The lost manuscripts of Seert – a clue?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The revival of interest in Syriac before the first world war led to the establishment of the American mission at Urmia, and also transformed some of the clergy in that region of the Turkish Empire into scholars, publishing previously unknown material in western journals.  Foremost among these was Addai Scher, Archbishop of Seert.  He gathered a considerable collection of manuscripts, a few of which he sent to Paris. 

Among his discoveries was a jewel; a Syriac translation of Theodore of Mopsuestia’s De incarnatione.  This work had been lost, but was a critical factor in the disputes in the 5th century.

Everyone knows of the massacres of Armenians by the Turkish forces — mostly Kurds — during WW1.  Less well known are the similar massacres of Syriac-speaking Christians during the same period of 1915.  Addai Scher was dragged out and shot by Turkish irregulars, and most of his library was lost, including De incarnatione.

But I have been reading an article by William Macomber SJ, in which an interesting footnote appears.  It seems that a servant of Dr Scher has told various people that a number of books were buried in cases and leather bags in the courtyard.  Travellers in 1966 confirmed that the courtyard level had risen quite a bit.  The episcopal residence had been turned into a school.

I wonder if anyone has gone and investigated? 

Here are Macomber’s words:

Two apparently independent witnesses, one at ‘Aqra that was interviewed by Jules Leroy, Les manuscrits syriaques a peintures conserves dans les bibliotheques d’Europe et d’Orient (Institut Francais d’Archeologie de Beyrouth, Bibliotheque Archeologique et Historique, t. LXXVII), Paris 1964, p. 212 n. 3, and the other in Beirut, a former servant of Archbishop Scher, whose witness has been related to me by friends in Baghdad, have reported that at least some of the manuscripts of this library were buried in wooden cases and leathern sacks in the courtyard of the residence. The servant indicates the precise location of the burial, before the door of the residence that led into the courtyard. Travellers to Seert (Siirt) report that the Turkish government has turned the residence into a school for children and that the original level of the eourtyard has been considerably raised. Even if the story of the servant be true, therefore, it is quite possible that the hiding place of the manuscripts has already been discovered. Nonetheless, the importance of the coUection was so great, containing, as it did, the only known copy of the De incarnatione of Theodore of Mopsuestia, that it would seem a great pity if steps were not taken to obtain permission from the Turkish authoritiers to excavate the site. The sight of the work of excavation, moreover, might persuade citizens of Seert who may happen to have acquired some of the manuscripts to declare themselves, at least secretly, in the hope of making a profitable sale.

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A fragment of the Didache in De Lagarde’s Coptic catena?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was looking at the introduction to Catenae in evangelia aegyptiacae quae supersunt by Paul de Lagarde (1886; available at Lulu here).  This is a publication of a Coptic catena on the four gospels, which contains a fair number of fragments of Eusebius, and that is why I was reading it.  But then I noticed something more. 

In the list of authors quoted, there is [didache twn apostolwn], given as p.73, line 7.  A fragment of Chrysostom starts on line 10.  So it’s only a short chunk.  There’s no label against the passage (hence the brackets) which belongs to a chunk starting “Epiphanius” on line 1.

I don’t follow Didache scholarship, but I wonder whether this fragment has been noticed by scholars?

PS: I wonder how many people know of this bibliography of published Coptic texts, here: P. Cherix, Petite bibliographie des textes coptes litteraires edites?  I encountered it just now, looking for stuff on De Lagarde.  The site, http://www.coptica.ch/ seems to be very useful indeed.  Here are links to texts; studies; manuscripts; and a mass of bibliographies.  Wonderful!

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Eusebius update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

More news on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Gospel problems and solutions.  I’ve had an email from the lady who has been translating the coptic fragments of this work from Delagarde’s catena.  Apparently this is now close to completion.  She also tells me that Delagarde’s intro is interesting, and should be translated.  This I will put elsewhere, as she is tied up.

One issue I have not explored is transcribing the coptic.  I don’t know if it will be hard to do; I would think not.

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The hecastylon in Rome

Posted on by Roger Pearse

When I feel under the weather, and I can’t face anything heavy, I tend to resort to reading old favourites.  Often these include the old Loeb’s of Juvenal and Martial.  This week, attacked by a heavy cold, it has been Martial.

