The decline of the legend of the Seven Sages and theosophical prophecies

A. Delatte begins his article of the above title with the following words:

Never did anyone prophesy so much, in the special form known as prophecy post eventum, as in the first centuries of Christianity.  The rapid conquest of souls by the new ideal and the solid establishment of the Christian churches showed the hand of God, and this transfiguration of the face of the world so stirred some spirits that in order to explain it they felt obliged to fall back on the idea of a preparation stage for the gospel.  Similarly some were unable to believe that the brightest and most inspired of the pagans did not have some presentiment or secret revelation of the mystery of the Redemption. 

In order to satisfy this longing of faith, some people who were well-intentioned but too little scrupulous of their choice of methods composed new Sybilline oracles, and placed in circulation prophecies that had previously come, so they said, from the sanctuaries of Apollo, announcing the coming of the messiah.  They also began to search the books and the biographies of the philosophers for features and doctrines that could easily be misinterpreted as disguised evidence of foreknowledge of the great event. 

Did they find them?  Some apostles of dissident Christian groups, those whose followers were of limited education and unable to detect the fraud, did not hesitate to resort to the falsification of ancient literary works to nourish the faith of their followers.  It might seem, moreover, that this was an excellent means of propaganda among those lingering in paganism, who were not fleeing the embrace of Christianity so much as clinging to the debris of the too mystical teachings of the magi, astrologers, and the theurgists, and were therefore ill-equipped to detect imposters.

Perhaps for Christianity to become universal, it had to appeal to the irrational element in every society, as well as the rational and devout; to the people who waste their time on New Age frauds in our day, as well as to the university-educated who make up most evangelicals in our day.  The thought is an interesting one, and the parallel also.  But let us return to Delatte, who is not so far footnoting these comments, unfortunately.

But in putting Christianity back among paganism, in making Orpheus, Pindar, Plato, Hermes Trismegistus and many others be Christians before the fact, the Orthodox faith was at great risk of diminishing itself, or even being contaminated.  The church was cautious; some of these theologians  to the troubled soul learned this to their cost. 

A certain Aristocritus (5th century) used all the resources of an uncertain science and the powers of a too supple spirit of conciliation to compose a book entitled Θεοσοφία.  He wanted to show that the most eminent souls among the Hebrews and the Greeks had, by the grace of God, the divination of the mysteries and prior knowledge of certain Christian doctrines, but in the opinion of orthodox theologians he only succeeded in demonstrating the identity of the doctrines of Judaism, Hellenism and Christianity, which was a hopeless error.  This system of accomodation which resembles the methods practised by the Stoics in handling previous philosophies was not to the liking of the strong-minded and clear-minded.  As a result the book of Aristocritus features among the works tainted with the Manichaen heresy which are anathematised in an ancient formula used for renouncing Manichaeism.

Accomodation is indeed the chronic hazard of the apologist; to be coloured by the views of those you oppose, to insensibly move to resist certain views and unknowingly accept others equally fatal to your position.

Delatte then goes on to review the scattered remains of Greek texts which preserve supposed extracts from philosophers predicting the coming of Christ.  I won’t repeat all this here, in what is already too long a post.  But these texts deserve to be gathered and made more readily available.

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Piles of paper on the side and a rainy day at home

I doubt that I am alone in possessing piles of photocopies from books and articles.  Like blocks of stone they rise on every side.  Made by my own hands, mostly, the photocopies were paid for in time and money.  Many a trip to the university library has ended in a session at home reading through the products of my labours with excitement.  Then the photocopies were laid aside, as I might want them again, and never seen again.

A soft and rainy day is the perfect day to try to rediscover your furniture.  Mine has bowed under the weight of these toppling piles for years.  A whim moved me to sort some of them out, and transfer at least some of them to the cupboard, where dust does not darken nor the cleaners condemn.

Of course I have these urges every few years.  The last time was when I got a fast modern Fujitsu scanner and converted quite a lot into PDF’s.  But I couldn’t remember why a certain pile had survived.

Inspection revealed that it contained mostly materials relating to the Eusebius project.  As I looked through it, there were print-outs of catalogue entries; books that I had once sought, mostly successfully, sometimes in vain.  Cordier’s catena was listed, a reminder that I sat in Duke Humphrey’s Library once and looked through it for Eusebian material.  I can remember the hardness of the chair, and getting caught in a rainstorm outside.  I had not realised, in truth, how long the Eusebius project has been part of my life and a focus for my efforts.  I tend to think that it is only for a year or two; but in truth I have probably spent much of the last decade on it.  So our lives slip away, while we play with this or that.

