A wonderful retelling of the Old Nubian legend of St. Mena, published by F. L. Griffith in 1903 in Nubian texts of the Christian period, is given at Suburban Banshee here. Read and enjoy! It makes plain why hagiographical texts have an appeal!
Author: Roger Pearse
The Antikythera mechanism — return to the wreck site
The Guardian reported on 2nd October:
Between 1900 and 1901, the sponge divers retrieved a string of stunning antiquities, including weapons, jewellery, furniture and some exquisite statues. But their most famous find was a battered lump that sat unnoticed for months in the courtyard of Athens’ National Archaeological Museum, before it cracked open to reveal a bundle of cogwheels, dials and inscriptions.
It has taken scientists over a hundred years to decode the inner workings of those corroded fragments, with x-ray and CT scans finally revealing a sophisticated clockwork machine used to calculate the workings of the heavens (video).
Dubbed the Antikythera mechanism, it had pointers that displayed the positions of the sun, moon and planets in the sky, as well as a star calendar, eclipse prediction dial and a timetable of athletics events including the Olympics. …
But one of the most intriguing mysteries relates to the wreck on which it was found. What’s still down there?
The wreck lies in around 60 metres of cold, rocky, current-swirled water – not an easy place to visit. The sponge divers who salvaged its cargo worked in clunky metal diving suits with little understanding of the dangers of diving at such depth. By the time they abandoned their project, two of them had been paralysed by the bends, and one was dead. They left behind stories of abandoned treasures, including giant marble statues that rolled down the steep slope from the wreck and out of reach.
The undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau spent a couple of days at the wreck site in 1978 and brought up some precious smaller items, including some coins from the Asia Minor coast, which suggested that the ship sailed from there around 70-60 BC (probably carrying war booty from Greek colonies back to Rome). But even with their sleek scuba gear, Cousteau’s divers could spend only brief minutes on the seabed without risking the bends.
No one has been back since. Now, after years of negotiations with the Greek authorities, Brendan Foley, a marine archaeologist based at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, finally has permission to dive at Antikythera. He’s working with Greek archaeologists including Theotokis Theodoulou of the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities.
This week, the team begins a three-week survey using rebreather technology, which recycles unused oxygen from each breath and allows divers to stay deeper for longer. The aim is to survey the wreck site properly for the first time, to find out once and for all what has been left down there – and to check down the slope, to 70 metres depth or more, to see if those stories of runaway statues are true.
And, of course, what if there is further ancient technology just sitting there, unrecognised?
The Qasr el-Wizz apocryphon
Alin Suciu has another marvellous post on an item entirely new to me.
When the High Dam was built in the 1960s, almost the entire Nile valley between Aswan and Wadi Halfa had been inundated in order to create the Lake Nassar. As the waters were rising, many archeological sites were destroyed, while others, such as the well-known temples of Abu-Simbel, were removed from their original location and re-erected elsewhere. During the construction of the dam, more precisely in October-November 1965, the archeological team from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago was excavating a Christian monastery at Qasr el-Wizz, situated just a couple of kilometers north of Faras, in Lower Nubia. …
Perhaps the most exciting discovery of the Chicago team at Qasr el-Wizz was a small parchment book written in Coptic. The manuscript was found almost intact, virtually the entire text being preserved. The Qasr el-Wizz codex was initially housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, but was later been moved to the new Nubian Museum in Aswan.
The codex is quite short (only 17 folios), is dated to the 10th century, and contains two items:
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A revelation of the risen Christ to the apostles, delivered on the Mount of Olives. “It contains a dialogue of the apostle Peter with the resurrected Christ concerning the eschatological and soteriological function of the Cross.”
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“A hymn sung by Jesus whilst the apostles are dancing around the Cross”.
The first item has long been known in Old Nubian, and was published by F. L. Griffith in The Nubian Texts of the Christian Period, Berlin, 1913 (online here).
The second is more interesting: it is an abbreviated version of the “Hymn of the Cross” found in the so-called “Gospel of the Savior”, P. Berol. 22220, published by Charles Hedrick back in 1997-ish — a report about it was one of the first items on my newly created website — and apparently this is also found in the so-called “Strasbourg Coptic Gospel”, which is unknown to me.