I was reading book 3, epigram 19.  This describes a place of “a hundred columns”, where there were statues of wild beasts in bronze.  The Loeb footnote says this was called the Hecastylon.  It seems to have been a portico.  The epigram describes how a boy thrust his hand into the mouth of a bronze bear, only to disturb a nesting viper, be bitten, and die.

A Google search on Hecastylon revealed almost nothing.  The only reference was to a map, which gave a location and said that some of the building is still standing, and placed it next to the Largo Argentina, where the emperors handed out donatives.  A Google books search identified it as a portico.

And that was it. 

We are so very used to finding material online, that it comes as rather a shock to find almost none.  Perhaps the building had some other name, or spelling; but even so, it is surprising.

UPDATE: Apparently it should be “Hecatostylon”!

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Patristics Carnival XXXI

Posted on by Roger Pearse

… is here.  Thanks to Polycarp for putting it together.  I seem to have missed a few carnivals lately — evidently I didn’t appear in them!

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How not to do it; AbdulHaq’s “Before Nicea”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve come across a Moslem pamphlet rubbishing Christian origins.  It’s available as an eBook here.  The authors are not orientals, but Britons who have converted to Islam and taken Arabic names.  As such they have no access to Eastern literature and have had to make use of whatever anti-Christian literature they could find.

I find it hard to read 99 pages online, but the general approach is to heap up quotations by western writers, whoever they may be, rubbishing the bible, the fathers, and so on.  The quotations are plainly taken from atheist literature, quoting such elderly “authorities” as Gibbon and Toland (1718)!  Some of the quotations look extremely suspect — F. G. Kenyon is quoted in a sense opposite to every work of his that I have ever read.

But AbdulHaq goes further.  He wants to claim that the people he quotes were all Christians, that what is said here by anti-Christian polemicists is what Christians say about themselves.  He states:

During conversations whilst compiling this work, it was noted that many evangelical Christians would argue that the Christian scholars quoted in this work for example are ‘not really Christian.’

To this he responds as might be expected.

Unfortunately AbdulHaq has defeated himself before he began.   The argument he has borrowed is the old 19th century atheist jeer “Who are you to say who is a Christian and who is not?”  Logically that is nonsense, unless the word “Christian” has no meaning.  It’s merely a gibe intended to weaken the appeal to the name of Christian, so that people who live by convenience but claim the name of Christian may evade the plain teaching of Christianity. 

To assist this process, the establishment — hardly eager to have their lives examined! — has always appointed people to bishoprics who have publicly made clear that Christianity was not true, or were men of immoral life, or both.  These men act as cuckoos in the nest, pushing out the real nestlings and in the confusion allowing the vicious to continue as before.  A former bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, publicly said that he did not believe in Jesus’ Resurrection. When Christian evangelist David Watson was running university missions calling students to repentance and conversion, he used to run counter-missions to encourage them to remain drunken fornicators as before.  Such activity qualified him, in the view of the church appointments committee, for high ecclesiastical office.

We all know that there is a pool of hyopcrites and liars around, and atheists make use of them as the establishment intends, to divert the argument from “Is Christianity true” to “Is this revolting person lying when he claims to be a Christian, and who is to say?”  Atheists need confusion, in order that their lifestyle of convenience may be hidden in the smoke.

But none of this helps AbdulHaq.  He needs clarity.  He needs to attack what Christianity is, not what it is not.  Confusion merely obstructs him from coming to grips with the enemy. 

If I wrote against Islam, it would be very silly for me to find some depraved soul who drank and never prayed and didn’t believe in the Koran, yet still claimed the name of Moslem, and use his ‘views’ as evidence of what Moslems believed.  I would need, for my argument, to make sure that those I quoted were accepted, by Moslems, as Moslems.

AbdulHaq could compile endless quotes from enemies of the church.   But it would show nothing except that Christianity attracts the enmity of people who live immoral lives and want to claim the name of Christian!   Well, I think we all knew that!  

For his polemic to work, he must attack Christians.  It does him no manner of good to confuse into his argument people who Christians don’t accept as believers.   This element of his book simply fails.

If his argument is that many scholars reject Christianity, it must be observed that this must be a rather dangerous argument for him to make.  Do those same scholars accept Islam?  Or do they merely repeat what is the fashionable religious consensus of their age?  If the latter, their testimony again does not help him.

