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Mark the Deacon on the destruction of the statue of Aphrodite

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Following my last post, I find that the Life of Porphyry of Gaza, by Mark the Deacon, is online.  Mango states (p.56):

At Gaza there stood in the center of town a nude statue of Aphrodite which was the object of great veneration, especially on the part of women. When, in 402, Bishop Porphyry, surrounded by Christians bearing crosses, approached this statue, “the demon who inhabited the statue, being unable to contemplate the terrible sign, departed from the marble with great tumult, and, as he did so, he threw the statue down and broke it into many pieces.” We may doubt that the collapse of the statue was altogether spontaneous.

The text is here and reads (slightly modernised):

59. But when we came into the city, in the place that is called the Four Ways, there was a statue of marble which they said was a statue of Aphrodite; and it was upon a base of stone, and the form of the statue was of a woman, naked, and having all her shame uncovered. And all they of the city did honour to the statue, especially the women, kindling lamps and burning incense. For they reported concerning it that it gave answers in dreams unto those who wished to make trial of marriage, but they deceived each other, speaking falsely. And often, being bidden by the demon to make a contract of marriage, they were so unfortunate that they ended up in divorce, or lived together in an evil way. These things we learned from those who turned aside from error and acknowledged the truth.

60. But some of the idolaters also, being unable to bear the calamity of the grievous marriages to which they had been led by the bidding of the demon of Aphrodite, were indignant and confessed the deceit. For that is what the demons do: deceive and say nothing at all that is true; for it is not in them to know for sure, but by guesses they delude and win over the people who are enslaved to them. For how can they speak truly who are fallen away from the truth? Even if they happen to prophesy something correctly, it is by chance that this happens, even as among men it often happens that one foretells concerning a matter and by chance it happens. When therefore they foretell the event correctly by accident, seeing that this is only seldom, we marvel; but though they continually get it wrong, of this we are silent. Thus much concerning demons and their error.

61. Now when we had come out of the ship into the city, as has been said, when we came to the place where was this idol of Aphrodite (but the Christians were carrying the precious wood of Christ, that is to say the figure of the Cross), the demon that dwelt in the statue beholding and being unable to suffer the sight of the sign which was being carried, came forth out of the marble with great confusion and cast down the statue itself and broke it into many pieces. And it happened that two men of the idolaters were standing beside the base on which the statue stood, and when it fell, it split the head of the one in two, and for the other it broke his shoulder and wrist. For they were both standing and mocking at the holy multitude.

62. And many of the Greeks when they beheld the sign which had come to pass, believed, and mingled with the lay­folk and entered with them into the holy church which is called Peace. …

Mango’s suggestion that Porphyry and his followers actually vandalised the statue is a little odd; surely it defeats the point of the story?

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Ancient statues in medieval Constantinople

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A truly fascinating article has come my way, thanks to a tweet by Dorothy King: Cyril Mango’s Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder (online here).[1]  The tweet itself was as follows:

Rare scene of pagan statues that survived being destroyed during later Byzantium in Constantinople pic.twitter.com/UYKMlAnIoS

The article contains a great number of references to primary sources describing statues and the attitude of the Byzantines to them.  In some cases statues could be destroyed as idols; but more often they were left alone.  The idea of demonic inhabitation of statues became transmuted into the idea that the statues were talismans, infused with magical power to protect the city.

If I had any time at all at the moment I might chase down a few of these.  Book 2 of the Loeb Greek Anthology, however, does indeed contain a description of 80 ancient statues collected at the palace of Lausus in the 5th century.

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  1. [1]Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 17 (1963), pp. 53+55-75.↩

Theodore Abu Qurrah and an anti-Manichaean synod

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent kindly sent me an article[1] which mentioned a synod against the Manichaeans, assembled by Theodore Abu Qurra, the Melkite bishop of Harran, at Harran in 764-5 AD.  This is mentioned in a 14th century source, a certain John Cyparissiotes.  The latter was previously unknown to me, but his works are found in PG152.

