I wrote to Keston College this evening, to ask why none of the books and articles in which Michael Bordeaux promoted knowledge of the persecution of Christians in the old USSR are online. This stuff is fading into history. I came across one poster who simply denied that the Soviets ever locked up believers in mental hospitals this evening. The martyrs deserve better than oblivion.
Can this be true?
A report at Reuters, which somehow has not reached the BBC as far as I can tell.
World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show.
The researchers from Boston and Harvard Universities and Finland’s University of Turku said pollution, and specifically sulphur emissions, from coal-fueled growth in Asia was responsible for the cooling effect.
Is this right? That in the last ten years there was no global warming?
Yet here in the UK we have had night after night of “news” reports, running as if they were news, telling us in alarming terms that the world was doomed, showing pictures of melting ice-floes (in summer!) It subsided quite a bit after the scandal of forged data at the University of East Anglia. The guilty men were found innocent by their peers — funny that — but the mud stuck. There was no getting around the fact that they concealed the data, and that it took a hacker to reveal that they did so intentionally and in words capable of the worst interpretation. But the idea of warming still lingers.
Now I don’t have a view on the technical issues. And doubtless readers of this blog have various views on the political platforms that depend on pro- and anti-global warming stuff. This is not a blog about climate change or global warming, and I don’t propose to address that.
What concerns me is the information access issue. The real issue for me here, if the report is true, is the honesty issue, the poisoning of the public with a lie whose consequences — lightbulbs, ‘green’ taxes — affect everyone directly. Whatever our opinions, we all need accurate data, honestly reported.
But if this report is true — and I have no means of knowing — then we have all been subjected to a deliberate campaign of lies and evasions that would make Goebbels gasp with admiration.
For how could people NOT know that the world was not getting warmer? I wouldn’t know; but there are people whose job it is to know. The money exacted from me in taxes goes to pay their salaries.
This is deeply troubling on so many levels. We rely on a more or less free system of mass communication. To watch it be corrupted in this way raises the obvious question: what else are we not being told? What else is being distorted.
If the answer is “a lot”, then what do we do? We don’t want to become the sort of lunatic obsessed with conspiracies.
Perhaps the answer is to read widely. Watch Russia Today. Watch al-Jazeera. And so on?
From my diary
The final version of the leaflet for the Eusebius Gospel Problems and Solutions book has arrived. I’ll check it at the weekend.
A purchase of a CDROM from my site has involved me in a dispute. The owner of the credit card has claimed that the purchase is not his. I have already posted the CDROM, so this is less than welcome news. But I find it hard to believe that credit card fraud is used for the purpose of buying collections of the Fathers of the Church. Most likely the purchaser did not recognise the debit on his card, or changed his mind. I have emailed him — a certain John Ford, at a PO box in Australia — and it will be interesting to see what he says.
This evening I have been sitting on the scanner, creating a PDF of an old and hard-to-find library book. Sadly after almost 200 pages a cramp developed in my hip which I know from past experience will render me unable to walk or work for a few days if I ignore it. So I must stop! Ah the joys of middle age.
While lifting the book and turning the pages, I came across an interesting quotation online, attributed to St. Augustine:
If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.
Google books reveals no quotations of this before the last ten years, and it is used almost exclusively in popular Christian paperbacks. It is, of course, a very apt and accurate saying. But … did Augustine say it?
I developed an idea that it sounded like something he might indeed have said, in the context of his disputation with Faustus the Manichaean. Faustus, we all recall, claimed to be a Christian and to believe in the gospel. Augustine points out that he uses the gospels selectively, claiming the authority of God for this, while denying the inspiration of that. Of course all the heretics do this; but somehow it felt right.
So I spent some time going through the online translation searching for “gospel”. I got to book 30 of the work against Faustus before I had to stop scanning. It certainly reflects the sort of things Augustine is saying. But I did not find any very close match.
