Author: Roger Pearse

A volume of papers from a Eusebius conference

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A year or so back there was a conference somewhere in Europe about Eusebius.  I never saw it announced, and the few people who seemed to know about it responded evasively to my requests for further information.  Possibly they were afraid that someone as unacademic as me might turn up!  Indeed I might have done.

The papers from the conference are being gathered in a volume to be published by Brill.  Interesting a translation of Eusebius of Caesarea’s De Sollemnitate Paschalis is among them:

Mark DelCogliano, “The Promotion of the Constantinian Agenda in Eusebius of Caesarea’s On the Feast of Pascha,” in Sabrina Inowlocki and Claudio Zamagni (eds.), Reconsidering Eusebius: A Fresh Look at his Life, Work, and Thought (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

My correspondant adds:

I don’t know when the volume is supposed to appear. It’s not yet listed on the Brill website, so presumably not soon.

Note that the article is not merely a translation. It is a study that argues that the short treatise was commissioned by Constantine as part of his campaign to eliminate the celebration of Easter on different dates around the empire. A translation is appended to the study.

The book is something to look out for, if not to buy — Brill volumes are so expensive as to be library-only purchases.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

What happened to my evening?!  It sort of disappeared!

First I had to deinstall Office XP from my PC, then install Office 2007.  Then Microsoft wanted to download some updates — about 1Gb of them!  I did some, and waited and waited, and then decided the rest could wait.

Then I had to scan a few pages of Iturbe’s edition of the Arabic version of a Coptic catena containing fragments of Eusebius’ Gospel Problems.  The Arabic is much more complete than the Coptic original, you see.  The translators of the Coptic wanted to see some more.  So I did that, and then uploaded the new PDF.  It took a while at 600 dpi, which is more than I would usually use.  But Arabic has all these little letters, distinguished only by dots.  Not much choice, but high resolution really.

Then a correspondant has sent me a sample of a translation of sermon by Severian of Gabala.  It’s a little awkward, and English is not his first language.  Bang that over to a reviewer.  Then the reviewer comes back to say that three sentences isn’t really long enough — true — and so I write again for some more.

Meanwhile the same chap turns out to be a Severian enthusiast, who has translated one of Severian’s sermons extant in Armenian, in a publication to which I have no access.  This is really interesting.  But he also asks if I have the Savile edition of Chrysostom which contains some otherwise unpublished sermons.  Well I do; but in PDF’s which are a Gigabyte in size.  How to upload those?

And so on it goes.  And somehow, there’s no more time, and the uploads are still going on, and I need to go to bed!

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Eusebius, De sollemnitate paschalis – translation done

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Angelo Mai retrieved various things from the margins of Vatican manuscripts in the 1820’s.  Among these was an epitome of another lost work by Eusebius of Caesarea, De sollemnitate paschalis (On the celebration of Easter).  This has never received a complete translation into English, although it is fairly short.

I commissioned a translation of it a couple of months back, and the first draft arrived today.  It’s an excellent and professional piece of work, as always with that translator. 

My original intention was to place the thing online.  I’m being slightly tempted instead to bundle it with the Gospel Problems and Solutions translation, and to think in terms of a volume of Minor works of Eusebius, rather than just the original idea.

Probably that’s a bad idea.  It’s taken long enough to get as close to completion with the Problems as we now are, and further delay would be involved if the scope expands.

Still tempting tho.

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Eusebius update 2

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I emailed someone this morning about transcribing the text of the Coptic fragments of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Gospel problems and solutions.  Rather to my surprise he did the first fragment then and there into unicode, and perfectly well.  I’m so used to delays on the Coptic that it is delightful to find someone getting on with it.

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Eusebius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Good news – the Greek text that the Sources Chretiennes sent me turns out to be exactly what they printed.  I had half the Ad Marinum checked, and there were no deviations. 

This means that all the Greek text has now been checked and is ready to go.

I’ve written to someone to type up the Coptic text in unicode.  That shouldn’t take too long.  I’ve put the translators of the Arabic and Coptic in contact, and they’re agreeing to disagree about the reading of some passage.  The Arabic is all done, translated and transcribed; the Coptic I think is probably the same.

I need to prepare the Latin text myself of the Ambrose fragments (unless someone else wants to, for money).  I need to assemble all the Greek in files in the right format.  And then…. we are basically done!  At that point it can be sent for typesetting.

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Why Windows Vista was awful

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Microsoft Freelancer, a space-exploration game, worked fine on XP.  It wouldn’t run on Vista. 

Thankfully it does run on my new Windows 7 laptop.

And I’m not getting prompted “do you really want to do that?” every time I do anything any more either.

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Greek texts from the library of the Patriarch in Jerusalem

Posted on by Roger Pearse

John Chrysostom was exiled from Constantinople at the instigation of the empress Eudoxia, assisted by Severian of Gabala.  But the people rioted before he had gone far, and Chrysostom was recalled.  An armistice was patched up between the two men.

In Migne there is a little group of three sermons, only in Latin, all headed De Pace — On Peace.  The first two are by Chrysostom, and refer to “our brother Severian”.  The third is by Severian himself in reply.

Quasten tells us that the latter is only fragments, and that the full Greek text only appeared in print at the hands of Papadopoulos-Kerameus, St. Petersburg in 1891, in vol. 1 of Analekta hierosolumitikes stakuologias, p.15-26.  My heart sank as I saw this, and contemplated how on earth I would ever even locate such a volume. 

