This evening I had another go at the web version of Brockelmann’s notes on the authors who give the history of Mohammed. It is a mark of how bad Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur is, as an organised source for information, that I have still not managed to get the stuff into some format that I can upload. The way in which the second edition refers to the supplement to the first, and the supplement to the first supercedes what is written in the second edition, is almost impossible to handle.
I’m making progress, tho, although I have spotted yet another area where a bit from the supplement needs to be translated and included. It is almost impossible to reproduce what the GAL contains, tho.
I’ve also been making an effort to work with Microsoft’s Expression Web4. It’s a lot like Dreamweaver; and, like Dreamweaver, the WYSIWYG editor is rather substandard; much less good than Microsoft FrontPage. Unfortunately FP2000 won’t handle unicode characters very well, and the Brockelmann is stuffed to the jawline with overscores and dots and funny characters!
Codex 184.B.64 of the monastery of the Laura on Mt. Athos was one of the manuscripts examined by von Soden and von der Goltz in a trip to the mountain in the winter of 1898. The presence of subscriptios to the letters of Paul, and scholia, caught the attention of the latter, who published an article about it in TU 17.4 in 1899. He was able to collate the ms. and to copy the old scholia.
The manuscript itself is 10th century, and bound between two boards, with brown leather covers. It contains 102 parchment leaves, each 23 x 17.5 cms in size. The written area is 17 x 11 cm, and has 35 lines. The ms. contains Acts, Paul’s letters, and the catholic letters. Each quire is of 8 leaves. The first sheet is a later replacement, and two quires are missing from the beginning, which perhaps contained some form of introductory matter. Originally a copy of Revelation followed. The text is written in an early minuscule, and the scholia in a careful semi-uncial. The chapters are numbered.
The manuscript was thoroughly revised by a later hand which also erased to some extent the majority of the ancient scholia and marginalia, and added the Euthalian chapter numbers. But there are also traces of large red letters under the “original” text, suggesting that it too is a palimpsest.
Von der Goltz does publish the scholia, without translation.
Coptic literature is an under-studied area for most of us. But today I have been finding out that significant work has been done in the last decade on an important figure of the 4th century, Shenoute of Atripe, the leader of the White Monastery at Panopolis.
For this we have Stephen Emmel to thank. It seems that he has undertaken the painstaking task of recovering the works of this central figure, and has revolutionised the field. It is unfortunate that none of this is online; but this blurb to Stephen Emmel, Shenoute’s Literary Corpus, Peeters (2004), in 1006 pages (!) tells the story.
… Stephen Emmel’s reconstruction of the literary corpus of Shenoute, monastic leader in Upper Egypt from 385 until 465, and Coptic author par excellence, marks the beginning of a new era in Shenoute studies.
On the basis of about one hundred parchment codexes from the library of Shenoute’s monastery, pieced together from nearly two thousand fragments scattered among some two dozen collections, Emmel demonstrates that Shenoute’s corpus was transmitted in two multi-volume sets of collected works, nine volumes of Canons and eight volumes of Discourses.
At the core of his study is a description of each reconstructed codex, demonstrating the organization and coherence of the corpus as a whole, followed by a survey of its contents in which nearly 150 individual works are catalogued. A research-historical and methodological introduction, tables, concordances, and an extensive bibliography …
I can already see references to “volume 4 of the discourses”, etc, when sermons are referenced. Effectively this acts as a clavis or index to Shenoute’s works. The book is, unfortunately almost $200, so unaffordable to the rest of us.
It would be good, surely, to have a list of his works at least, online.
One of the most accessible resources on Josephus and the Testimonium Flavianum has always been a paper delivered in 2000 to the Society of Biblical Literature conference by Alice Whealey. For years it sat at http://josephus.yorku.ca/pdf/whealey2000.pdf but this link is now dead.
Rather than lose it — I needed to refer to it this evening and couldn’t find a copy! — I’ll place a copy on this site. Where the SBL papers that used to be on the josephus.yorku.ca site now are I do not know.
