Author: Roger Pearse

Two more Syriac fragments of Eusebius “Gospel problems and solutions”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Ishodad of Merv, in his commentaries on the gospels, quotes from Eusebius To Marinus.  The commentaries were printed by Gibson in 1911 with an English translation.  Vol. 1,  p. 143 contains the Eusebius, on Mark 15.  This is online in PDF here.  The Syriac text is in vol. 2, here.

The other passage appears in the letters of Severus of Antioch, published in Syriac with English translation by E. W. Brooks in the Patrologia Orientalis 14, p. 270 (of the PDF).  This is online here, and I transcribed the English here long ago.

The two passages seem to be on the same material.  Probably neither actually had a full text of Eusebius before him, but relied on excerpts.

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Getting hold of books

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I pulled down from my shelves yesterday a cheap reprint of Lanciani’s The destruction of ancient Rome, and made it my bedside reading.  It’s full of interesting statements, about how the monuments disappeared into the lime kilns.  Unfortunately it is rather under-referenced.  The latter is very frustrating. 

The book also refers to the destruction of the Septizonium.  Interestingly it tells us that a medieval guide to Rome, the Einsiedeln itinerary, contains transcriptions of inscriptions visible when it was made.  This includes an inscription on the septizonium which is long since vanished.  I was unable to find the itinerary online, tho.

Lanciani refers readers to his Ruins and excavations, and last night I decided I would just buy a copy of this.  The cheap reprints based on PDF’s usually make this possible, although in this case it seemed very difficult to get one at what I consider a reasonable price.  I did notice a copy of the first edition, with fold-out maps, offered for $200!  This raised the issue of how good the reproductions of the plates would be.  Those in my copy of The destruction were pretty grainy, which rendered them largely useless.  Indeed we might ask whether Google books is really preserving illustrations at all.

UPDATE: I was able to find Lanciani’s Italian publication of the itinerary here.  Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to contain the inscriptions.

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Devreesse: catenas on Mark

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Let’s continue to extract relevant material to Eusebius from Devreesse’s massive article on catenas.

VIII.  THE CATENAS ON St. MARK. — 1.  OVERVIEW. — The most ancient edition of a catena on St. Mark is due to the Jesuit, Poussines:  Catena graecorum Patrum in evangelium secundum Marcum couectore atque interprete Petro POSSINO Soc. Iesu presbytero qui et adiecit, titulo spicilegii commentarium, ad loca selecta quatuor evangeliorum: accessere collationes graeci contextus omnium librorum novi Testamenti cum XXII codd. antiquis mss. ex bibliotheca Barberina. Romae. typis Barberinis, MDCLXXII. [1672].

Three sources were available for this edition; 1.  A manuscript which Poussines cites under the name of the Anonymous of Tolouse, belonging to Charles de Montchal, archbishop of that town, today Paris gr. 194.  Most of the exegesis in this manuscript is anonymous: it is astonishingly closely related to that work known as the commentary on Mark of Theophylact (Patrologia Graeca, vol. 123, cols. 487-682); the rest consists of 20 citations scattered through the work.  — 2.  An interpretation of St. Mark attributed to a certain Victor of Antioch by a German manuscript, a copy of which was sent to him by Cordier.  According to Sickenberger (Titus von Bostra, p. 128 f.) this would today be the Monac. 99.  An exegesis of almost identical content is given in Vatican gr. 1423, but that manuscript bears no attribution on it.  — 3.  An anonymous manuscript in the Vatican, of which Cordier also sent him a copy.  We have identified this manuscript, which Poussines cites as Ἀνωνύμου Βατικ or even Ἀνωνύμου as the Vatican gr. 1692 A, fol. 177 ff. Its content can be found in Poussines, as will appear below, although not always very faithfully.

In 1840 [sic]  following his catena on Matthew, Cramer published a catena on St. Mark, based on Bodleian Laud 33 and Coislin gr. 23, already used with profit by him for the catena on the first gospel.  Some lacunas were filled with the aid of Paris 178.  Cramer likewise took from Bodleian Barocci 156 a scholion attributed to Justin in the catena of Macarius Chrysocephalus on St. Luke.  There are few named citations in this collection printed by Cramer.  One is credited to Cyril of Alexandria, another to Irenaeus, a third to Basil and a fourth to Theodore of Mopsuestia.  A few others are cited from time to time, but inside the texts.  Other manuscripts like the Vindob. 154 (Lambec. 29) have a few more lemmas [=author’s names], but never more than twenty.