Perhaps it is merely a summary of what Augustine says, from some secondary source, which has become attached to Augustine himself?
A burning hot day in the office today, and hot this evening (although not hot enough to hook up the air-conditioning). It greyed over this evening, and started to drizzle. So far the only effect is to add humidity to heat.
The pile of now useless (to me) academic books on the side, which has stared at me reproachfully for some time now, might finally be disposed of. It turns out that the scholar to whom I intended to give them — who will find them useful, where I will not — is on a temporary posting to the United Kingdom. The incredible postal charges become moot; I can probably drive down and hand them to him. Let us hope so.
Databases of Greek mss
From this source, on NT textual criticism, itself well worth reading, I learn of two databases which are worth a look.
The Pinakes database (http://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/) aims to bring together catalogue entries for all manuscripts of Greek texts predating the sixteenth century, supplementing the
Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB, http://www.trismegistos.org/ldab/).
The latter gave some interesting results. Who would have imagined that we have a 4th century fragment of the Church History of Eusebius?
From my diary
Isn’t it odd that a difficult day at work tends to leave you too exhausted for anything else? I’ve known husbands to make the same complaint of a row with their wives. All these interruptions to what we think of as our “real” life!
I went to the library at lunchtime and picked up vol. 1 of the 2nd edition of Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Literatur, 1943. It’s a remarkably old-fashioned looking volume in terms of binding and typeface. But considering that the Netherlands were under Nazi occupation at the time, and that industrial sites on the continent were being bombed by the RAF, I suppose it is a marvel that Brill were able to produce it at all. No time to look at it this evening.
Rather more to my taste just now was a large paperback book of literary anecdotes. It’s ideal to skim through, looking for oddities, although the editors have allowed a little too much latitude in length from time to time.
Over the weekend I was also reading volume 3 of the collected letters of C. S. Lewis. The charm of Lewis’ letters is considerable, and I am glad to own it. But these monster volumes are quite hard to digest (and indeed even to hold!). Instead of three volumes each three inches thick, the publishers should have split each volume into three. Probably they had commercial reasons for their choice; but the smaller volumes would be much easier to handle!
I had to put the Lewis volume aside, tho. It was slightly depressing to enter into of a man who grew old early — he says so himself — but, at my age, had achieved so much and was so well known to so many. But … would we wish to be famous? To be courted by the media, to earn large sums, to receive letters from lunatics and attempts to inveigle into marriage from cunning (and not so cunning) women? Obviously not.
Unless the women are blonde, of course. And the money is in hard currency.
Letters from lunatics, sadly, are the lot of every blogger. Most of mine are friendly, fortunately. And I keep a big, fierce dog.
Mithras in Commagene — the hierothesion at Nemrud Dag
Turkey is a land of many interesting archaeological sites, and I would very much like to go there some day! One of them is a curiosity — a site in the minor Hellenistic kingdom of Commagene, at a place today known as Nemrud Dag in South-Eastern Turkey, adjoining Syria. There is a website for an International Nemrud Foundation, which, if you can get past the awful intro, gives a lot of useful information.
The kingdom was a mixture of Hellenistic and Persian in influence. The kings took names like Mithradates and Antiochus and were related to both the Seleucids and the old Persian Achaemenid dynasty.
The site at Nemrud Dag consists of a large tumulus, with three terraces below it on which are a number of statues and inscriptions. The inscriptions are online, in image form, with translations, here. Apparently they all appear on the west terrace.
Therefore, as you see, I have set up these divine images of Zeus-Oromasdes and of Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes and of Artagnes-Herakles-Ares, and also of my all-nourishing homeland Kommagene; and from one and the same quarry, throned likewise among the deities who hear our prayers, I have consecrated the features of my own form, and have caused the ancient honour of great deities to become the coeval of a new Tyche. Since I thereby, in an upright way, imitated the example of the divine Providence, which as a benevolent helper has so often been seen standing by my side in the struggles of my reign.