His Grace is now forced to devote more time each day trying to stem the tide of offensive and irrelevant comment than he is able to dedicate to each morning’s missive. When one is forced to spend the first hour of one’s day not in the crucial contemplation of religio-political issues but in the cleansing of the temple, it is evident that something must change. …
His Grace has attempted to make his blog a bastion of free speech, but there are those who are intent on hijacking every thread for their own malignant and malicious purposes. When he has directly emailed the perpetrators and politely asked them to desist, he receives insult, invective, and condemantion that he is not prepared to tell ‘the truth’. …
His Grace has therefore decided to ban all ‘anonymous’ comments, thereby forcing all communicants to register a Google account (pseudonymous, if preferred) before they may contribute to a discussion thread. Should individual accounts thereafter prove irritating or offensive, it is easier to identify the individuals (who sometimes post under a plurality of ad hoc identities) and ban them. …
His Grace will hereafter monitor any progress and prays that it will ameliorate his happiness and general well being. Should there be no improvement, he will not hesitate to take more drastic action, however terminal: he is not averse to silence or cessation.
This is a sad day, but evidently a necessary one, and “His Grace” has acted with moderation and restraint.
We have all been used to presuming that everyone on the internet is basically a decent human being. In the past, being smaller in number, this was largely true. Even the hackers really meant no harm.
But the internet has grown to include all sections of society. And in every society known to man, there are criminals.
A pedant might say that a criminal is someone who breaks a law which a powerful man has chosen to impose on a society. But this is to get things backward.
A criminal is a man who preys on his fellow men. He is the kind of man who will do whatever he likes, regardless of the injury caused to others, simply because he wishes, or it gives him advantage of some kind, or for any other reason. Such human beasts have always existed, and any society tries to protect its members from them, by various means. They are destroyers, creating nothing and wrecking for any purpose and none.
Perhaps the time has come to recognise that the criminals are now well-established on the web. We have all tolerated the troll; although trolling is clearly a moral wrong in most circumstances, as it violates the principle of “do not do to others what you would not like done to you”, in that it causes upset at the very least.
But this tolerance of wrong-doing is now being used by much worse people. There have been vulnerable teenagers driven to suicide by campaigns of bullying and harassment online. I myself experienced a vicious assault of the same nature, designed to seize control of the Mithras article in Wikipedia, evidently without the slightest concern for right or wrong or anything but the culprits’ own base wishes. Fortunately I’ve been online a long time, and maintain emotional detachment; but that these people meant to do me injury, to hand out a beating in order to steal the fruits of my labour, is not remotely in doubt.
Perhaps we need to stop thinking about “harassment”, about “trolling”, about “bullying”, and start thinking of this as what it is — assault. It is a form of battery, exploiting the most powerful and engaging form of communication known to man to inflict pain and misery. It is a criminal act.
One obvious cure for it is to require everyone using the internet to register, and to write and post under their own name. Few of the criminals above would care to have their conduct under their own name.
At present the effect of allowing the criminals to rampage unchecked is that using your own name online is becoming rarer and rarer. In Wikipedia fewer and fewer people do so, because it disadvantages them so, when faced with trolls who frequently change their identities or post under different names. The same is true in nearly all the fora known to me.
Yet which of us would trust a politician with the power to control who has access to the internet? To control what may, or may not be said?
These are difficult times. I hope that some middle path may be found. But that the criminals need to be dealt with … that is becoming ever more urgent.
UPDATE: A couple of hours later, I see a news report on Sky. An academic study reports that 35% of teachers have suffered some form of online abuse; and in a quarter of the cases, parents are responsible.
One of the most prevalent types of abuse was through the creation of a Facebook group to be abusive about a particular teacher.
The report said there was evidence of pupils trying to establish fake Facebook pages in a teacher’s name, posting videos of teachers in class on YouTube, and setting up whole websites to be abusive about a single or group of staff.
The BBC version is here, and offers some horrifying details:
“Some parents view teachers as fair game for abuse,” Prof Phippen said.
“They use online technologies to hide behind while posting lies and abuse about their chosen victim.”
Intimidation, harassment … enough. We’re talking about violence, and those doing it are criminals.
Dioscorus’ letter to Shenoute is preserved in Coptic translation (from the original Greek, now lost) in four leaves of White Monastery Codex XZ. The first three of these were published by Herbert Thompson in his article “Dioscorus and Shenoute,” in Recueil d’études égyptologiques dédiées à la mémoire de Jean-François Champollion (BEHE 234; Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1922), 367–76. The last leaf was published by Henri Munier, Manuscrits coptes (CGAE 9201–9304; Cairo: Imprimerie de l’IFAO, 1916), 147–49. Thompson’s article contains an English translation of all four leaves. I use my own translation from the Coptic.
The Thompson article is online at Gallica here. But better yet, if you download the PDF of the whole volume of the journal, you get a PDF which has been OCR’d, and bookmarks added to each article within it. That is new, and well done Gallica!