One name dominates all the catenas on St. Mark; that of Victor of Antioch.  The Jesuit Peltanus edited  a commentary on the second gospel under this name… [1580]…  It is also from ps. Victor that another pseudepigraph already mentioned is derived: Peter of Laodicea, whose content was edited by Matthaei as a commentary by ps.Victor … [Moscow, 1775].

I don’t think the lengthy discussion of Victor of Antioch is relevant here.

Let us summarise this collection of literary facts from which the catenas on Mark derive.  1.  A bloc of scholia for the most part anonymous: the pseudo-Victor of Poussines.  2.  To this have been added other citations, not numerous: from which derive the text of Cramer, and the ps.Peter of Laodicea; the first reproduces integrally the fundus and adds a few (anonymous) extracts; the second rearranges the fundus and interpolates new scholia, some related to the additions in the catena of Cramer.

There remain two other collections of scholia; those of Vatican gr. 1692 A, and those of Paris 194, incompatible with each other.  The second agrees almost word for word, as in Poussines, with what is contained in the commentary of Theophylact on Mark.  As for the first, the state in which it has reached us does not permit us to say whether the few named citations encountered in it are the remains of a primitive state in which every citation had a name against it, and the source from which the catenist excerpted it, or on the contrary, whether we must envisage a two-stage process of compilation, perhaps an anonymous collection to which named patristic extracts were added later with an indication of their provenance.  Let us add that this collection also is far from covering the whole of the second gospel.

There remain the Scholia vetera (PG 106, col. 1173- 1178; also edited in Thomas, Les collections anonymes de scholies grecques aux evangiles, vol. 2, p. 181-9).  Their rare extracts correspond sometimes with ps.Victor.  Most often, they form a group apart.

II.  THE AUTHORS CITED. — …

Let’s now skip to Eusebius.  I’ve added some paragraphing.

Eusebius. — There was mention of a passage of Clement on the origins of the second gospel, collected by Eusebius.  The catenas cite various works of the bishop of Caesarea [=Eusebius].  In its prologue, the Anonymous of the Vatican (Poussines, p.3-4) refers to an opinion ἐν τρίτῃ βίβλῳ τῆς εὐαγγελικῆς ἀποδείξεως.  

Likewise the testimony of the questions to Marinus is invoked (Cramer, p. 266, 10-12; Poussines, p. 343 (on Mk. 25:25), 364 (on 16:18-20); these two passages on Simon of Cyrene and the appearance to Madeleine have been reproduced from Poussines  in PG vol. 22, col. 1009).  The same anonymous bears on Mk 13:32-39 (Poussines p. 297) the statement of Eusebius: ὡς γὰρ ἱστορεῖ ὁ Εὐσέβιος ἐν τῷ χρονικῷ κάνωνι.  Likewise on Mk 8:27 (Poussines, p. 269) Εὐσέβιος ἐν τῇ ἐπιτομῇ τῶν χρονικῶν. 

Finally Eusebius is named three times, though without references, once in Paris gr. 194 (=Poussines p. 46 on Mk 2:12), twice in ps.Victor of Antioch on Mk. 16:18-20 (Cramer 446, 19 f.) and by the anonymous of Poussines  on Mk. 15:15 (p. 340).

I think that is a very useful summary both of the printed catenas, and what is to be found in them.

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A curious copyright consideration on commissioned work

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The lawyers in the UK have done something odd.  They’ve decided that if someone commissions a bit of work from someone else, the copyright of the work remains with the author unless the contract explicitly says otherwise.  The details are here.

It’s hard to imagine any circumstance in which X would pay Y to create an original work and not intend to acquire ownership.  So this is just a typical lawyer’s trick, designed to increase the income of lawyers by obscuring what was plain to everyone and forcing everyone to state in writing what everyone presumed already, on pain of enriching more lawyers.  I can’t stomach such things.

I’ve tended to state this explicitly in all the work I have commissioned, being paranoid, but I’ve written to all my people explicitly again.  What the US position is I do not know.

As a rule I only take ownership so that I am free to give it away, of course.