Adequate property in land and an inalienable income therefrom have I set aside for the ample provision of sacrifices; an unceasing cult and chosen priests arrayed in such vestments as are proper to the race of the Persians have I inaugurated, and I have dedicated the whole array and cult in a manner worthy of my fortune and the majesty of the gods.
The deities are syncretistic. In each case a Persian deity is associated with Greek deities. Thus we have one statue identifying Zeus with Ormazd (reasonably enough), and another associating the minor Zoroastrian figure Artagnes with the hero Heracles and the god Ares.
But the other item is interesting in a wider sense: a deity “Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes”. By analogy with the other gods, one of these gods must be an oriental, a Zoroastrian Persian deity. Obviously Mithras is the one, as the others are all mainstream classical Greek gods.
But this is a site built by a semi-Persian king, for the purposes of syncretism. This must mean, therefore, that “Mithras” here means the oriental deity Mitra, known to Zoroastrianism.
Some have tried to use this site as evidence that Roman Mithras was around during the first century BC. But there is nothing here suggestive of Mithras of the legions. There is no Mithraeum, no bull sacrifice, nothing. There is an association with Helios, the sun, just as Mithras is associated with Sol. But such an association by itself is not a fingerprint for Sol Mithras, as many deities were associated with the sun, and Mitra himself replaced the Zoroastrian sun god.
I think we must consider Nemrud Dag as a syncretistic site with no connection to Mithras.
There is discussion of the site at the Encyclopedia Iranica site here.
Aphrahat in English
I can’t find the post, but a month or two back I decided that I really ought to try to get hold of the complete English translation of the classic Syriac author Aphrahat. He wrote 26 sermons, and a selection was included in the Ante-Nicene Fathers series so is online. But few people even know there is a complete translation, made in Kottayam in India a few years ago and available in two volumes from the St Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute at $25 a vol.
At least, in theory it is available. In practice SEERI are quite hard to deal with. I wrote and asked, and got a reply asking for my postal address and how I proposed to pay. I offered to pay using Xoom.com, and heard nothing more. I was thinking yesterday what to do. Gorgias Press do a version of the book, at some very high price.
But down at the post office this morning, and the parcel is not the humdrum item that I was expecting, but a parcel from SEERI. Yep — it’s the Aphrahat! The packing is not great, and rather torn, but the item has arrived fine!
Opening it was harder than it looks. But once open, there were the two volumes!
A catalogue search reveals that not a single library in the UK possesses a copy of these.
On opening them, I find that vol. 1 contains a lot of introductory matter, obviously from a thesis, and a preface by Sebastian Brock. This is solid stuff, in other words. Now if only it was online!
But now I have to work out how to pay them. Western Digital is possible; Xoom is possible; but in both cases I need information from SEERI to give them. I look up their address in Google Maps and they are in the heart of the city of Kottayam. It is a bit sad, tho, that it is so much work to give them money. Let’s see what happens!
PS: An email from the library tells me that Brockelmann 2nd ed. vol. 1 has arrived. Not that I can do much about that until Monday, but good to know.
Now I need to do something with the proposed design leaflet for the Patristics Conference, advertising the Eusebius book. The final revision awaits! I’ve already paid for the insert yesterday. All costly in time and money, N.B.
From my diary
At home today, and I’ve spent part of the afternoon OCR-ing and proofing the section of Brockelmann’s History of Arabic Literature dedicated to historical writers of the classical period (750-1000 AD). I hope to turn it into English and put it online. It’s only from the first edition, but should still be useful.
The discovery of Manichaean literature at Medinat Madu
Dionysius of Alexandria on Gutenberg
Mike Aquilina draws my attention to a new arrival on Gutenberg, the old SPCK translation of letters and treatises by Dionysius of Alexandria. It’s here, and done rather splendidly! I didn’t even know the book existed, or I should long since have scanned it.
Thank you Mike! And thank you Gutenberg!