I will scan and upload this text to the Fathers collection when I get a moment!
Meanwhile Dr. Lundhaug added a couple of extra snippets of wider interest:
By the way, if you are interested in the Gospel of Philip, I would like to direct you to my book, Images of Rebirth: Cognitive Poetics and Transformational Soteriology in the Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul (Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 73; Leiden: Brill, 2010), which contains a detailed analysis of this text.
It may perhaps also interest you to know that starting January next year I have funding from the European Research Council for a five-year research project along the lines indicated in my Oxford paper – looking at the Nag Hammadi Codices and their texts in the context of fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian monasticism.
I think this line of research must be promising, and will tell us a lot more about where the Nag Hammadi codices really appear from.
UPDATE: The letter of Dioscorus to Shenoute, concerning the Origenist monk, is here.
UPDATE2: Dr. H. adds:
In my paper I referred specifically to Shenoute’s “I Am Amazed” and “Who Speaks Through the Prophet”. The best edition of “I Am Amazed” is now Hans-Joachim Cristea, Schenute von Atripe. Contra Origenistas: Edition des koptischen Textes mit annotierter Übersetzung und Indizes einschliesslich einer Übersetzung des 16. Osterfestbriefs des Theophilus in der Fassung des Hieronymus (ep. 96) (STAC 60; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). There’s an English translation of most of “I Am Amazed” in Michael Eugene Foat’s 1996 doctoral dissertation from Brown University, “I Myself Have Seen: The Representation of Humanity in the writings of apa Shenoute of Atripe.” It is not complete, however, as it is based on Tito Orlandi’s edition of the text. There are also English translations of excerpts from “I Am Amazed” in Stephen J. Davis, Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and Divine Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Europe (Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
By the way, I also treat “I Am Amazed” and other texts by Shenoute in the recently published article “Baptism in the Monasteries of Upper Egypt: The Pachomian Corpus and the Writings of Shenoute,” in Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism in Early Judaism, Graeco-Roman Religion, and Early Christianity (ed. David Hellholm et al.; 3 vols.; BZNW 176; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 1347-80, as well as in several forthcoming articles.
As for “Who Speaks Through the Prophet”, it has not been edited and no reliable English translation exists. I rely on photographs of the manuscript evidence.
I have my own working edition of “Who Speaks Through the Prophet”, but since an international editorial team lead by Professor Stephen Emmel at the University Münster is currently hard at work editing the entire Shenoutean corpus there should be no need for me to publish an edition of it. I might publish a translation of it though. We’ll see.
I will set up a website dedicated to my project in the not too distant future.
This is all very useful. I confess that I’ve never had that clear an idea of what existed by Shenoute, but I shall look at this with more interest.
UPDATE: A Google search reveals that the new German edition of “I am amazed” — Contra Origenistas — runs to 387 pages, and includes the Coptic text and a German edition, as well as the Letter of Theophilus included in the treatise, which was also preserved in a Latin translation by Jerome. Apparently comparison of the two version is interesting!
I forgot to mention that at breakfast I found myself in the queue, and talking to a chap who, like myself, wasn’t wearing his name badge (the name badges this year were excellently readable). It turned out to be Mark DelCogliano, who has translated a number of the prefaces to books of the Vulgate and also done an academic translation of Eusebius, De Pascha for a volume of papers which has just appeared and which I need to get and read. Currently he is doing a translation of some of the homilies of Gregory the Great Basil of Caesarea for the St. Vladimir Press, and most of those homilies have never been translated before. It was great to meet him.
The system of having meals together is a very important part of the conference, and was the main reason why I endured the discomfort of Queen’s College Annex.
After that, I checked out of my room and took my luggage to the lodge. Curiously their locked room for heavy luggage is down two flights of narrow stairs! Someone at Queens needs to think about that, just a bit.
Merton Street, Oxford
Then I wandered off into Oxford. Today it was damp and hot, but overcast, and there were few people around. It was around 9am. I walked down to the Eastgate Hotel and verified the presence of a usable-size car park there, for future reference. The rack rates were extortionate, but the staff as good as told me that they were all negotiable. Doubtless in reality you book through some agent and pay 50% of it.
Then I walked along Merton Street — such a contrast to the noisy High Street. I walked through my old college, Merton, to the gardens, out to the turret on the wall where Tolkien used to sit, and where I remember that we once held a bible study on a sunny day. Then down to the Rose Lane Annex, looking unchanged, and then to Grove and out again. The college grounds were immaculate, and I reflected again on how lucky I was to have spent four happy years there.