Among the items I found was a copy of A. Delatte, «Le déclin de la Légende des VII Sages et les Prophéties théosophiques», Musée Belge 27 (1923), p. 97-111.  I got this when I was looking at material in Arabic derived supposedly from patristic sources.  There were all these collections of “Sayings”, often by philosophers or the like, predicting the coming of Christ, or other “wisdom” type sayings.   Such collections of sayings were analogous to the volumes of “Wit and Wisdom” that populate shops selling remaindered books.  The accuracy of attribution and quotation is probably about the same.  These collections are called gnomologia. 

Delatte’s article discussed the twilight of the classical tradition of the Seven Sages.  In Late Antiquity this unfixed myth was found useful by people such as theosophists to provide a frame for their ideas.  Consequently it connects to the idea of “famous sayings of the philosophers.”

Delatte also published in the article one of the texts feeding into this tradition, which was why I got it.  No translation, tho.  Don’t you hate it when people do that?  It’s four and a bit pages of Greek; almost worth commissioning a translation of it and giving it away.

I might try and reacquaint myself with this paper this afternoon.  I’ve created a PDF, and run it through the OCR software.  My sofa will now help me understand it!

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Iturbe on Arabic Gospel Catenas

I had to scan the introduction to Francisco Javier Caubee Iturbe’s edition of a Christian Arabic catena on the gospel of Matthew.  I found myself wondering how well Google translate would handle Spanish.  After all, it gives Spanish as the default foreign language, so I hope it might be good!  So I experimented a bit. 

The following notes are abstracted from Iturbe’s comments.  Since both volumes of his work have a 50-page introduction, these are very much short notes!  Anyhow, he introduces his edition thus:

Studies and research on gospel catenas – comments by various fathers listed successively around the text of the Gospel – to date have been limited almost exclusively to those conveyed to us in Greek. As regards those preserved in Arabic, we can say that, nothing exists apart from some brief references in a few authors.  And yet there are several Arabic manuscript codices containing exegetical catenas on the Gospels, with markedly different characteristics from Greek catenas. The problems that these codices present with regard to their origin, their language, the patristic extracts used, the method and means by which they have been transmitted, and so on, are various, and often difficult. There are some differences, more or less marked, in the text of the comments found in the manuscripts, but fundamentally, at least for the Gospel of Matthew, they are all the same catena, conceived as an organic whole, with proper proportions, in this surpassing many of the Greek catenas, which sometimes comprise lengthy scholia joined with other tiny extracts by many different fathers juxtaposed against the same verse. The copies of almost all these manuscripts were made in Egypt, in the Coptic Monophysite church, and they were long in use, especially in the monasteries of Scetis.

 Of all the existing Arabic manuscripts, of which thirteen are known to contain gospel catenas, four are in the Vatican Library, three in Cairo, two in Paris and one in each of the following cities: Strasbourg, Oxford, Gottingen and Baghdad. All have the catena on the Gospel of Matthew, except for one in Cairo and another in Paris.

A description of the manuscripts containing the catena on Matthew is presented in this volume, beginning with the oldest of them, ms. Vatican Arab 452, which is the basis for the text published here; in the notes of the apparatus are the variants of the other manuscripts that rely on the same textual tradition.

He then lists the sigla for his edition.  It is interesting to learn of so many manuscripts.  M and P belong to a different family to the rest.

B  = Ms. Vatican Arab 452.
C = Ms. Arab Cairo 411.
D = Ms. Arab Cairo 195.
G = Ms. Gottingen ar. 103.
K = Ms. karsuni Vatican syr. 541.
L =  The catena in the coptic ms. of Curzon, as printed in the edition by P. de Lagarde, Catenae in evangelio aegyptiacae quae supersunt,  Gottingae 1886.
M = Ms. Vatican ar. 410.
O = Ms. Arab Bodleian Hunt. 262.
P = Ms. Paris ar. 55.
S = Ms. Arab Strasbourg or. 4315.

The copies all derive from the Coptic catena printed by De Lagarde, which is now sadly missing many of its leaves. 

Iturbe begins by describing the first of these.  Since Arabic catenas are probably almost unknown to anyone, I think it’s worth translating this as a sample of what the manuscript contains.

MS. VATICAN ARABIC 452 – Siglum B.

1214 AD. Paper, 250 x 165 mm., the written area is 175 x 110 mm., 376 folios, 17 lines per page.

The manuscript is divided now into two volumes, bound in white leather: one has 196 pages and the second 180. The missing folios at the end, probably about thirty-five, are more or less what is needed to complete a version of the Gospel lessons of the holidays, Sundays, Saturdays, and so on, for the whole year, introduced and started on f. 369v  at the end of the manuscript; as it currently is, it only goes as far as 4th Hatur, which is the third month of the Coptic calendar.