Slightly hopelessly I entered his name in Google; and a list on Archive.org came up.  And here it is, courtesy of the good and generous people at Harvard Library, who have given freely of their store to the world!  There’s also a catalogue of manuscripts in that library.

Looking at the PDF of vol. 1, after the prologue in Greek, sure enough, on p. 15 (Roman numerals; p.50 of the PDF), is the sermon peri eirenes, taken from ms. Saba 32, fol. 130a-135b.  Migne’s Latin text is printed in parallel where it exists; no translation where it does not.

Anyone fancy translating it into English, for money?

On p.556 of the PDF is a list of contents.  Any care to give us an idea of that lot in English?  I can see it starts with Andrew of Crete, then Severian, then Paulinus’ Life of Ambrose…

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Problems with Berchman’s translation of the fragments of Porphyry “Against the Christians”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been looking at Harnack’s edition of the fragments of Porphyry’s work against the Christians, and comparing bits of Berchman’s translation against it.  Berchman did not translate Harnack, but had his own ideas; nevertheless, we can connect the two.

Fragment 21, from Jerome’s prologue to his commentary on Galatians, reads:

Quod nequaquam intelligens Bataneotes et sceleratus ille Porphyrius in I. operis sui adversum nos libro Petrum a Paulo obiecit esse reprehensum, quod non recto pede incederet ad evangelizandum, volens et illi maculam erroris inurere et huic procacitatis et in commune ficti dogmatis accusare mendacium, dum inter se ecclesiarum principes discrepent.

which Berchman renders as:

Porphyry, completely ignorant and criminal, in the first volume of his work against us, says that Peter was reprimanded by Paul, that he did not go out immediately to evangelize. And thus he wanted to brand him with the blemish of error, the lie of impertinence, and of publicly fictitious teaching because between these princes of the church there were difficulties.

Now this didn’t look very good to me, not least because which bit renders “Bataneotes”.  Searching for this word, I discovered that the 19th century Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation had included this prologue, and renders this passage thus:

That wretch Porphyry Bataneotes [*] by no means understood this, and, therefore, in the first book of the work which he wrote against us, he raised the objection that Peter was rebuked by Paul for not walking uprightly as an evangelical teacher. His desire was to brand the former with error and the latter with impudence, and to bring against us as a body the charge of erroneous notions and false doctrine, on the ground that the leaders of the Churches are at variance among themselves.

[*] Probably from Batanea, the ancient Bashan, where Porphyry is said to have been born.

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An opportunity to translate some of Severus Sebokht

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Syriac scientist Severus Sebokht lived in the mid-7th century in Syria and was possibly the most learned man of his day.  He lived at the great monastery of Kinnesrin, which was noted for Greek studies.  He is the first western writer to refer to what we today call “arabic numerals”. 

Two works by him have been translated into French; On the astrolabe and On the constellations.  The French translation of the former was run into English, and I scanned that and placed it online.  I translated part of the latter and also placed that online.

I also dumped whatever information I had on him online here.

Most of his works have never been published.  A lot of them are to be found in a manuscript in the French National Library in Paris, ms. Syr. 346.  I obtained a PDF of a microfilm of this years ago.

I’ve had an offer today by a chap who is fluent in both Syriac and Arabic to translate some of it.  I think I’ll take him up on this!

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Eusebius’ lost work against Porphyry – extant in 1838?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Eusebius’ refutation of Porphyry’s attack on the Christians is lost; but it seems it may not have been lost that long ago.

Does anyone know whether there are manuscripts still in Rodosto, a town 60 miles west of Istanbul and now known as Tekirdag? Or if not, where the mss of the expelled Greek community now are?

I ask because of references to manuscripts of Eusebius of Caesarea against Porphyry. There is a statement in Harnack’s edition of the fragments of Porphyry’s Against the Christians, p.30:

A listing of manuscripts in Rodosto, written between 1565 and 1575, on p.30b: Eusebiou tou Pamphilou Kata Porphuriou (s. Forster, De antiquitatibus et libris ms. Constantinopolitanis, Rostochii, 1877; cf. Neumann in Theol. Lit. Ztg. 1899, col. 299). In 1838 a great fire broke out in Rodosto.

It would be most interesting to know whether this ms. exists anywhere.   Does anyone know who would know?

I wonder if Forster and Neumann are online.

Harnack’s next paragraph continues with a statement that an ms. in the Iviron monastery on Mt. Athos, codex 1280 (s. XVII) which contains Eusebius, biblos peri ths euangekiwn diaphwnias; Eis thn prophhthn Hsaian logoi t konta [sic]; [Kata] Porphyriou logoi l’ [sic]; topikon logos a’ etc (see Meyer, Ztschr. fur. K.-Gesch. XI, p.156).

But this last is probably a red herring.  Long ago I scanned and translated MEYER, Ph., Der griechische Irenäus und der ganze Hegesippus im 17. Jahrhundert, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte (1890) pp. 155-158 (English translation).

Iviron 1280 mainly contains church music, but at the end is a letter with a couple of pages containing merely a list of books, which mentions Hegesippus, Irenaeus, Methodius against Porphyry, plus Eusebius Against Porphyry and his Biblical Questions (diaphonias).

There are a number of these lists from the renaissance and later in existence. Nigel Wilson has written that at least some of them look like the productions of dealers in the East, intended to draw in the too eager western buyer in order to do a ‘bait-and-switch’ scam. One of them even looks like a deliberate joke.

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