It seems that Cyparissiotes wrote against the “Palamites”, the followers of Gregory Palamas, and that our snippet about Theodore Abu Qurra and the anti-Manichaean synod may be found in PG152, column 784 B.  Migne gives only the Latin: the Greek is quoted by Hemmerdinger from a manuscript, Vaticanus Ottobonianus gr. 99 (s. XVII), fol. 133 r-v.

This is Decades, part 3, chapter 4:

Likewise, from the Panaria, a synod was held against the Manichaeans by the bishop of Harran (=Καρων), Abu Qurra: “The goodness,” he said, “which is found in the world receives increases or decreases as chance determines.”  And further on: “Goodness in God is a substance; but in creatures is an accident. For “Be merciful”, he said, “even as your Father is merciful.” (Luke 6:36)

The footnote in the PG suggests that the “Panaria” were anti-heretical texts of various sorts, such as the Panarion (=medicine chest) of Epiphanius of Salamis.

The same material appears almost word for word the same in col. 809 C, which is Decades part 5, chapter 2, which is on fol. 148v of the manuscript.

Theodore Abu Qurra wrote against the Manichaeans, and a work in Arabic is extant.[2]  The context of all this is perhaps given by the monophysite writer (ps.)Dionysius of Tell-Mahre in his Chronicle, which states that, in 764-5, the Manichaeans of Harran were accused of practising human sacrifice once a year.[3]  Dionysius does not mention the action of the Melkite bishop in holding a synod and writing against the Manichaeans, but Hemmerdinger suggests that this may be from sectarian animosity towards the Melkites.  We cannot say.  But the account ends with the words:

Bearing the head [of a previous victim] away at a rapid pace, he [the intended victim] went to find Abbas who was then Emir of Mesopotamia.  The latter, learning what had happened, had all the Manichaeans seized and imprisoned, men, women and children; [82] he seized all that they possessed, inflicted on them various tortures and took from them more than four or five hundred thousand minae (? fr. = “mines”).

Whether the Manichaeans of Harran really practised human sacrifice may reasonably be doubted.  It would be very risky to abduct random strangers once a year, after all.  It is more likely that they were the victims of an informer, who ran quickly to the greedy emir, hoping to profit thereby.  Whatever the truth of the matter, the emir certainly took the opportunity to profit from it!

In the west we are accustomed to rulers who identify with the ordinary people, and whose interests are the same as the nation.  It may be a shock to remember that the oriental despot felt no such feelings.  The Arabs were little more than bandits who came into ownership of wide lands and rich cities, and settled down to enjoy them as much as possible.  This alien ruling class were looters, not rulers.   The same habit of mind has persisted down to our own day in those parts.  We are fortunate that such cold exploitation is exceptional in our own lands.

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  1. [1]Bertrand Hemmerdinger, “Revue de l’histoire des religions”, tome 161 n°2, 1962. pp. 270.  Online here.↩
  2. [2]Hemmerdinger gives the reference: G. Graf, Des Theodor Abu Kurra Traktat uber den Schopfer und die wahre Religion, Munster i. W., 1913, pp.27-29.↩
  3. [3]J.-B. Chabot translated part 4 of the Chroniques, Paris, 1895, p.68-70, online here.↩

Cramer’s catena on Mark translated into English!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s remarkable what you can find on Google books if you look.  An idle search for “catena” yesterday revealed that someone has translated the entirety of Cramer’s catena on Mark into English!  Yay!

But first, a few words about catenas!

Not everyone will know what a “catena” (the word means “chain”) is.  The term itself is modern.  It refers to medieval Greek biblical commentaries.  These are composed entirely of extracts from earlier writers, chained together by slight wording alterations at the ends.  They usually appear in the margins of Greek bibles; or, rather, the biblical text appears in a small box in the centre of the page, surrounded by a mass of small writing!  The author of each catena entry is indicated, usually using the first letter of their name or something of the kind.  This of course gives plenty of scope for misattribution!  Often the main author used is John Chrysostom.

Catenas seem to arise in the 6th century, and often incorporate very interesting material.  There can be several catenas for each book of the bible, and the relationships between them are tangled things.