On the first page, in the center of a large rectangle, to whose sides are attached 16 identical circles, enclosing as many Coptic crosses – four circles with crosses, one on each of the horizontal sides, two on the vertical, four more identical at the corners of the rectangle all drawn in red and black –, the manuscript title is written in black ink, indicating its contents: Book of the Gospels, its explanation and calendar.

On most of the rest of the page, above and below the rectangle, there is a certificate of ownership of the book, dated 55 years after the composition. We will discuss this document later.

A few short sentences in Arabic, which can barely be read — some of which seems to be an essay written by an ignoramus — plus two seals of the Vatican Library and the indication “452 Arabic”, occupy the remaining free space on the page, which because of that, plus humidity and other stains, presents a sorry state, which is felt in part on the verso of the same folio. This folio 1 is the most deteriorated of the manuscript, except folio 135v. The latter was originally left blank, before the commentary on the Gospel of Mark.  But then four lines were written in Karshuni, also repeated in Arabic, which a few illiterates then wrote over and over again like vandals, which, added to the horrendous lines crossing at the top of the page, has completely smeared the page. Something similar on a smaller scale, has occurred in ff. 188v-189, which were almost completely blank between the gospels of Mark and Luke, and on ff. 368v-369, the end of the Gospel of John. Except for these cases and others of less importance, the manuscript has been preserved in good condition.

On ff. 1v-5v, after a preface, the Ammonian sections are arranged in the ten canon tables of Eusebius, and marked by Coptic numerals.
Ff. 6-135 contain the Gospel of St. Matthew with the patristic commentaries.
Ff. 136-188v: Gospel of Mark and their comments.
Ff. 189v-298: Gospel of St. Luke and comments.
Ff. 299-c68: Gospel of St. John and their comments.
Ff. 369v identifies the Coptic gospel lessons for the first part of the year, as I indicated above.

A little further on he adds:

The colophon to the Gospel of Mark says (f. 188v): ‘The text of the Gospel of Mark the Evangelist and the commentary on its meaning is finished with the help of God – may He be exalted! — and by the blessing of His grace, on Wednesday, 6 Tut of the year 921 of the pure Martyrs. May his blessing be with us. Amen’.

The date is 3rd September, 1204 – the same year as the sack of Constantinople by the renegade army hired for the Fourth Crusade, in which so much ancient literature perished.

Iturbe published his edition in two volumes, the first with a preface on the manuscripts and then the Arabic text, the second with a preface on the contents and a Spanish translation.  The introduction to the second volume begins as follows:

The patristic catena on the Gospel of St. Matthew in ms. Vatican ar. 452, the text published in Volume I, which we here give in translation, after almost all of the 68 sections into which it divides the Gospel text, has one or more pieces of commentary — scholia — each preceded by a very brief indication – lemma – written in red, which states, most of the time, who is the Father or interpreter who composed it. In total, there are 336 scholia with corresponding lemmas.

But there are 86 lemmas which are no more than the word ‘interpretation’, and we may wonder whether the compiler of the catena – or the copier – meant to assign the scholia which immediately follow to the named author of the preceding passage. That certainly agrees with the reading of the Coptic manuscript of Curzon and other similar Arabic manuscripts, and in a comparative study of them all we find that of the 86 scholia, 82 belong  to the author last named in a lemma; 3 to a different author than the one listed in B above, and only 1 of them is unknown.

Having clarified the previous difficulty, and incidentally shedding light on other such mss, Coptic and Arabic, we have 113 which are scholia by St. Cyril of Alexandria and 109 of St. John Chrysostom. The two great Eastern doctors thus cover two thirds of all the commentary of St. Matthew in the catena. Then comes Severus of Antioch, with 53 glosses. And then, with a much smaller number, the other contributors. The list of all those in B, with the number of scholia that each must be awarded is as follows:

Cyril of Alexandria = 113
John Chrysostom = 109
Severus of Antioch = 53
Hippolytus of Rome = 15
Gregory the Theologian = 8
Gregory Thaumaturgus = 6
Epiphanius = 5
Eusebius of Caesarea = 5
Clement (Alexandria) = 5
Athanasius = 4
Basil = 4
Severian of Gabala = 2
Simeon the Hermit = 2
Cyril of Jerusalem = 1
Titus (of Bostra ) = 1
Isaiah the Anchorite = 1
An elder of the Desert Fathers [the abbot Ammon] = 1

These, then, are the authors for which we may find textual witnesses in this Arabic catena.  Iturbe also states:

On the other hand there are various authors in Greek catenas who do not appear in Coptic-Arabic catenas: Apollinaris, Gregory of Nyssa, Irenaeus, Theodore of Heraclea, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, etc; and above all Origen, who in almost all Greek catena families has many scholia, such as in the third of type B, where Origen comprises 227 out of the total 874.