Alas! The ranks of the Grecians of my time may stand still, yet we are not what we were. Some have been shaken or defeated by the shock of the years, or unexpected illness, and all of us, I fear, have had to give up the ambitions of youth in the daily effort to make a living. Few were wealthy or well-connected, and most had no real idea of what to do next. Many have ended up in dead-end jobs such as computer programming, wondering what happened, and even unable to marry for lack of suitable people whom men of intelligence and humour could sensibly marry. “Is this all there is?” some ask, wondering what meaning their life has. Alas, for such is the lot of men.
I have been very fortunate to be able to return to Oxford at a conference such as this, where everyone is friendly, a smile will be returned, and everyone you meet will be doing something interesting, and be able to tell you about it and to hear about your own work. It is always the people that make the place. Indeed, once the conference was over, I was just a solitary man again wandering around a strange town.
The Parian Marble – a Greek Chronology
I walked down to the river, and then back up St Aldates, along Cornmarket, to the Ashmolean Museum. I had heard good things of this last night. Blessedly, admission is free. Even more blessedly, they allow photography, so long as you don’t use flash. My mobile phone has a 5mp camera in it.
Most interesting of the exhibits was a block of stone labelled the “Parian Marble”. As you can see from the photograph, the script on it is barely visible. Yet it is, in fact, a Greek chronology, and the oldest known, according to the note on display. The earliest entries are mythical, but it would be interesting to compare this with Eusebius’ Chronicle.
A very dramatic bust of Trajan was present, in the form of a cast.
A cast of a bust of the Emperor Trajan at the Ashmolean
Another couple of items, also casts, caught my eye. The first was a tauroctony — quite a small one, cast from an item in the Museum of London, and dated to the third century AD.
Tauroctony of Mithras, London, 3rd century, in Ashmolean
Mithras is surrounded by the zodiac. Top left is the sun, top right is the moon, while two of the winds fill the lower corners. The writing indicates that it was dedicated in fulfilment of a vow by a veteran named Ulpius Silvanus, who became an initiate at Arausio (modern Orange).
Another item is probably from a tomb, and depicts a butcher at work, while his wife keeps the accounts in a little codex. It dates from about 125-150 AD. Here it is:
Butcher and wife, 125-150 AD, with codex. Ashmolean cast.
I’ll include a close-up of the book. I had read that businessmen in the early Principate used notebooks made of papyrus leaves, but this is the first example I had seen. But this might also be an example of a wooden codex with wax pages, that could be reused.
Butcher's wife with codex, AD 125-150
You can click on any of these images to get a full size image.
After that, I quickly tired of walking around alone, and made my way back to the college. I retrieved it, and got them to call a taxi (A1 Taxis, 01865-248-000), which turned out to be a real taxi rather than a minicab and which whisked me quite cheaply back to where I had left my car. And then, dear reader, I drove home.
What a week it has been! It was with great trepidation and stomach cramps that I set out on Wednesday. The cramps, I suspect, were really caused by the stress of getting ill when I wanted to be in Oxford. Then the difficulties on arrival and with the accomodation, and the stress of setting up the stall and so forth.
But it has been tremendous. I have enjoyed being here, and would not have missed it for the world. The papers were, if anything, rather better than last time. The presence of graduate students with a need to impress — to find posts — meant that even these had made a considerable effort.
I’ve grumbled quite a bit about some of the admin things, not least because they are hard on a man who is not that well, and not that young any more. But these must be taken in perspective, and much of the organisation was actually rather better than in previous conferences. The conference itself is the thing, and it is a great joy to attend. To leave is like leaving home.
I’m looking forward to Exeter next year.
UPDATE: Fixed description of what Mark DelCogliano is working on.
Up with the lark, and off to breakfast at 7:45. A queue of disappointed people outside, tho, because it turns out that on Saturday it’s at 8:15. It’s another warm day, and is raining slightly. I’m going to leave my bags in the porter’s lodge for an hour or two and wander around Oxford!
I spent the evening trying to get the Kindle application to install on my mobile phone, and enduring various obstacles and difficulties. At 8:30pm there was a session at the university church of St. Mary the Virgin, and I was eventually obliged to leave my phone downloading that application, pop it in my pocket, and head off to the church.
St Mary the Virgin Church at the Patristics Conference
A great number of the conference participants attended. The speaker was Averil Cameron, who was described in the introduction as one of the “great and the good”, which she is, and the subject was “Can Christians do dialogue?”