In 1840 Cramer published the Greek text of catenas on all the books of the New Testament in 8 volumes.  The work was shoddily done, as John Burgon among others remarked; but it was still an achievement, and Cramer’s work can be found on Archive.org.  But … it was the Greek text only.

The man who has made this translation is a certain William Lamb, The Catena in Marcum: A Byzantine Anthology of Early Commentary on Mark, Brill 2012 (Preview here).

Lamb doesn’t try to edit the text, which is probably a wise decision.  Pages 27-45 discuss what, precisely, it is that we are looking at.

Cramer published his catena on Mark under the name of Cyril of Alexandria, because a couple of the manuscripts attributed it to him.  But Cyril is too early.  Burgon suggested the little-known Victor of Antioch; and Lamb suggests (p.33) that we probably are mistaken to suppose that the work, in anything like its current form, was the work of any one man.

There is much in this.  Burgon took the view that even a compilation must have an author.  But this is to neglect the physical form in which the catena was transmitted; as a massive collection of marginalia.  Marginalia exist in most manuscripts anyway.  But bibles are a special case.

Most printed bibles belonging to members of modern Christian Unions bore the marks of ownership – underlinings, scribbled notes in the margins, and so forth.  Ancient readers had much the same needs in this respect as modern ones.  So it seems idle to doubt that notes on the meaning of the text would not arise spontaneously in manuscript copies of the scriptures.  A copy in a monastic library might well acquire marginalia from several hands, all of it excerpted from other books in that library, and placed in the (wide) margins where they would be useful.  Over time, we may suppose, some of these bibles could acquire quite a lot of marginal items.

Would a scribe copy such marginalia?  Surely he might.  Because the marginalia were not idle scribblings, but useful commentary.  Scholia get copied, as we know.

A body of marginalia may, quite naturally, evolve into the sort of catena that we see in medieval manuscripts.  If so, then there may indeed be no original author.

Later, of course, someone may decide to compose a set of marginalia.  Such a task is well within the capabilities of medieval scholarship, after all.

It’s hard to be sure.  All this is speculative.  But it is far from impossible.

If any of this is true, however, it does point to the exceeding difficulty in editing such a “text” – because it isn’t really a text at all.  It is whatever somebody thought worth adding to a bible margin.

Lamb’s book is a great deal more than just a translation.  The translation is the item of permanent value, for scholarship ages; but the scholarship in the book is also very welcome.  Chapter 2, which surveys the scholarship and the manuscript tradition, is interesting throughout and I refer you to the online preview.

It is a book to which I wish I had access.  The price is not as bad as some; but at $163 on Amazon.com, it is still prohibitive.

I look forward to seeing bootleg PDF’s in circulation!

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Farewell to the NIV?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The New International Version of the bible was on course to become the new standard English translation; until, in an act of incredible hubris and folly, the publishers, Zondervan, decided to tinker with it and keep tinkering with it.  Not, one might add, in the interests of greater accuracy, but to make it “gender neutral”.   But “gender neutrality” is not a principle of text criticism, nor of biblical theology, but a principle of the modern political movement referred to as “political correctness”.  So the publisher has acted to corrupt the translation in the interests of a modern political lobby – an incredible thing to do.  It went down about as well as you might expect; and I have written here about the story.

This week I came across an interesting blog post entitled “Farewell NIV”.

The version that many grew up reading has finally ridden off into the sunset, never to return. Zondervan has phased it out, buried it, and replaced it with something else.

Many people denied that a significant change had taken place, and tried to act like the Bible being sold now as the NIV is indeed the NIV they grew up with. That myth was sustainable for a while, but eventually it just didn’t work. This year many Christian schools finally dropped the NIV, and replaced it with something else. Even AWANA was forced to make the change.  …

[This] is a FAQ guide to the NIV, with an explanation for why churches and ministries are dropping it:

Why did so many churches and schools change their translation this year?  

Because Zondervan, the company that makes the NIV, stopped publishing it last year. It was widely used in churches and schools, and this changed forced those that used to find a new translation.

What do you mean they stopped publishing it? I see the NIV still for sale in book stores.