There is little point in looking for material by Origen in Coptic or Arabic, it seems.

Back in the first introduction, Iturbe discusses the Coptic catena published by De Lagarde, from which all the Arabic mss. derive.

The Curzon Coptic manuscript catena, siglum L.

In 1886 Paul de Lagarde (P. Boetticher) published the Bohairic text of a manuscript obtained by Robert Curzon in March 1838 in the Monastery of the Syrians, Wadi ‘l-Natrun. Never translated, little use has been made so far in the scholarly field of this good edition of De Lagarde.  But for the present study, however, we are particularly interested in this Coptic ms.

It contains a patristic catena on the four gospels – next to the Gospel text – divided into sections, as in B and other Arabic manuscripts. The text of the Gospels has only a short verse or verses, which are generally given before the lemmas and scholia: in this, then, it is similar to M and P. This codex was written in the year 605 of the holy martyrs (888/89 AD), more than three centuries before the oldest of our Arabic mss, codex B, which was written in the year 1214 AD as regards the part of Matthew. Because sixteen folios were lost, the comments on Matt. 2:1-5:5; 5:44-6:3; 7:24-29; 9:27-9:37; 12:48-13:10; 24:16-29 are missing; see the introduction.

All this detail  may swamp us; but we need to recall that almost no-one working on New Testament texts or on the patristic comments on them found in catenas — is there anyone working on the latter? — has any awareness of material that has made its way into Arabic.

When my Eusebius volume appears, at least those dealing with the Gospel problems and solutions will be aware that there is material that should be consulted in Christian Arabic.

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Eusebius update

Iturbe’s edition of the Arabic catena containing bits of Eusebius has arrived.  There are five fragments.  I’ve commissioned a translation of them, and also a transcription; also a transcription of the Syriac text translated earlier.

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Eusebius update

I’m still trying to get the manuscript of Eusebius Gospel problems and solutions completed.  We’re getting ever closer, tho!

I’ve started working on the text of the Latin fragments myself, faux de mieux, which I will get done by the end of the week. 

The two extra Syriac fragments, culled from Severus of Antioch and Ishodad of Merv, will be translated by the same time (I am promised).

I’ve got all the Greek in electronic form.  The passages from Cramer’s catena have all been proofed excellently, but I’ve now got a friend looking at the material from Migne: the first three chunks from Nicetas’ catena on Luke are with him.

I’ve heard nothing from the people doing the Coptic for a month, when I last prompted.  Time to prompt again.

I’ve also ordered a copy of the Arabic translation of the Coptic catena on Matthew.  I need someone with Coptic and Arabic to translate the relevant bits and compare it with the Coptic.

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People with knowledge of Coptic and Arabic

A touch of insomnia this evening led me to hunt around the web for native English-speaking academics who know Coptic and Arabic.  No luck so far!

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Critical edition of the Koran in preparation?

Ghost of a flea pointed me to jeff black, berlin, who writes:

A page from a 7th century Sanaa ms.
A page from a 7th century Sanaa ms.

German researchers preparing “Qur’an: The Critical Edition”

This is a serious business. A team of researchers at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences is preparing to bring out the first installment of Corpus Coranicum – which purports to be nothing less than the first critically evaluated text of the Qur’an ever to be produced.

 What this means is that the research team is in the process of analysing and transcribing some 12,000 slides of Qur’an mansucripts from the first six centuries of the text’s existence. Once that is complete, the way is open to producing a text that annotates and, presumably, provides some sort of exegesis on the differences found in the early manuscripts.

The Potsdam-based team of Corpus Coranicum have so far concentrated on Suras 18 to 20, and are due to produce a first slice of the final product from that in the next few weeks. The whole book is meant to take until around 2025.

UPDATE: The English language site seems to be down but the Google cache contains the following, seemingly from an old update:

Welcome to the Corpus Coranicum

The project “Corpus Coranicum” contains two unworked fields of qur’anic studies: (1) the documentation of the qur’anic text in his handwritten as well as orally transmitted form and (2) a comprehensive commentary which elucidates the text within the framework of its historical process of development.