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Editions of Chrysostom “Against the Jews”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The eight sermons by John Chrysostom against the Jews do not seem to have attracted the attention of editors.  The following list of editions and translations is given by Harkins:

  • Erasmus, Desiderius. Divi Iohannis Chrysostomi et Divi Athanasii.. lucubrationes aliquot etc. (containing Discourses IV-VIII in a Latin translation] (Basle 1527).
  • Hoeschel, David. Contra Iudaeos homiliae VI (Augsburg 1602).
  • Duc, Fronton du (Fronto Ducaeus). Ad populum Antiochenum, adv. Iudaeos, De incomprehensibili Dei natura, De sanctis deque diversis eiusmodi argumentis homiliae LXXVII (Paris 1609).
  • Savile, Henry. S. Iohannis Chrysostomi opera omnia [title actually in Greek only] (8 vols., Eton 1612).
  • Duc, Fronton du (Fronto Ducaeus). S. Iohannis Chrysostomi opera omnia (12 vols., Paris 1636-42).
  • Montfaucon, Bernard de. S. Iohannis Chrysostomi opera omnia (13 vols., Paris 1718-38 and Venice 1734-41). Second edition by Th. Fix (Paris 1834-39; reprinted by J.-P. Minge in PG 47-61; Paris 1863 [earlier printings of vol. 48: 1859]).
  • Bareille, J. Oeuvres completes de S. Jean Chrysostome [Montfaucon’s text with French translation] (12 vols., Paris 1865-73).
  • Schatkin, Margaret. “St. John Chrysostom’s Homily on the Protopaschites [the third discourse Adv. Iud.]: Introduction and Translation,” Orientalia Christiana analecta 195 (= The Heritage of the Early Church (Essays in Honor of.. . G.V. Florovsky]; Rome 1973) 167-86.
  • Paul W. Harkins, John Chrysostom, Discourses against Judaizing Christians, Fathers of the Church 68, 1999.  Google books limited preview. [Complete English translation]

It would seem, therefore, that Montfaucon’s text is still the most recent scholarly edition, being a mere 250 years old.

It is admittedly difficult to edit the works of Chrysostom.  Just a list of the extant manuscripts of his works fills multiple volumes.  But it is surely time that someone had a go at Adversus Iudaeos. 

I looked at the Google Books preview of the Harkins translation, but it seems that he was unaware of the discovery by Wendy Pradels some years earlier.  Seven of the sermons are of the same length; but the eighth is about 33% of the length.  Dr Pradels hunted down a manuscript which contained the remainder in the late 90’s, and published that text with a German translation.  It is my hope to get that lost portion translated into English, and reunite it with all the various online translations.

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The price of being disorganized

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m so cross with myself.  Some years ago I ordered a paper copy of PhD thesis containing a translation of John Chrysostom’s Eight Homilies Against the Jews.  It cost real money.  For years I have tripped over it.  Now I need it, and it is nowhere to be found.  Drat the thing, where can it be hiding?  I was going to convert it to PDF.

I was also looking for the Fathers of the Church volumes which are freely available on Archive.org.  I know I downloaded them.  But are they are on my hard disk?  They are not!

However do I avoid this happening?

I’m hoping to get the lost (and rediscovered) portion of Chrysostom’s Second Sermon translated and up on the web.  Time for another go at that particular hobby horse!  This one I will give away.

UPDATE:  Hmm.  Well I’ve just found the Chrysostom.  You see, when you have photocopies of complete books, they do make very large piles.  In the days when I was scanning a lot, I acquired a few of these doorstops.  My solution was to get the boxes that photocopier paper comes in (with lids), and place the books in those, writing on the lid which books were present within. 

Unfortunately I have acquired few such in recent years, and the pile of seven boxes next to my desk has come to serve as a make-shift extension on which papers get put.  Fortunately I thought to look under the papers.  In the second box down was the Chrysostom.  Thank heavens for that!  And I bet modern scanning will take a fraction of the time it did the last time I attacked that one.  I ordered it on 27th March 2007.  Was it that long ago?  Wow…

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Eusebius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still working on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Gospel questions and solutions, and on the task of getting the book together.  At the moment the intention is to include both a text and translation.  There’s been a little more progress over the weekend.

A friend has typed up the Greek for letter 212 of Isidore of Pelusium which is itself a fragment of the work (although Eusebius is not named).  The quality of the Migne print made this rather more difficult than it might be.  He has also done the first of eight fragments from Cramer’s catena, and is checking the translation as he goes which is also valuable.