A brief history of the NIV: Translated in 1984, it quickly became one of the most popular versions, especially in schools. Then in 2002 Zondervan released an update (TNIV), which went over as well as New Coke, and the beloved NIV was resurrected. This time Zondervan learned from their errors, and released an update that they called the NIV2011, and for one year they sold both it and the NIV. But with a name like NIV2011, shelf-life was obviously not in view, and last year they simply dropped the old and beloved NIV, and then shrewdly dropped the “2011” from the updated one. In short, they pulled a switcheroo. What you see on shelves today is the new version which is sold and marketed as the NIV.

How is the NIV on the shelves now different from the one I’ve been reading for 20 years?

There have been deniers about the demise of the NIV. Many people have tried to hold onto the idea that the new one is the same as the old. After all, they have the same names, so how could they be that different? But the more people have tried to use the new one, the more the changes are evident.

Here are the stats: 40% of verses have been changed from the ’84 edition of the NIV. The stat that Zondervan gives is that 95% of the Bible remains unchanged. I assume they are counting words and not verses, but even so I’m not sure how they got that number. When you consider individual words, the new version is 9% new. That might not seem like a lot, but in schools and with curriculum,  verses are what is important, and that means that 4 out of 10 passages needed to be updated.

The whole post is worth reading, and makes me deeply sad.  I have used the NIV since my first days as a believer.  I too feel loss.

But who can now trust the “new NIV”, under whatever marketing name it is produced?  Who will trust any translation labelled “NIV”?

This sort of thing should not happen.  The author is quite right to say that Zondervan have destroyed the NIV; because, since you can’t buy it, and none of us want the TNIV (or whatever they call it), it is effectively dead.

On a humorous note, old copies of the Gideons’ bible may suddenly become rather valuable!

I cannot avoid feeling that Zondervan have not acted with integrity.  It pains me to say this, since I know otherwise only good things about them.  But you don’t address a real question of the utmost urgency — is this a corrupt version? — by the sort of “switcheroo” tactics that have been employed.  No: to do that is to railroad opposition; it is the kind of tactics used by lobby groups to force unpopular measures on a democracy which is denied the opportunity to vote.

Very, very sad.  I imagine we will all use the ESV instead now.  But I preferred the old NIV.

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Infra-red light can “remove” spilled ink from digital images of books?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting email on the Ethiopian literature email list:

List members may value knowing that one of the positive results of the imaging of the 1513 first Ge’ez book – Psalterium Æthiopicum – Rome, Potken,

http://www.kingscollections.org/exhibitions/specialcollections/psalter1513/

was the use of Infra Red imaging to ‘remove’ spilled ink. Please see:-
This is a printed text; but no doubt the same would apply to manuscripts.  These are days of miracles and wonders indeed.
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Fire hits Internet Archive building

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Fire hits Internet Archive building http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24848907

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

On Monday I must go back to work, so blogging will certainly take a back seat while I get established in a new job.

I have spent much of today converting a large 600+ page book into a PDF, so that I can search it, quote from it, and work with it more conveniently.   It was a long task!

I wish that academic publishers did what Amazon do with music CDs.  If you buy a music CD from Amazon, Amazon make an electronic version of the tracks available to you, in MP3 format.  So you can download the album to your iPhone, as well as having the hard copy.  Why can’t publishers provide PDFs on a similar system?

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A new 4th century fragment of Justin Martyr!!!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via Brice C. Jones I learn that the new volume of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (vol. 73) contains a parchment fragment of the 4th century, with 6 lines from Justin Martyr’s First Apology on it! The reference is P.Oxy. 5129.

This is quite a find, since the apologies of Justin are known to us only from ms. Paris graecus 450, written in 1364.   It is by no means unusual for Greek texts to be preserved only in manuscripts of the 14-16th centuries; what is unusual is to get a shred of a manuscript from antiquity.

Jones gives a photograph, transcription and translation.  It’s a shame that it’s so very short; but how very exciting too!

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The patristic idea that God is outside of time

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A post in an online forum drew my attention to some passages in which God is described explicitly as being outside of time, and seeing all eternity as the present.