I admit that I was not terribly enthusiastic about this, but in fact the subject was really “Did the Fathers use the Socratic dialogue, and if not, how dialogue-like were their disputations”. This was much more interesting, and I listened with increasing interest as she went on. It contained quite a number of references to interesting-sounding texts.
I chuckled when I heard a reference to the Dialogue with a Persian of the emperor Manuel II Comnenus, right at the end of the Byzantine period, when Manuel was obliged to winter at Ankara as a vassal of the Ottoman sultan. This was the text that Pope Benedict quoted to show that Moslems were violent, and which was refuted by riots across the Moslem world. I think I translated some of this and put it online; but a proper English translation of the work has never appeared.
Another reference was to a dialogue at the court of Justinian between Paul the Persian and a Manichaean.(1) I have always been interested in Paul, as a truly obscure figure, ever since I came across his name while looking at Severus Sebokht. I need to find out more about this.
There were also references to disputations in the Sassanid empire with Zoroastrians. One of these was apparently translated by someone called Walker and was entitled the History of some-odd-sounding-name. I tried to use my mobile to access Google and look this up, but in vain.
A third reference was to a 6th century dialogue with an iatrosophist — i.e. a medical philosopher — in Alexandria. Again I need to do that Google search.
The session ended with a presentation of something to the speaker, and of flowers to Gillian Clark who organised the whole conference and indeed had produced what to my eyes was the best conference yet.
Afterwards people started talking, and indeed as I tried to leave the church, I was surrounded by scenes of frantic networking, and quite right too. Immediately in front of me was a chap whose name-badge read “Aaron Johnson”, and I heard the word “Porphyry” uttered. Aaron does work on Eusebius, but is an offline person (and probably gets more scholarly work done accordingly). There was something of a queue to talk to him, and in the street outside knots of people formed. I did get to speak to him, and we talked about his translation of Eusebius Eclogae Propheticae, which is not published but he hopes to use with students in the next year; likewise the Commentary on Luke by Eusebius.
We also discussed the Eusebius, Commentary on the Psalms, on which he has written a couple of articles that are probably in JSTOR and which I need to read. I accidentally commissioned a translation of the portion on Ps. 51 and found it very boring, but he told me that there was valuable material in there on issues like attitudes to race in late antiquity. I must look at the work again, and form an idea of what there is in it sometime.
I then got a chance to talk to Gillian Clark, who really made my Eusebius book possible, and got a copy of it, not from me, but from David Miller, the main translator. I grovelled suitably that I had not sent her one of the first complimentary copies. In truth I have still not sent out all the copies that honour demands, such has been the pressure, but that was a very bad slip on my part, due entirely to accident. But she was very good about it, as she always is. Quite how she manages to find the time to edit texts in the TTH series, run conferences, and do academic work, while encouraging everyone she interacts with I do not know!
I then found myself stood next to a very nice American girl, a scholar of art, who turned out to be associated with Brigham Young University in Utah. That institution brought to mind the name of Kristian Heal, who is doing such good work in copying Arabic manuscripts and making Syriac texts available. I learned that he has now established copies of his microfilm collection of Arabic mss. in various European locations. The set in England is in Oxford, at the Oriental Institute, or, more accurately, in a box under David G. Taylor’s desk there! There is a set at the Institut de recherches et histoire de textes in Paris, and another at the Pontifical University in Rome, and a couple of other places which I do not recall. Apparently the grant money received for getting these had conditions that mean it is all open source!
After that, back here, and to compose emails! And now, since it is 00:43, I’m going to bed!
UPDATE: Some footnotes.
1. This is the Debate of Photinus the Manichaean and Paul the Persian, (PG 88, 529-552). See Byard Bennett’s article here for more details of the manuscript tradition and publication by Angelo Mai. Two English translations are in preparation.
I returned to my room ca. 1pm, and uploaded the last blog, got photos off the mobile phone, ordered various books for purchasers and so forth. But a couple of further ideas caused me to return to the Examination Schools. As I did so, it became clear that all the major publishers were packing up. There was a rumour that the trade exhibitors would all be kicked out by 3pm, so of course I collected my stock and display and took it back to my room.
I think the conference organisers should look at this. The workshop sessions actually go on until 6pm, and there is no good reason why the displays should disappear before then. In fact the obvious closures and departures affect the mood of the conference and hastens its end, quite unnecessarily. It feels like the end, quite a few hours before it does finish. Most of us, I suspect, are still here on Saturday.
