5. As the blessed one saw the virtue of this student, and thought much about his words, he decided in his heart to go and learn at the Christian college, and fasted and prayed much.
He was working for a respectable man named Chudaibod, the secretary of the Finance Director of the district of Beit Aramaye, and was then in Radan. After the latter was called to Ctesiphon, the blessed one also went down with the secretary for whom he was working. He fasted daily and prayed constantly at the stone church.[1]
The secretary heard, where he was, that the blessed was being instructed in Christianity and said one day, “Aba, have you become a messianist?” He said, “Yes, I am a messianist.” The secretary said, “I will say this and accuse you before the Finance Director, and you will be put in chains.”[2] The blessed one said, “Just say it; I am willing to allow myself to be chained and to die for the name of Christ.” So spoke the saint, although he had not yet received the seal of baptism.
After he had spent some time in Ctesiphon, he returned to his home and after fasting and praying constantly, he entered into holy baptism in the village of ‘KD.[3] From then on he was more eager in fasting, prayer and virtuous works. He left the secretary and his service, renounced the world, and decided to go into the desert and the mountains, there to live and to please God by his conduct.
Author: Roger Pearse
Life of Mar Aba – chapters 3 and 4
More from the Life of the Nestorian patriarch, Mar Aba I, ca. 550 AD. The anonymous biographer has already explained that Mar Aba was originally a Persian pagan who held a senior administrative post.
3. When the blessed one looked at the habit (σχῆμα), which was chaste and (not) colourful (?), he became doubtful whether he was perhaps not a Son of the Covenant, but a Marcionite or a Jew, and he asked him, “Are you a Jew?” He said, “Yes”. Again he spoke, “Are you a Christian?” He said, “Yes”. Again he spoke, “Do you worship the Messiah?” He said, “Yes”.
The blessed one was very angry at this answer by the student and said, “How can you be Jew, Christian and Messianist (meschîchâjâ) ?” For by “Christian” he meant, after the local custom, the Marcionites.
The student said, “In private I am a Jew. I worship the living God and believe in his Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit. I avoid idolatry and all uncleanness. I am a Christian in truth, not like those the Marcionites lead astray and call themselves Christians. Because “Christian” is a Greek word, which means in Syriac “Messianist”. And if you ask me, “Do you worship the messiah?”, I worship him in truth and I avoid all evil for the sake of true life.”
4. When the blessed one heard this, he rejoiced in his spirit. He recognised the wisdom and humility of the student, the disciple of Christ. Again he got into the boat and sat down, and the student also got on. And since the blessed one stopped despising the student, the wind also ceased; the waves of the Tigris calmed; they went across and came ashore. As both got out, the student said, “What did it cost you, that I came across with you?” The blessed one wondered at his calm, and very much regretted insulting him. He went to him and fell down before him, and said, “I ask you by the living and true God, forgive me for this sin committed against you.” The student said, “The Lord has commanded us Christians, to retain anger against no-one, and never to return evil for evil.” Then they drew near each other, greeted one another, and parted.
Life of Mar Aba – chapter 2
The story continues:
2. When the blessed one sat in the boat to go across, the student also got in, to go across with him. Then the saint saw his dress (σχῆμα), took him for a Son of the Covenant, beat him, and took the bag that he had with him and threw it ashore, and forced him to get out. The student said nothing in reply, but got out and sat on the bank of the Tigris. But once the blessed one and his companions had set out and had moved away a little distance from the shore, by the grace of God a violent wind blew against them; the Tigris became stormy like a zealous servant and its waves rose up against them, and it roared against the blessed one, because he had fought against the disciple of Christ and mocked him and prevented him from crossing. Fear came over him, and he ordered the boat to return to the shore. After he landed, the wind ceased and there was a great calm. Then he got into the boat again, and the student also got in with him, and sat down with him in the boat, and again the blessed one rose against him and forced him to go ashore. And when they had gone a little way, the wind awoke again against this pagan audacity, that he did not recognised the Creator of All, and he was even more disturbed than before. And again the blessed one and his companions returned to the shore and got out. But the excellent student was sitting on the bank of the Tigris.