The first source mentioned is Augustine, Confessions, book 11.  The old NPNF translation is here, and a look at the (Victorian) headings for the chapters reveals some very interesting ideas:

Chapter X.-The Rashness of Those Who Inquire What God Did Before He Created Heaven and Earth.

Chapter XI.-They Who Ask This Have Not as Yet Known the Eternity of God, Which is Exempt from the Relation of Time.

Chapter XII.-What God Did Before the Creation of the World.

Chapter XIII.-Before the Times Created by God, Times Were Not.

Chapter XIV.-Neither Time Past Nor Future, But the Present Only, Really is.

Chapter XV.-There is Only a Moment of Present Time.

Chapter XVI.-Time Can Only Be Perceived or Measured While It is Passing.

Chapter XVII.-Nevertheless There is Time Past and Future.

Chapter XVIII.-Past and Future Times Cannot Be Thought of But as Present.

Chapter XIX.-We are Ignorant in What Manner God Teaches Future Things.

It is unfortunate that the translator used mock-Jacobean English, in a manner more or less impenetrable even to someone as well-educated as the readers of this blog must be.  For instance one passage in chapter 11 is rendered:

… in the Eternal nothing passeth away, but that the whole is present; but no time is wholly present ….

Fortunately I was able to find other versions:

In the Eternal, on the other hand, nothing passes away, but the whole is simultaneously present. (Outler translation[1])

In the eternal, nothing is transient, but the whole is present. (Chadwick translation.[2])

Boethius expresses a similar view in the Consolation of Philosophy, book 5, which is online here:

If one may not unworthily compare this present time with the divine, just as you can see things in this your temporal present, so God sees all things in His eternal present. Wherefore this divine foreknowledge does not change the nature or individual qualities of things: it sees things present in its understanding just as they will result some time in the future.

The translator of Boethius adds a useful note directing us to the Timaeus of Plato, “ch. xi. 38 B”, and stating that where Boethius refers to people who ‘hear that Plato thought, etc.,’ this is because this was the teaching of some of Plato’s successors at the Academy. Plato himself thought otherwise.

The passage referenced from Plato’s Timaeus 11 is as follows:

For there were no days  and nights and months and years before the heaven was created, but when  he constructed the heaven he created them also. They are all parts of time,  and the past and future are created species of time, which we unconsciously but wrongly transfer to the eternal essence; for we say that he “was,” he “is,” he “will be,” but the truth is that “is” alone is properly attributed to him, and that “was” and “will be” only to be spoken of becoming in time,  for they are motions, but that which is immovably the same cannot become  older or younger by time, nor ever did or has become, or hereafter will  be, older or younger, nor is subject at all to any of those states which  affect moving and sensible things and of which generation is the cause.  These are the forms of time, which imitates eternity and revolves according  to a law of number. Moreover, when we say that what has become is become  and what becomes is becoming, and that what will become is about to become  and that the non-existent is non-existent-all these are inaccurate modes  of expression. But perhaps this whole subject will be more suitably discussed  on some other occasion.

Time, then, and the heaven came into being at the same instant  in order that, having been created together, if ever there was to be a  dissolution of them, they might be dissolved together. It was framed after  the pattern of the eternal nature, that it might resemble this as far as  was possible; for the pattern exists from eternity, and the created heaven  has been, and is, and will be, in all time. Such was the mind and thought  of God in the creation of time.

Chadwick adds a note referring us to Plotinus 3.7.3, which reads:

All [Eternity’s] content is in immediate concentration as at one point; nothing in it ever knows development: all remains identical within itself, knowing nothing of change, for ever in a Now since nothing of it has passed away or will come into being, but what it is now, that it is ever.

What we have here, then, is a philosophical idea from the Platonic school, being adopted by the Fathers to deal with the difficult question of the relationships of time and eternity.

As with all such borrowings, we may use them if they clarify what the scriptures tell us; but with the reservation that, if they cease to be useful, they are merely theories and may be discarded.

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  1. [1]A.C. Outler, Augustine: Confessions and Enchiridion, Library of Christian Classics, Westminster Press, 1955,  p.252.↩
  2. [2]Henry Chadwick, Augustine: Confessions, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1991.↩