After Cramer, the next thing to do will be to get the Mai text of the Greek fragments together.  We’ll do this  a bit at a time.

I’ve also had a fresh contract from Les editions du Cerf for using their Greek text of the main part of the work.  I returned that this weekend; let us hope that they will supply me with a text.  If they do not, this may force me to print without a text.

There is no progress on the Syriac section.  Now I know that a fragment exists in Severus of Antioch, the translation of this needs to be reviewed.  All the Syriac needs to be entered and vowels added.  I’ve held off on this until I know about the Cerf Greek text.

The Coptic section is stalled, because the translator has not replied to my last email.  I’ll need to email again.

I think the nature of any collection of fragments is that there will always be more fragments to collect.  But I think I am largely happy with what we have, and there is little more to do in this area.

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Devreesse – introductory notes on catenas on Matthew

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The post on the fragments of Eusebius extant in catenas on Matthew really needs some material from earlier in Devreesse’s article.

VII.  CATENAS ON ST. MATTHEW. — 1.  OVERVIEW. — It is to P. Poussines, S. J., that we owe the first edition of a catena on St. Matthew, Symbolorum in Matthaeum tomus prior exhibens catenam graecorum Patrum unius et viginti editam ex bibliotheca Illustrissimi D. Caroli de Montchal … Petrus POSSINUS e Societate Jesu… ex antiquis membranis eruit… Tolosae excudebat Ioannes Boude. MDCXLVI, in-fol.  [=Possinus, 1646].  The manuscript of the archbishop of Toulouse [=Charles de Montchal] has been identified; it is Paris gr. 194 (13th century).  It is one of the two mss. that Poussines used equally for his edition of the catena on Mark.  We possess on this subject an interesting letter from the archbishop of Toulouse to Combefis [=another editor of catenas], dated 16 August 1642, from which we will extract some words:  “Father Poussines has transcribed from my library during the past few days a catena on St. Matthew and St. Mark, in order to publish it soon.”  (Patrologia Graeca vol. 94, col. 515).  The first pages of the manuscript were badly damaged, so Fr. Poussines, who had no other exemplar of the catena on St. Matthew at his disposal, allowed himself to follow his imagination rather than give an accurate edition of what he could read.  Richard Simon did not fail to reproach him for this, and to propose some corrections to his work, Hist. critique du Nouveau Testament, vol. 3, ch. 30, p. 423-424.

A year later, another Jesuit whom we have already met, Cordier published a new catena on St. Matthew, which was presented as a supplement to the edition of his fellow-Jesuit, Symbolarum In Mathaeum tomus alter, quo continetur catena Patrum graecorum triginta collectore Niceta episcopo Serrarum interprete Balthasar CORDERIO societatis Jesu theologo.  Prodit nunc primum ex bibliotheca electorali serenissimi utriusque Bavariae Ducis.  Tolosae, excudebat Johannes Boude, MDCXLVII, in-fol. [=Corderius, 1647]  Why this attribution to Nicetas of Serrae?  Probably because the prologue and first few explications which follow on the beginning of the first gospel are given in Cordier’s manuscript (Munich 36) under the name of Nicetas.  This is a pretty arbitrary attribution, at first sight, since most of the scholia correspond exactly to parallel passages in the homilies of St. John Chrysostom on St. Matthew, but the remainder does indeed seem to have been taken from authors who are only generally cited in the other catenas by Nicetas.

In 1844 Cramer published the first volume of his catena on the New Testament.  Catenae graecorum Patrum in Novum Testamentum edidit J. A. Cramer… Oxonii, e typographeo Academico.  The base text was printed from ms. Coislin 23 (11th c.)  The major part of the catena is taken from the homilies of St. John Chrysostom, to which have been added, following, some scholia by different fathers.

Devreesse then goes on to mention a bunch of anonymous scholia, published with a commentary by Peter of Laodicea, by Henrici, Des Petrus von Laodicea Erklarung des Matthausevangeliums… Leipzig, 1908.  He then discusses this commentary and Peter himself at length.  He then mentions the catena of Euthymius Zigabenus (in PG 119), and a couple of other minor catenas.

