out of him. At last in despair he suggested: “Well, you have met the words Tantum ergo Sacramentum before; at least you know what that means.” At which a great light dawned upon the boy, and he said : “Oh, yes, sir, I know that : it means ‘Down in adoration falling.'” Most Catholic schoolmasters have had similar, if not quite so poignant, experiences .

No doubt it was ever so.  All the same, we are the poorer for the loss of this kind of Latin.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My attempt to finish off the St Botolph materials was derailed by two weeks of a cold, but I’m now back to it.  I’m currently working on translating the full text of the “translation” of his remains.  This took place under King Edgar, and basically consisted of a raid on the ruined monastery at Iken.  It will be good to get this done.

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A thought on the GNO edition of Gregory of Nyssa

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I received an email asking if I could locate the Greek text for a passage in a translation from a work by Gregory of Nyssa, and complaining that it wasn’t obvious what the Patrologia Graeca reference would be.  Oh lucky me.

What a marvel: the virgin becomes a mother and remains a virgin! Do you see the innovation of the nature? For other women, so long as she is a virgin, she is not a mother. And when she becomes a mother, she no longer has her virginity. But here the two descriptions go together simultaneously, [247] for the same woman is both mother and virgin. The virginity did not prevent the birth and the birth did not destroy the virginity. After all, it was fitting that the one who came into human life to take away the corruption of the whole should take his start from his own servant in a birth of incorruption. For human convention is acquainted with calling a woman with no sexual experience “incorrupt.” To me, that great man Moses seems to have already observed this in the theophany that came to him through the light, when fire was kindled in the bush and the bush was not consumed. For it says, “After passing through, I will see this great sight.”33 I think by the “passing through” it indicates not locomotion but passing through as in traversing a period of time. For after an intervening period passed, that which had been prefigured in the flame and the bush was disclosed in the mystery of the virgin. For just as in the former case the shrub both kindles the fire and is not consumed, so too in the latter case the virgin both bears the light and is not corrupted.

The translation is a portion of Gregory of Nyssa, Oration on the Saviour’s Nativity, translated by Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, taken from Mark DelCogliano (ed.), The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings vol. 3: Christ: Through the Nestorian Controversy, Cambridge (2022), pp. 403-419; p.409.  I’d not seen this series, which is very nicely produced.  I also discover that a draft of the same translation is online at hcommons.org here – well done!

The bold [247] turns out to be the page number in the Greek text, printed in the Gregorii Nysseni Opera series published in a lotta lotta volumes with confusing numeration by Brill.  From the intro:

The text translated here is from the critical edition of Friedhelm Mann in Ernestus Rhein, Friedhelm Mann, Dörte Teske, and Hilda Polack, Gregorii Nysseni Sermones, Pars III, GNO 10.2 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 235–269. Numbers in square brackets correspond to page numbers in this edition.

Erm, yes.  The volume numbering probably makes sense if you have the set before you; otherwise not.  I know that producing daft volume numbering is a cherished tradition of German editors, but… guys, it’s got to stop.  Memo to Brill: horse-whip any academics who try this trick in future.

So our passage is on page 247 of the GNO edition.  And if you can find the right one, then you can move forward.

First however, a quick whinge.

What the translator does NOT do is two essential essential things.  And if you are editing or translating a text, please do these in your introduction.  Please.  Why force every user to do this?

Firstly, give the Clavis Patrum Graecorum (CPG) reference number.  It’s what it’s for.

In this case the work turns out to be CPG 3194, “Oratio in diem natalem Christi”.  This is also listed in the BHG index as 1915.  The PG text is 1128-1149, reprinting the Morel edition of 1638.

There.  That’s solid, useful bibliographical information, available for the price of a number.  Why the heck not refer to it?

Secondly, give the Latin title(s) of the work.  Come ON boys!  Why make the reader reverse translate your shoddy little vernacular paraphrase?  We want to access the literature.

In this case the CPG and GNO differ: the latter calls it “In Diem Natalem Salvatoris”, for some unknown reason.

Where the GNO edition DOES score is that it printed the PG column number in bold, with “M” for Migne, the PG editor.  So we can indeed link back to the PG text.

So here we can see that our passage is that found in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca vol. 46 col. 1136.

A quick sanity check shows that page 247 does indeed refer to “mater” and “parthenos”, so we have the right passage.

There’s no chapter or verse divisions, so anybody using the GNO edition has to refer to GNO page number – yes, the bibliographical reference with the confusing volume numbers (second memo to Brill: stop these bums doing this, yes?).

I wondered if there was actually any divisions in the PG edition.  Taking a look, we find that Migne gives the title as “In diem natalem Christi” or, at fuller length, “Oratio in diem natalem Christi et in infantes qui in Bethleem occisi sunt a Herode” – Oration on the nativity of Christ and on the infants who were killed at Bethlehem by Herod.”

But the PG has no chapter divisions either.  Rats!

That seems more work than it should be, to be honest.

Christmas homilies tend to attract translators.  A translation also exists in Beth Dunlop’s unpublished 2004 thesis “Earliest Greek Patristic Orations on the Nativity” (Boston College, 2004), p.154 f., and another translation appears without attribution at Orthodox Christianity Then And Now.  There are probably others.

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Thoughts on Psalm 1:1 in Latin – “pestilentiae”?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the useful features of Bible Gateway is the parallel versions, and if you use it with the Latin Vulgate and the Douay-Rheims, it is useful indeed.  Here it is for Psalm 1.

Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum, et in via peccatorum non stetit, et in cathedra pestilentiae non sedit;

Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence.

A quick look at some modern version shows an interesting difference.  The modern versions are translated from the Hebrew.  Here is the ESV – basically the Old RSV.

Blessed is the man
    who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
    nor sits in the seat of scoffers;

Scoffers is also rendered “mockers”.

Now the Vulgate Latin for the Psalms is not translated from the Hebrew, but from the old Greek translation, the Septuagint (LXX).  This reads:

μακάριοςμακαριος ὃς οὐκ ἐπορεύθη ἐν βουλῇ ἀσεβῶν καὶ ἐν ὁδῷ ἁμαρτωλῶν οὐκ ἔστη καὶ ἐπὶ καθέδραν λοιμῶν οὐκ ἐκάθισεν

And the Hebrew itself reads:

So where does “pestilentiae” come from?  Our Hebrew manuscripts are mainly 10th century AD. So was Jerome working from a different Hebrew text?

Well, we can find out.  Jerome may have translated the psalter from the LXX, but he also did a translation from the Hebrew.  This was helpfully translated by the SPCK: J. M. Harden, Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos Hieronymi, SPCK (1922), online here.  And it reads:

Beatus uir, qui non abiit in consilio impiorum, et in uia peccatorum non stetit, et in cathedra derisorum non sedit.

So the Hebrew of Jerome’s day was no different.  This is purely an LXX thing.

Now I don’t know a word of Hebrew, so I won’t try and look into that.  But I did find a commentary online which discusses this very question here.  It looks as if it’s a genuine question, how to render that Hebrew word – used only twice in the Psalms, and with different meanings in each case -, and other ancient translators such as Aquila and Theodotion struggled with it too.

So where does the LXX reading come from?  Well, again I know nothing of Septuagintal studies, so I can only speculate.  But I don’t think ancient translations were notable, as a rule, for their accuracy.  We all remember the preface of Jerome – somewhere! – that says that there were as many versions of the Old Latin bible as there were manuscript copies.  So maybe the unknown translator just bodged something in at that point and moved on, never dreaming that we would be talking about it two millennia later and more.  It’s an interesting thought.

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