Something I forgot to mention is that one of the visitors to the stall demonstrated the use of Amazon kindle on a hand-held mobile phone, with a screen no larger than my own. This I need to look into, for it was quite visible and I carry that phone (and camera) everywhere.
The next thing that I did was to go up to the De Gruyter stand and look for Christophe Guignard’s book on the letter of Julius Africanus. I found it, and quickly found that it contained a lot of interesting information on Eusebius Gospel Problems, and also on the catena of Nicetas. The price was 70 euros — half price — and I weakened and bought the copy.
Next I went to the IVP stand. Thinking about the idea of a book on The Right Use of the Fathers, I realised that there was no better time to discuss it with that firm than today, as a delegate at a conference on patristics which had held a session on “Evangelicals and Patristics”. But sadly their display had already gone.
I also bumped into one of the translators of my book, who wanted a bunch of the leaflets to hand out to promote sales. I was distinctly chuffed by this, and made sure she got what I had.
New College Lane, looking towards the 'bridge of sighs" and the Bodleian
Then back to my room — it was nearly 2pm by this point — and time to crash out. I’d acquired a distinct pain in my back, hunched over a table at the stall, and wanted to dispose of it.
I had arranged to meet Clayton Coombs at the Kings Arms at 3pm, to discuss Eusebius, so off I went, up New College Lane, to the Bodleian, and then to the Kings Arms.
We had a very pleasant discussion, in which it came out that some of his students had also written to him, asking for advice on this issue of how Christians should respond to advances from Catholic and Orthodox people, playing on their existing belief in the bible and trust in Christ and arguing that “the body of Christ should be united here on earth in a single organisation”. This appeal to visible human church is powerful; but it is also selective. If you accept that the church can add to the teachings of the bible, as the Orthodox do, then you have to accept Cyril of Alexandria as a great saint and doctor, as the Orthodox do. After a morning listening to details of his campaign of bribery to get Nestorius condemned after Ephesus in 433, it seemed doubtful to me that we would want to pay this price. Likewise if we take the Catholic view of the apostolic succession and the primacy of the Pope, it is unlikely that most of us want to treat Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, as anything but a reprobate.
The Kings Arms
There are, of course, arguments around these problems, and it is not my purpose to attack Catholicism or Orthodoxy. The Catholics have been under attack by the world because they will not conform, and I honour their faithfulness. But there is a reason why Protestants believe as they do. There is a reason why we rejected the superstitions of the medieval Catholic church, and the corruptions of the Borgia period. And it is a good reason — and those who wish to adopt either Catholicism or Orthodoxy need to be aware that there is a price to pay, in terms of accepting a great deal of history which is unacceptable, immoral or revolting.
All this, and much more, then in 45 minutes. For I found that, despite the impression that the conference was over given by the exhibitors leaving, that there were a whole series of workshops at 4pm. One of these I had highlighted, and so we made our way back from the KA to the Schools, and to Room 6 — nearly all the papers I went to were in Room 6, for some reason — to hear it.
The workshop was on Biblical Quotations in Patristic Texts. There were four speakers, running from 4-6:30, each given half an hour with room for questions and discussion. The first speaker was Laurence Mellerin, Biblindex, Online index of biblical quotations in early Christian literature. This was an overview of the history of the project, details of the new website, and then a lot of detail on how biblical quotations were chosen, classified, etc, and how allusions were handled. The material was good, and the importance of this free site can hardly be overstated. The project also includes all books as “biblical” which get treated as such by any father in antiquity, including some of the rather oddball items from the Ethiopian church. But unfortunately Laurence — who is a woman, by the way — ran on well past her time, and, speaking in a low voice and a French accent, lost my interest some time around the half-hour. I began to fiddle with my mobile phone, and see what I could pick up on the internet!
The University Church
The next speaker was Hugh Houghton from the Vetus Latina project, who was much better but also numbingly technical; and I realised that I wasn’t doing justice to either, and made a retreat. It was 5pm at that point.
After this, I sauntered gently up the High street. It was still warm and humid, although a bit grey, and, in my shirt-sleeves, I was very comfortable walking up to the Randolph Hotel and back, just to enjoy being in Oxford.
This evening there is the final event of the conference, at the official University Church (note the capital letters) of St. Mary the Virgin, where three people will give some kind of address to the remaining few still on their feet, and finally the conference will be wrapped up. I’m going, any way. I have thoroughly enjoyed the conference.