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Devreesse on the fragments of Eusebius in the catena on Matthew

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In his article on medieval Greek commentaries made up entirely of chains of quotations from the Fathers — catenas, as they are called today — Devreesse has some good material on each of the four gospels on Eusebius.  This is very relevant to the translation of the remains of Eusebius’ Gospel Questions and Solutions.  Here is the entry on Matthew’s gospel, run into English.  I have split the main paragraph so each item is separate.

Eusebius — Of the work περὶ διαφωνίας εὐγγελίων [on the differences in the gospels] composed by Eusebius, different catenas give us different extracts.  It was divided into two parts (Patrologia Graeca vol. 22, col. 879-1006).  The first part, relating to the genealogies [of Jesus] comprised two books; it was dedicated to Stephanus.  The second, one book only, concerning the disagreement of the evangelists on some texts of the Passion, was addressed to Marinus.

In Poussines [=Possinus], Cramer, and in manuscript Vatican gr. 1618 (on Matthew, 1:1-21) there are various citations which derive from questions 1, 2 and 3 of To Stephanus.  Those which Poussines gives have been reproduced, PG, 22, cols. 972-976, with two others.

One fragment on the name of Jesus (1, 3-8b) placed sometimes in the mouth of Origen belongs in reality to Eusebius (cf. G. Mercati, Un supposto frammento di Origene, in Revue biblique 17, 1910, p. 76-79).

Sometimes the scholiast seems to have hesitated about the attribution to Eusebius (cf. Cramer, p. 12, 15).

As for the questions To Marinus, some fragments can be found in Cramer p. 251-256 which belong to this.

Some other citations can be met with in Cramer, p. 56 (Mt. 7:27), and 81 (Mt 10:34);  Pousinnes, p. 35 (Mt 3:3), and 145 (Mt 10:24-25).  Perhaps all this Eusebian material is analogous to some that was signalled in the Bodleian Library manuscript Laud 33, fol. 80b (Harnack-Preuschen, Geschichte, vol. 1, p.577). 

Zahn has published (Geschichte d. Neutestamentl. Kan. vol. 2, p. 915) another scholion of Eusebius on Matthew 16:9-20, from manuscript Moscow Holy Synod 139.

I need to get hold of the Mercati and Zahn articles.   It all reinforces the impression of fragments all over the place.  Any editor of this material will have a considerable job simply to assemble the raw materials!

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Lemma-out of here!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The word lemma is widely used in the humanities.  Indeed it leaves confusion wherever it is employed.

Because no-one knows what it means.  When was the last time you went down to get your car serviced, and told the mechanic to look at the lemma?  When did you hear a TV announcement talk about the lemmas in the latest failed government IT project?  It doesn’t mean anything, chaps.

What brought this on, I hear you ask?  The answer is a deeply confusing exchange discussing the fragments of Origen’s comments on Ezekiel with the translator.  The said gentleman used the word, in an email discussion of how we are going to present the catena fragments, and communication promptly took a nose-dive.

You may think you know what it means.  You are wrong.  All you know is one use of the word.  There are many.

I first came across the term in connection with the MorphGNT file, containing a Greek New Testament, one word per line, with grammatical information for each word.  The help file — I use the term ‘help’ loosely — used the word to describe one item on the line.  As a normal person, or at least, not one of the in-crowd, I had no idea what it meant.  So I emailed James Tauber, who maintained the file and asked.  Answer came there none!  In the end I figured out that in MorphGNT lemma here meant “base form of a word, uninflected, in the form found in a dictionary”.  It is a little difficult to think of an English alternative, although “dictionary form” or “base form” would do.  Doubtless this difficulty led to the use of lemma.

What other uses are there?  Well, we just saw Devreesse use it in his description of catenas.  In this case he meant “name or abbreviation stuck in the margin of the book to indicate that this extract was by this author.”  Again, a short term is not immediately apparent; but lemma does not help.

The translator was using it in yet another sense.  Often in a catena, the discussion is preceded by a short quotation of the scripture under discussion.  You guessed it — he called that a lemma as well!  Nor was he to blame, when others have led the way.

In short, it is an omnipresent jargon word.  And I think it should be banned.  It is an example of language as a means of intimidation, rather than a means of communication.

Some might say that we could achieve this end by holding a convention, adopting better terminology, setting new standards.  But I think the answer is simply to find those using the word and chop their goolies off.  If we refer to it as mandatory de-lemmatisation, they won’t know until our posse rolls up and I shout the secret code phrase, “Grab him, boys!”

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