We all need to take our holidays, if we wish to remain in good health. I’m feeling very tired indeed, and the last three weeks have been nightmareish. I’m going to take some downtime over the next week, so don’t expect a lot of posting or replies to emails.
Severian of Gabala, sermon 1 on Genesis online
A little while back I started translating the six sermons of Severian of Gabala on Genesis from the French version of Bareille. Not that this process has any scholarly value, but it should help to get Severian better known. Unfortunately I had to stop after the first sermon for pressure of other things.
I found the first sermon on disk this afternoon, and I have tidied it up and uploaded it here. I place it in the public domain. Have fun!
A proper academic translation of the sermons of Severian on Genesis will be coming out at the end of the year. Translated by Robert C. Hill, it’s published by IVP.
IVP have a big programme to translate patristic bible commentaries. I know it needs doing; but I’m not sure that I approve. IVP has a defined mission, to publish popular books to support people doing the Lord’s work through evangelism at our universities. I really do not see patristics as part of that. SPCK once had a mission for the gospel. It too once went down the patristic route.
IVP is doubtless accustomed to sharing in the hostility that its Master attracts. Preaching the gospel is hard, in our selfish age, and living it still more so. It is very easy to linger on the “plain of ease”, doing stuff for which men will mostly only praise. I hope that this venture does not mark the dilution and extinction of the key Christian publisher of our days.
Yet more Eusebius
I do need to take a week off and just potter around. But I’m still hacking away at the Eusebius.
I sometimes go out to a local restaurant. I tend to find that it takes them a while to take my order, to serve each course, and so on, so I tend to take a book with me. In this case I took the print-off’s of the Eusebius volume, and a red pen, and worked through the Syriac fragments. I came back and typed them up, and then did similar changes to the Coptic and Arabic. And … somehow it’s 5 O’Clock!
Looking at the Coptic made me realise how little related these were to the rest of the fragments. I suspect that a good many of them are spurious.
I’ve passed the manuscript across to someone to advise on whether to get it professionally edited or to go straight to typesetting.
Eusebius the liar
The testimony of Eusebius of Caesarea about Christian origins has often been found inconvenient by those determined to attack the church. Ever since Gibbon, the accusation has been made that Eusebius deliberately suppressed material that might throw discredit on the church. Indeed Gibbon insinuated, and fools have believed, that Eusebius actually made a policy of such activity; that telling lies for the glory of God was acceptable.
In Eusebius’ Gospel Problems and Solutions, To Stephanus question 4, I find the following statement on precisely that issue:
May such an argument, that a falsehood has been composed to the praise and glorification of Christ, never by any means prevail in the church of Christ and of God, the fathers of the strict truth!
Worth remembering, I think, when the headbangers howl.
From my diary – book completion day
Today is the day that the Eusebius book must be completed and sent to typesetting. Up early and on with it!
First I’ve reread the contract with the Sources Chretiennes and made sure I acknowledge them in the proper way on the title page and reverse.
Next I’ve applied for a block of 10 ISBN’s from the Nielsen Agency, here in the UK. I’ve decided on “Chieftain Publishing”.
And I’ve also emailed a friend who runs an online shoe-selling business to ask for recommendations for a commercial website designer – I’m not going to attempt it myself, when money rests on it.
UPDATE, 10:39. Deep into it now, dealing with all the little notes scattered throughout the text where I marked (with “qqq”) that I needed to come back and deal with some cross-reference. I’ve also converted a cross-reference table to the PG and Mai editions into Word format and am updating it with Cramer references. Finding the odd bit of sloppy work by some hired editorial people, unfortunately, as well; trouble is that checking they did it is as much work as doing it myself again. Trudge trudge trudge…
UPDATE, 11:38. Most of those notes dealt with, the cross-references added. The only “qqq”s are in files like indexes and so on that need populating. It’s been a slog but worth it.
Bad news in the Latin materials; I originally intended to footnote each page in the CSEL text that we printed. That’s probably 2 days work, and we haven’t got the time. Indeed if I was ever to do it, it would already have been done. Too late now. Just do without.
Time for some lunch. After that, process in the last batch of translator changes, then print the whole lot off and sit down with a coke and read it all!