An English translation was prepared in typescript by Egyptologist George R. Hughes in 1965, for private use, which Alin rediscovered in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. He did place it online, but felt obliged to remove it after a communication from Artur Obluski, whom he may have thought was writing on behalf of that institution.
That is rather a pity, surely. I have always thought of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago as a rather forward-looking body. The availability of an admittedly obsolete translation of this obscure item can only benefit everyone by raising awareness of the text. It is, after all, very obscure. I had never heard of it, and, given my interest in ancient texts, that means that practically no-one has ever heard of it.
Perhaps I might write to that institution and ask whether they really have any objection.
Where to find the “Clavis Coptica”
An interesting post at Alin Suciu on some new Coptic fragments of ps.Severian of Gabala made reference to a mysterious “Clavis Coptica”. A google search left me none the wiser, so I thought that I’d better write something.
It looks as if “Clavis Coptica” is an informal reference to a “Clavis Patrum Copticorum”, which exists in a pay-only-access database. If you look at this page it gives you these details.
It’s very disappointing to find something like this offline. Only a handful of people will ever be able to use it.
UPDATE: Alin Suciu has now posted himself on this question here. He asked Tito Orlandi, who replied:
The Clavis Coptica (or Clavis Patrum Copticorum) is the complete list of the literary and Patristic works which form the Coptic literature, modeled on the example of the Clavis Patrum Graecorum (by Geerard) and the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca/Latina/Orientalis.
Each work has an identification number of 4 digits, which may be quoted as: cc0000.
The list is presently found on the web page of the Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari
(http://cmcl.let.uniroma1.it) accompanied by information on manuscripts, content, and critical problems.The bare list (id. number, author-title) will soon be found for free on the Hamburg web page of the CMCL. A printed Clavis Coptica is in preparation.”
It is very good news that the list will be accessible to us all.
A new translation of the Life of Samuel of Kalamoun
A correspondent has written:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/108046621/Samuel-Apocalypse
The article contains the Arabic text with an English translation, accompanied by notes including references to the Coptic Life of Samuel of Kalamun.
This is the Arabic text, with a new English translation, of the Life of Samuel of Kalamoun. Get it while it’s hot!
From my diary
The first draft of a translation of Ephraem’s Hymn 22 against heresies has reached me; will look at it tomorrow.
It seems that papyrologist Colin H. Roberts states that the papyri do not support the Bauer thesis as regards Egypt. I have not looked into that chapter of Bauer, since I still need to complete work on chapter 1 (Edessa). But it’s interesting all the same.
Ever downloaded a pirate video? The publisher knows that you did it. Apparently.
An interesting article in New Scientist here.
Anyone who has downloaded pirated music, video or ebooks using a BitTorrent client has probably had their IP address logged by copyright-enforcement authorities within 3 hours of doing so. So say computer scientists who placed a fake pirate server online – and very quickly found monitoring systems checking out who was taking what from the servers.
The news comes from this week’s SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy, where computer security researcher Tom Chothia and his colleagues at the University of Birmingham, UK, revealed they have discovered “massive monitoring” of BitTorrent download sites, such as the PirateBay, has been taking place for at least three years.
Quite right too. One can imagine the conversation in a Pall Mall club:
What business have the plebs in reading or watching, unless they pay someone for it? Another glass of something, minister?
I imagine that these companies — they like to call themselves “creative industries”, presumably in reference to their attitude to the law — are keen to get a law passed that will allow them to demand money under threat from all those people.
Anyone like to suggest untranslated works of spiritual value to modern Christians?
Life of Mar Aba – chapter 32
The hagiographical life of the 6th century East Syriac Catholicos Mar Aba continues.