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Catenas on the Psalms: the “Palestinian catena”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There may be 29 different types of catena on the Psalms.  All of them contain quotations from works by the Fathers on the exegesis of the Psalms.  But the most important of these by far is the catena known to modern specialists as the “Palestinian catena”.  This catena was apparently originally compiled in 6th century Palestine, directly from a bunch of mostly now lost texts.

It stands out for the size and quality of the extracts that are preserved in it.  These are mainly taken from the commentaries of Eusebius of Caesarea, Didymus the Blind, and Theodoret.  In some of the psalms, there is also material from Apollinaris of Laodicea, Asterius the Sophist, Basil of Caesarea, and — of course — Cyril of Alexandria, Chrysostom, and Origen.  For psalm 118 there is also material from Athanasius.

Psalms is a long book.  A catena on the psalms is also a long book.  Some time after composition, the catena was turned into two editions.  The first of these was in three volumes; on Psalms 1-50, 51-100, and 101-150.  The other was a two volume edition; on Psalms 1-76 and 77-150.

Naturally the volumes of each version have travelled down the centuries independently.

The three volume edition

Volume 1 of this edition is preserved in good condition in the catena of type VI (Karo and Lietzmann).  This is found in he following manuscripts:

  • Oxford, Bodleian Library, Barroci gr. 235 (9-10th century)
  • Mt. Athos, Iviron monastery 597 (1st half of 11th c.)
  • Bucharest, Romanian Academy Library gr. 931 + Constantinople, Panaghia Kamariotissi Patristic Library 9 (1st half of 11th century)
  • Munich, National library gr. 359 (10-11th c.)
  • Vatican Library gr. 1789 (10-11th c.).
  • Oxford, Bodleian, Auct. 1.1 (= Misc. 179) (17th c.), pp.169-262 containing Pss.10-50 and pp.262-284 (Ps. 9)
  • Oxford, Bodleian, Barocci gr. 154 (late 15th c.), a copy of Barocci 235.

These are all derived from the Barocci ms., and the other mss. serve only to supplement some passages today missing from the Barocci (I presume this means leaves have been lost down the years).

Marcel Richard made a check on the value of the material using the text for Ps. 37.  The whole commentary of Eusebius on this psalm happens to be extant, under the name of Basil, and is accessible in PG 30, col. 81-104 (now I ought to commission a translation of that!).  Origen’s two homilies on this psalm have reached us, in a version in Latin by Rufinus.  Theodoret’s Interpretatio in Psalmos is extant, and in PG 80.  The work of Didymus has perished.

Richard found that all the extracts from extant sources were reproduced correctly, and attributed to the correct authors.  The remaining extracts, from Didymus, were not found in any of the other authors, so are presumably also corrected quoted.  This gives us great confidence in using the catena.

The second volume existed in a single manuscript in Turin, Cod. 300 (C.II.6, 10th c.).  Unfortunately this was destroyed in the fire on 26th January 1904, without ever being photographed or printed.  No doubt the librarians who watched it burn had congratulated themselves just as modern ones do, that they had never allowed it to be photographed, thereby preserving it from “damage”.  Some leaves remain, and the Institut de Recherches et Histoire de Textes did their best, but the majority of the material from this excellent source is lost.

Fortunately this matters less for the Commentary of Eusebius.  A portion of this massive commentary has reached us in direct transmission, and contains Pss.51-95:3.  It’s in Cod. Coislin 44 (10th c.).

The third volume, on Pss.101-150, did not reach us, and no traces of it are known.

The two volume edition

The first volume of this edition, covering Pss.1-76, has been lost.  No copy of it came down to our times.

The second volume, however, covering Pss. 77-150, is extant.  This is fortunate, as it complements the losses in the three volume edition.

This volume was classified by Karo and Lietzmann as type XI.  No single copy is entire, although it probably once existed complete in Milan, Ambrosian Library F 126 sup. (=A, 13th century) which is now mutilated at the start and end.  Fortunately Ms. Patmos, St. John’s Library 215 (=P, 12-13th c.) is complete at the end, and has only lost a couple of leaves at the front.  The material at the start of the catena is found in Ms. Vienna theol. gr. 59 (13th c.).

A and P both descend from a copy in uncial.  A is the better, as P has been contaminated with material from the commentary of Theodoret.  Fortunately this is usually placed in the same places, and can be readily identified.