UPDATE, 13:37. All the “qqq”s done, and some sort of minimal index of the main biblical passages created. I’ve also tracked down all the uses of theotokos in the text and highlighted them with a note. It is, after all, highly unlikely that Eusebius used in 300 AD this battle-cry of the 5th century, so it suggests interpolation. Both the ecloge and the fragments have it, which suggests that the addition was made early on. Now to process in the translator’s comments.
UPDATE, 15:54. All the translator’s comments processed, and a bit of to- and fro- over a couple of them. Now printing it all off; or trying to! The Greek text (which I got from Claudio Zamagni and the SC) is all over the place; paper size wrong, paper tray set to manual, varying margin sizes. Fixed it all now, but it all cost time. Still printing…
UPDATE, 16:13. All printed, and a pile of paper an inch and a half thick on the side. Now to read through it all…
UPDATE, 17:53. I’m getting a definite impression that some professional copy editing would be a good idea.
UPDATE, 19:00. Enough! My eyeballs are giving out. The manuscript is complete. It just needs some professional copy editing by someone NOT so far involved. Then it can be typeset. So I am contacting people who might be willing to do that. Let’s see if we can get that done in a week or two and then get on.
This human weakness thing is a nuisance. I’ve decided that if we get a choice in the New Jerusalem, I’m opting to come back as a dalek.
It would give the cherubs a shock, anyway… 🙂
Eusebius again
Laying out facing Greek and English – and being laid out by it
The Eusebius book consists of a Word document containing all the Greek for the Quaestiones ad Stephanum, and another one containing all the English translation of that. Then there are further pairs of files; text, translation for Latin; text and translation for Syriac, and so on. Word has no way to get the multiple languages appearing on alternate pages.
For the last three hours I have been experimenting with the trial version of the professional desktop publishing and layout tool, Adobe InDesign. Others may have been tempted, but put off by the terrifying complexity of this tool. So I thought I’d say that you can get this working from a state of complete ignorance in about three hours, and not very difficult hours. Here’s what I did, to get a PDF with alternate Greek and English text.
First, download the trial of InDesign from the Adobe website (you can find that alright using Google, I’m sure). You will need to register for an “account” – just use one of your email accounts and some junk password, but remember it because you will need it later when you start up the trial. It takes a fair old while to download, but that doesn’t matter.
While you’re waiting, start using the free video tutorials on the Adobe site. I’m no great fan of videos, but these were short and easy to watch. I found it useful to rig up external speakers to my laptop, because I had an air-con unit going in the same room. Do maximise the screen while watching!
Now I only watched the following videos:
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Getting started – what is Indesign CS5? (2:33 mins)
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GS-01: Understanding the application window. (6 mins)
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GS-02: New documents (7:35 mins)
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GS-03: Adding page numbers (3:50 mins)
and then I stopped, because I was getting frustrated. The first three are all fine, and usefully it mentions how to set up the book as 7×9″. But then you realise that you are looking at excerpts from the Lynda.com site; and that there are loads more tutorials for each bit. When you look at the fourth one, you feel you have missed something. However all these are worth looking at, and they are free.
By now InDesign has downloaded. Fire it up, and do some of the things you saw in the video. Remember you can pause the video while you try something out!
This tells you how to set up the double-page spread. But it won’t tell you how to add text from Word, nor how to interleave Greek and English.
What I did then was to register at Lynda.com for the rest of the tutorials for InDesign. I recommend you do likewise. They charge $25 a month, and keep right on charging unless you cancel. But the Indesign trial expires after a month, so just buy a month’s worth, and remember to cancel before the end of the month.
This gives you the rest of the tutorials. I watched:
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Inserting, deleting and moving pages (pretty obvious) (7:23)
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Changing page numbering with sections — you do need this, to fiddle with the page numbers for Roman numerals for the intro (5:58)
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Creating and applying master pages — mainly because you’ll do the alternation of Greek and English by customing a master page (5:20)
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Importing text — this is the critical one. You will never manage to guess how you import a word document unless you watch this. The answer is that you do Ctrl-D to choose a .doc file, then click ‘Open’, and then do shift+click to click on an empty frame. This says “paste in the text and create more pages on the end until you run out of text”. Just doing click will leave you with a little red icon at the bottom. (7:49)
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Threading text frames. You need this one as well, to understand how to manage the Greek-English. Because you will be using threading. (4:01)
None of this will tell you exactly what to do for our case, but you need all this stuff. And… it’s really not that long. What I did was get some diet coke (full of caffeine) and some chocolate, and watch them all.