Opening portion of the “Life” of Mar Aba
I thought that I would turn some of the German translation of the life of Mar Aba into English, since many of us find German hard to read.
1. History of the wonderful and divine struggles of the holy witness Mar Aba, the Catholicos, the Patriarch of the East.
(Introduction: if we honour great men with statues, how much more then is it fitting to honour the witnesses to Christ, especially Mar Aba.)
Mar Aba was originally a pagan, and surpassed most heathens in his (zeal for) paganism. He also was learned in Persian literature. Because he was very learned in literature, the nobles of his area recognised that he was very learned and perceptive, and invited him to join them, and they considered that he was suitable for the civil service and gave him an official position. And since the Blessed One listened to them, they made him an Arzabed; he went in and out with them, and was respected by many. He was a hard, bitter pagan; he reviled the Christians and taunted the Sons of the Covenant.[1] But as he crossed the Tigris, Jesus threw his net over him and caught him in it. For the Lord is accustomed to do as he did to the blessed Paul, when he went to Damascus to persecute his followers, to chain them and deliver them to death. He transformed him from a persecutor into a persecuted; he was chained, suffered and died for him. Similarly Jesus sent to the saint, as he went from the village of Chale to his home, and sat with others in a boat (κέρκουρος), a student (σχολάριος) as teacher, a mortified ascetic, a humble and gentle man, modest and humble in his appearance (σχῆμα), named Joseph, with the surname Moses. On his rod he had the sweet and pleasant bait of the spiritual life, to entice the saint from death to life.
- [1]This group (Syriac bnay qyāmâ) were a monastic-like group who combined asceticism with an politically and socially active life. See also Wikipedia article.↩
Gone rather horrible
From my diary
A week ago I accidentally installed what I believe to be malware on my main PC, a Sony Laptop. I uninstalled it at once, and scanned for malware using Kaspersky, but the damage was done. Kaspersky could find no indication of malware. But there is no reason why anyone would camouflage an installer as a PDF inside a self-extracting zip, other than to install something malicious. So I must presume that the machine is tainted. I use this machine for my online banking, so I don’t dare connect it to the web. Since I don’t know what has been done to it, I can’t trust it. It’s cheaper to buy a new machine, than to risk identity theft. And I had noticed that the disks on the old machine tended to squeal a bit after the machine got hot, which I didn’t like.
So last week I purchased a new Samsung RF711 laptop. Yesterday I unpacked this and began the process of setting it up.
I also bought a 256 Gb Samsung solid-state drive. These are much faster than hard disks, and, if you use one of these as your primary drive, and put Windows on it, Windows loads very much faster, as this page informed me. The Samsung came with an empty hard drive bay and a fitting kit. Time was, when fiddling with hard disks could destroy your laptop. But clearly Samsung expect you to.
Here’s what I did.
-
I started the machine as per instructions, and ran through the Windows 7 start up.
-
I shut down the machine, removed the battery and power cable.
-
I took the SSD out of its package (it comes with instructions), and opened the fitting kit from the laptop. The latter consisted of a bracket, a cable, and some screws. There were two sizes of screw: 4 short ones, to hold the drive into the bracket; and 4 long ones, to hold the bracket to the laptop.
-
I screwed the drive into the bracket. Then I fitted the cable onto the drive (it can only go in one way) and the other end onto the laptop (which could go two ways, so be a bit careful – the correct way is the same way up as the other drive).
-
Then I screwed the drive into position, thankfully without losing any screws.
-
I refitted the battery and power, and fired it up. The PC started normally, but I couldn’t see the new drive in Windows explorer.
-
Then I bought and downloaded a copy of Paragon Migrate OS to SSD 2.0 ($19.95), installed it and ran it. This was very simple, could see the new drive, and just copied the C: drive to it (including the recovery partition, I later discovered).