Indirect tradition

The material contained in the Palestinian catena is good, but the same material also appears in secondary catenas; catenas that used the Palestinian catena as a source.  This means that this indirect tradition can be a control on mistakes in the text.

The catenas that form this tradition appear in two forms; either a condensed version of the whole catena, or else a collection of extracts from across the catena.

Printed editions

It was always obvious to scholars that it should be possible to recover the commentary of Eusebius in almost complete form from these materials.  B. de Montfaucon printed an edition of his commentary on Pss.1-118, which is reprinted in PG 23, cols. 71-1396.  J.-B. Pitra reedited this in Analecta sacra Spicilegio Solesmensi parata, 3: Patres antenicaeni, Venice: S. Lazaro (1883), p.365-529.

Angelo Mai added the remainder, from Pss. 119-150, which is reprinted in PG 24, 9-78.  Unfortunately the materials used were printed with insufficient care, and are contaminated by material from Origen.

Carmelo Curti wrote a series of articles on this subject, all reprinted in Eusebiana 1: Commentarii in Psalmos, Catania 1989 (2nd ed).  Unfortunately I have never managed to see this, but I’ve just put in an ILL for it.[1]

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  1. [1]Update, 5th June, 2015.  I came across this post this week, which I had entirely forgotten about.  I wish that I had added the sources at the time.  I think that the main source was Angelo di Berardino, Patrology: The Eastern Fathers from the Council of Chalcedon (451) to John of Damascus (d.750), 2006, p.618 f.↩

Catenas on the Psalms in print

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Karo and Lietzmann’s Catenarum Graecarum Catalogus lists 28 different medieval Greek catenas on the psalms.  These are not 28 different copies, but 28 different types.  I confess that I have not yet read through all this material, and am awaiting the printed copy that I made and ordered.

Fortunately the printed editions of whatever exists appear at the front of each entry in K&L.  This is meagre enough.

First there is a volume by the inevitable Balthasar Corderius, in three folio volumes: Expositio Patrum Graecorum in psalmos, a. Balthasare Corderio Soc. Iesu ex vetustissimis Sac. Caes. Maiestatis, & Sereniss. Bauariae Ducis mss. codicibus … concinnata; in Paraphrasin, Commentarium et Catenam digesta; Latinitate donata. & Annotationibus illustrata . . . Antverpiae, ex officina Plantiniana Balthasaris Moreti M. DC. XLIII- VI. 3 vol. fol.

This appeared at Antwerp in 1643-6 at the Plantin-Moretus press.  I had not known that Corderius was a Jesuit, but so it appears.  He printed his text from manuscripts belonging to the Emperor and the Duke of Bavaria. He also translated what he gathered into Latin.

The mss he used were Vienna 298 and 8 (possibly also Vienna 294 on Psalm 1-50).  He also used Munich 12 and 13 to fill in what he considered to be gaps.   The edition is plainly a collection of whatever Corderius thought useful, rather than based on an edition.

The second catena in printed form listed by K&L is this: Aurea in quinquaginta Davidicos Psalmos doctorum Graecorum catena. Interprete Daniele Barbaro electo Patriarcha Aquileiensi. cum privilegio. Venetijs, apud Georgium de Caballis. MDLXIX. fol.  So this is earlier, 1569, in Venice.  It looks as if it may only be a Latin translation.  K&L give a list of authors and where the materials came from.

Most interesting of these to us are fragments of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Commentary on the Psalms.  These are contained in this, and were edited by Montfaucon in his edition of that work.  It looks as if he may have made use of manuscripts in Turin, which would be rather important as that manuscript was destroyed in 1904.

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The sources for the downfall of Majorian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The emperor Majorian was the last effective Roman emperor of the west.  He ruled from 457 to 461. 

At that period the rule of the empire was actually in the hands of the sinister Ricimer, who appointed and killed a series of emperors to act as figureheads.  Majorian was one of these, but speedily proved too competent for the liking of his supposed prime minister.  There is an excellent article on Majorian’s life and rule at the DIR here.

I remember transcribing the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris.  He went to dinner with Majorian in Gaul, when the emperor was there rallying support.  He describes how the Gallic dignitaries fawned over the emperor, seeking honours that the dying empire was soon to render of no significance whatever.  Majorian must have wondered what kind of fools could worry about such things at such a time.  Sidonius also wrote a Panegyric for Majorian, to be among his verse works.