Because of the ambiguity of the early defective writing system of the Qur’anic manuscripts, a strict separation of the data on the one hand provided by manuscripts and on the other hand transmitted via the tradition of recitation is recommended. The documentation of the Qur’anic text will provide a documentation for both traditions and compare them afterwards.

The planned commentary focuses on a historical perspective, the Qur’an seen as a text which evolved through the period of more than twenty years, thereby getting formal and content-related differences through abrogation and re-definitions within the text. Furthermore, the commentary is based on an inclusion of the judeo-christian intertexts and looks at the Qur’an as a document of the Late Antiquity. “Corpus Coranicum” is in the early stage of its development; the first results are planned to be published online in 2009.

That shows a very sensible approach.  You eat an elephant a little at a time.  Rather than working on a Koran text as such, work on the early witnesses to the text, the physical remains, the unvocalised scripts, and find out what we actually have from that period and what it says.

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Interesting article on the preparation of the Sources Chretiennes’ Jerome commentaries

A note in LT-ANTIQ drew my attention here.  A PDF at the foot of the page not merely lists the manuscripts of some of the commentaries of St. Jerome on scripture but discusses how the editions are being prepared for maximum clarity, what font is used, what forms of quotation marks, etc.

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Using Greek Transcoder

I’ve been converting a load of Greek text into unicode using Greek transcoder with much success.   But I ran across a glitch.  Depending on the option chosen, the accents can all end up to one side!

The option responsible is this one, “Use composing characters”. 

dialog

I checked that, and I should not have done; it caused off-centre accents.  But what on earth does it mean? 

A hunt around the web reveals that you can do all those accents in one of two ways.  Firstly you can use a character that includes them all inside the character.  Alternatively you just type ‘alpha’ followed by the accents, and the browser and editor should render them all correctly as one letter with some accents on the top.    The former is called “using precomposed characters”; the latter “using composing characters”.  The latter does not work very well, as applications don’t support it.  This TLG PDF says more.

toolbarI’ve also noticed that on XP the WINWORD executable tends to hang around in memory after you exit a document.  If you copy the .dot files for Greek Transcoder into the Application Data\Microsoft\Word\Startup directory, they are only picked up when the WINWORD executable starts, so get ignored in this case.  I’ve had to manually terminate it to get the utility to appear.

Once it’s loaded, the buttons appear in Word.

 

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Copyfraud once more

Today I received an email from a Romanian gentleman, asking about the translation of the lost passage by John Chrysostom from Oratio 2 adversus Judaeos, which I commissioned and then gave away recently.  He wanted to make a translation into Romanian.  So he asked what I paid the journal, in which Wendy Pradels published the Greek text with notes and German translation, for permission to have that English translation made.  I replied that I paid them nothing; there was no money in all this, and any claim to own a text by a man dead 16 centuries might be valid in some benighted lands but hardly in the USA. 

But it led me to muse on the likelihood that any academic publisher would try to sue out a claim to copyright in such a case.  It would hardly be sensible, in my opinion; why sue over what has no commercial value?  

While in bath, tho, my sense of humour took hold, and I took to wondering what questions one could ask in court.  Copyright only vests in “original, creative works.”  So…

“M’Lud, can the plaintiff tell us which specifically which words in the first line are NOT by John Chrysostom?”

“Would you give us a list of the differences between the text printed and the text composed in 400 AD by John Chrysostom?  If you cannot list the portions which are an original creative work by yourselves, on what possible grounds can you claim that any of it is by you?”

“Would you tell us what the commercial value of this item was, when you purchased — as you believed — the copyright from the scholarly author?  Did you pay any money at all for it?”

And so on.

I suspect, sadly, that courts are unimpressed by rhetoric  unless it involves clever points of law.   The layman who ventures into these waters does so at his peril, and indeed few of us ever do so unless cornered.  As Auberon Waugh remarked, from bitter experience, “He who goes to court places himself in the hands of a ring of grinning rascals who will all run up costs as fast as they can until somebody has to pay.” 

It’s probably easier and safer just to meet the plaintiff, shake hands with him, and then pitch him head first out of his office window, “accidental-like”.  Would the fines for so doing be at all likely to reach the charges that any law firm would demand?

The serious point behind all this is that the relentless march of commercial interests taking a yard where the law granted an inch has reached the point of absurdity.  Only the common sense exercised by publishers in the anglophone world is restraining them from foolishness of the sort feared by our Romanian friend; and outside that sunlit circle of generosity and mutual respect, there have been many examples of insane greed.  We need to push back. 

Genuine creative work should be protected by copyright, for the benefit of us all.  Attempts to own the work of the ancients, by one subterfuge or another, should not exist in a civilised land.

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