The final bit is described here, in the first reply by Peter Spier. In my case I have one column on the left hand page, for the Greek, and one on the right, for English. Here’s what you do.
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Edit the master page, and create a text frame on the left hand page, and another on the right hand page. Make sure these are not threaded together by using the View|Extras|Show text threads.
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By default you will have a single page, page 1. Add two more pages. Pages 2-3 will be a double page spread in the page viewer.
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Change page 1 to not use the master page by clicking on the black triangle on the top.
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Now click on page 2, and it will display, empty, in the editor.
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Do your Ctrl-D,choose your file of Greek, and do shift+click on page 2. You will find that it creates a whole slew of pages, all with the Greek in the left hand page only.
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Go to page 3, and do the Ctrl-D, open the English, and do shift+click on page 3. That will fill up all the right-hand side pages, and if need be create more.
There you have it! You can now do File|Export to PDF for print, and get a PDF with the two interleaved.
One minor problem. The text and translation don’t line up! Over a few pages, they get out of step.
The answer? You get to fix that manually by adding extra spacing, line breaks, etc! That’s show-business. That’s why InDesign is used for laying out text. But at this point at least you can generate something for proof-checking the whole document!
If only InDesign was not so terrifyingly expensive!
Eusebius once more
He’s getting all Coptic on me
Isn’t it funny how different various groups of scholars are? Some are all free and easy and helpful. Others are all suspicious, riven with rivalries. The first lot respond to enthusiastic but ignorant emails kindly. The second ignore them. The first band together to get things working. The second sit in their various bastions and snipe at each other and the outside world.
Doing an edition of material which exists in Greek, Syriac, Arabic and Coptic throws an interesting light on the various ways these languages are handled online. Everyone knows about the Hugoye list for Syriac studies, started by George Kiraz who also made Syriac unicode fonts of all kinds freely available. He even got the Estrangelo Edessa font included by Microsoft into Windows! Syriacists are all helpful, and Syriac studies online is frankly booming. At Brigham Young University Kristian Heal is putting online a massive collection of Syriac texts. George has reprinted loads of them, which gets them into libraries. In short, every contribution adds to the whole.
Christian Arabic is much the same, not least because late Syriac writers also wrote Christian Arabic, and a lot of the same people are involved on a lower level. The NASCAS google group is where they hang out.
My experience of Coptic and Coptologists, on the other hand, belongs to the other side of the spectrum. There’s the Copts themselves, who are a good bunch. But some of the academics … phew! One sign of this is that only one decent Coptic unicode font exists, Keft; and this was done at huge expense with government grants and is still not finished. No free Bohairic font exists. Indeed people are still messing around with non-unicode Coptic fonts. Likewise I don’t know of an online forum like Hugoye or Nascas for Coptic. And always, always, I get this impression of people looking down their noses.
But at least some people are fighting back. Dr Hany S. Takla of the St. Shenouda Center for Coptic Studies in Los Angeles is doing what he can. There’s a Facebook group, which he invited me to yesterday. This in turn tells me about resources that I wouldn’t otherwise know of. There’s the journal Coptica, for instance.
Mind you; Hugoye is also a journal, not just a forum. And the journal exists in free online form, as well as in printed form. How George Kiraz makes that work I do not know. But Coptica is only offline, sadly. I hope Dr. Takla will find a way to make this online.
But I recommend the facebook group. Dr Takla (who also looks in on Nascas) is plainly doing a huge work, and doing it more or less by himself. Well done, that man!
Eusebius update again
I’ve been too zonked from travel to do much today, but I’ve been working on the mysterious annotations in the manuscript. Thanks to a correspondent I have now worked out what these are. In fact they are all OK. Indeed one that provoked violent indignation seems to be a problem with the file, and nothing to do with the corrector. So that is good news, and I have sent the lot off to the translator for review.
One interesting thing I have discovered; you can’t persuade Microsoft Word to have its footnotes on one line. Each footnote has to be a new line. That does eat space!