Majorian’s downfall came at the hands of Ricimer.  While returning from Gaul to Italy without his army, he was assassinated.

The sources for Majorian’s reign are very scanty.  A fragment of John of Antioch gives the bare details:

While he was still on the way to Italy, Ricimer plotted his death. When Majorian had dismissed the allies after their return and was going home to Rome with his attendants, Ricimer and his party arrested him, stripped him of his purple robe and diadem, beat him, and beheaded him. Thus ended Majorian’s life. (fr.203; Gordon trans, p.117).

I wasn’t clear what the “Gordon” translation was; is it perhaps C. D. Gordon, The Age of Attila, 1966?  A new critical edition of the remains of John of Antioch, with an Italian translation, has recently appeared, edited by Umberto Roberto, Ioannis Antiocheni Fragmenta Ex Historia Chronica. (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 2005).

The Gallic Chronicle of 511 — another continuation of Jerome’s Chronicle, no doubt — has a laconic entry giving more details:

Moreover, having set out from Arles for Italy, he was killed by the patrician Ricimer at Tortona.

The Chronicle of Hydatius (210) tells us:

Ricimer, aroused by envy and supported by the counsel of jealous persons, surrounded and treacherously killed Majorian while he was returning from Gaul to Rome and was in the process of arranging things that were necessary for the Roman name and empire.

And the Chronicle of Marcellinus for 461 AD:

The Emperor Majorian was killed at Tortona, near the river that is called Ilyra.

All these Chronicles are continuations of Jerome, and have only a sentence or two against each year.

A little more information comes from the Fasti vindobonenses priores (?) no. 588:

During this consulate the Emperor Majorian was deposed by the patrician Ricimer at Tortona on 3 August and killed at the Ira River on 7 August.

Finally Procopius rather later reports (Bellum Vandalicum 7.14-15: Dewing trans., p.69).:

But meantime Majorian was attacked by the disease of dysentery and died, a man who had shown himself moderate toward his subjects, and an object of fear to his enemies.

Note the accolade, that Majorian was “moderate towards his subjects”.  Taxation is what is meant, of course.

And that’s it.  There are a few more splinters, but that is all the information we have.

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Lost Roman legal text found

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There’s still stuff out there.  This report from University College London tells us that someone (unspecified) has found 17 fragments of parchment in a binding in a manuscript or book (unspecified).  They contain parts of a lost text! 

It’s not at all uncommon to find bits of medieval books used as extra leaves at the ends of early printed books.  They’re parchment, which is tough, while the boards of the binding were added later.  At the end of the middle ages there was a surfeit of handwritten books, often of little value, which went to all sorts of purposes.  Lots of medieval service books, student copies of medieval school texts, and so on.  Ask to see volumes in any collection of early printed books, and you will as often as not find yourself looking at one of these in the end papers.

Many a rare manuscript was sent to the printers to be printed, and afterwards was used for parchment in this way.  Clearly this was one of them; although when it was dismembered is not stated.

The letters on the fragments are a mixture of uncial and semi-uncial, say 400-500 AD.  So the bits are from an ancient codex.  If they were in a binding, how did they get there?  Is it possible — God forbid — that an ancient book made it all the way to the renaissance and was then chopped up for bindings, unrecognised?  Or did it come from some manuscript, itself bound that way during the middle ages?

Here’s a striking fragment.  The title is in red, and starts with an R with a line across it.  Then the word PRESCR…, the start of a Praescriptio of some sort.  The next line contains the end of the heading: AUG. IUL. PRAESENTI — Augustus, to Julius Praesens.  This is clearly the intro to an imperial rescript (=decree).

codex_gregorianus

The text is indeed a legal one.  Simon Corcoran writes:

One complete and five partial headings to imperial constitutions have so far been identified, supplying, in addition to Julius Praesens, the names of three other addressees, and explicitly attesting four emperors: Antoninus (i.e. Caracalla, AD198-217), Gordian III (AD238-244), Philip (AD244-249), and his son Philip junior, who was associated in power with his father.

So the volume contains 3rd century rescripts.  Their conclusion, therefore, is that these are parts of the lost legal code of Gregorianus!  (Bill Thayer has some notes on what was previously known about that, here).

Who would have thought that January 2010 would be marked by the recovery of an ancient text!?

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