32. At the time of the journey, when the King of Kings set out to go to Azerbaijan, the saint was led with him in his fetters, in great discomfort, over mountains and hills, in heat and drought, in thirst and hunger, in much prayer with his disciples. Wherever they came, the believers welcomed him with great joy and everyone went to his tent as a means of grace and blessing. Wherever the king camped, believers came from place and asked that the Saint should be released from these harsh restraints. When the King of Kings came to Azerbaijan and the magians of the place where the Blessed One had been in custody, hearing that he was at court, all came to honour and greet him, weeping that by the removal of the Noble One they had been robbed of such a blessing. Everywhere they went, wherever the great ones of the Kingdom were, they spoke of his wisdom and manner of life. The leaders of the magians at court forbade them to say such things about him, until, of the leaders of the magians, Kardag the Ainbed, and Shahrdawer, and Azadsad the Mobedan Mobed, calmed down in their anger against him, because they became ashamed of themselves through the beautiful things which people said about him. So they told him through a Mobed, “We hear from many people that you are a good and an upright man, and we are anxious that you should be released from your bonds. Just state publically that you are not opposed to magianism and will not convert (anyone) else to Christianity, and we will immediately release you and you can go wherever you like.”
All this seems rather fictional to me.
Notes on Walter Bauer’s “Orthodoxy and Heresy” – part 4 – Edessa (contd) – criteria
I have been looking at Walter Bauer’s 1934 book, Orthodoxy and Heresy, in a series of posts. My previous post consisted of taking his chapter on the earliest Christianity in Edessa, in Northern Syria — the home of the Syriac language — and summarising what he had to say. Bauer’s argument is made in a really rather diffuse manner, and it is usually sound practice with such theses to reduce them to a series of propositions and assess the evidence either way.
Bauer’s thesis in chapter 1 is straightforward. The earliest Christianity in Edessa was Marcionite. Later came Bardaisan. Normal Christianity came at least third, around 300 A.D.
It is entirely possible that, in a remote region, separated by political and linguistic barriers, that the first mention of the name of Christ may come from people who are heretical. The conversion of the Goths to Arian Christianity shows that this can happen. Whether Edessa is that remote, that separate, may reasonably be doubted. Geographically it was close to Palestine. The language was a dialect of Aramaic, understood in Palestine, probably spoken by Jesus himself, and certainly used for a translation of the Old Testament at a very early date, probably made by Jews.[1]. Certainly in the 4th century material written in Caesarea by its bishop Eusebius was translated into Syriac almost within the lifetime of the author.[2] But who knows? Maybe it is so.
Rather than arguing from probability, let us try to marshall evidence for and against the thesis.
First we must ask what sort of data will be evidence for or against the thesis? We should also ask, critically, what will that data be evidence of?
One approach would be to examine all the references in the surviving ancient literature to Christianity in Edessa. If we have a clear statement of the proposition in one of these, that would be evidence for the thesis. If we have a clear statement to the contrary, that would be evidence.
If the proposition is not explicitly discussed, then we can examine references to Christianity in Edessa for doctrinal statements. Then we can draw up a table of date and doctrine, and see what appears first.
But this raises a question. Will this be evidence? If we find that all the earliest references are to Marcionites, will that show that Marcionites were first? Or will it merely show us what the chances of survival — for not more than 1% of the material composed has reached us[3] — have preserved? It is one thing to say, “The first mention is Marcionite”, if such is the case. It is another to infer from such a discovery that whatever is mentioned first in the surviving data did indeed come first, and that the absence of any mention of normal Christianity shows that it did not exist.
It is notoriously difficult to prove a negative. A positive statement of non-existence is evidence. Is failure to mention something evidence of non-existence?
Likewise, if normal Christianity is not mentioned, are we justified in presuming that it existed anyway? In this case I would say not; for Bauer’s thesis seems to be testing this presumption, region by region.
Let us defer that question, however, until we have seen what the evidence is. Then we can argue what it means. If WordPress will permit, I shall try to put it in tabular form.
- [1]S. Brock’s introduction to Syriac Literature, SEERI, refers to the early date of the OT Syriac translation.↩
- [2]The earliest known Syriac literary manuscript, BL. Add. 12150, dates to 411 AD and contains Eusebius, Theophania. His Church History was translated into Syriac in the 4th century at least.↩
- [3]So Pietro Bembo, referenced by N.G.Wilson on the Archimedes Palimpsest website.↩