-
I then shut the machine down completely, and restarted. The Samsung comes up with a logo and a menu at the bottom, F2 for BIOS, F4 for recovery. In the Bios I changed the boot order, so that it booted from my new drive.
-
Save, exit, restart and … Windows 7 started, and was completely booted in 9 seconds. Wow!
One problem that I have found is that the drive letters get a bit messed up. However you can correct this, I believe (haven’t done it yet).
At the moment I am engaged in copying all my backed up files to a new external hard drive (I always have two), and getting the machine set up the way that I want it. Tedious, but inevitable.
The backup is about a week out of date. So I will need to look at the tainted machine, work out what I did, and repeat that on the new machine.
The Samsung did not come with oceans of rubbish pre-installed, which was welcome. It’s very generic; not nearly as nice as the Sony was; but the internal 1Tb drive will be very welcome!
UPDATE: It all went rather horribly wrong later, tho — see subsequent posts.
From my diary
More British Library mss.
The British Library continue their digitisation of their manscripts, which is very welcome. They’ve moved on to the Royal collection, although the focus seems to have drifted back to digitising “pretty books” and medievalia, rather than the material that classics and patristics scholars will want.
There is a Tertullian in that collection, which ought to be online. But I have given up making suggestions and requests, since it never seems to have any effect.
In the current upload only one volume is of interest:
- Royal 6 C. i — Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, England (St Augustine’s, Canterbury), 4th quarter of the 11th century.
From my diary
Home, with piles of electronic gear. But when will I get time to set it up? That said, being unable to use my main machine is becoming increasingly irksome.
I’ve been looking for possible Greek texts to get translated. There’s a little pile of sermon material by Chrysostom.
Most interesting of these are three items which appear in Migne in very truncated form. De Regressu Sancti Joannis (PG52, col. 421), De Recipiendo Severiano (col. 423), and Severian’s reply De Pace (col. 425). All three are given in Latin, and seem far too short to be full versions. Now I know that the Greek exists of Severian, and indeed a full version of it. But I am unclear about the others.
It turns out that I did enquire of a scholar who had published about these, and got the response that I should look in the Clavis Patrum Graecorum vol. 2, from 4438 onwards, and also in the supplement. I believe that there are oriental translations of this stuff also.
And that, dear reader, is why I am annoyed that I can’t access my main machine, on which resides my copy of CPG2!
There are also some short tracts by Epiphanius of Salamis, in which he expresses strong antipathy to icons. These would be of general interest: but it turns out that a translation exists already, by Stephen Bigham, in Epiphanius of Salamis: Doctor of Iconoclasm? (2008). Of course this is offline (drat).
Never mind. There are still lots of Chrysostom sermons!
Papyri of St Augustine in the Green collection?
Via Tommy Wasserman at Evangelical Textual Criticism I learn of some rather exciting news!
The Baptist Standard reports (2012-07-10) from the same summer institute citing Jeff Fish (editor of the new Brill series) who said:
Scholars also mentored students editing some of the earliest fragments of the New Testament, with some dating to the second century, Fish said. Other discoveries are fragments of copies of some of St. Augustine’s commentaries on John’s Gospel and the Psalms, . . .
There is a little more on the session here, although no more about Augustine.
Also, it looks as if New Testament material will not relegate other material to the sidelines: Dr W. reckons that “the first volume will not contain the NT MSS”. Information from this interview with Jerry Pattengale in Indiana Wesleyan University (2012-08-02):
Comprising of one to two new volumes per year, the new series will publish approximately 20 papyri with a thorough description, commentary with images, and web-based support for further resources.
The first forthcoming volume in the series, planned to be released in early 2013, is dedicated to an early 3c BCE papyrus containing an extensive, undocumented work by Aristotle on reason, and is currently being analyzed by a research group at Oxford University.
Of course the biblical material is no doubt of very great importance; but classical and patristic material is pretty interesting too!
Well done, Steven Green, for getting hold of all this stuff, and making it available!