Finding Armenian resources

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My queries to professional Armeniologists have gone unanswered, doubtless because they are very busy.  But I am still interested to learn whether there are catenas on the gospels in Armenian.

A thought struck me last night.  Suppose that none have been published?  Where could we find catenas?

The answer, surely, is to start looking at catalogues of Armenian manuscripts.  These will surely indicate the general content of manuscripts.  If there are catenas, they will probably indicate the authors quoted.

The French National Library has PDF’s of most of its catalogues online (bless them!).  This includes a splendid catalogue of their 300-odd mss, with a nice history of the collection at the front and some good indexes.

The results were a little disappointing, tho.  So in the Index of subjects on p.1002 (p.538 of the PDF), there are lists of mss by subject.  But catena is not one of those subjects.

However there is an anonymous Commentary on the genealogy of Matthew and Luke in Ms. 303, items 4-5.  This is something Eusebius talks a lot about in the Quaestiones ad Stephanum.  Probably the material here is at least influenced by him.  Unfortunately you would need Armenian to learn much more.

A few pages on, there is a category of Questions and Responses.  Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and John Damascene all feature.  So, interestingly, does Philo!  There is no Eusebius listed, but who knows what someone sat in the reading room ordering up mss might find?

Looking in the author index there are fragments of the Church History and the Chronicon in various mss.  This is natural, since both exist in full in Armenian.  But no other works are listed.

All in all, this was an interesting exercise.  I learned more about the collection than I might have done.  But so far, no material for the Eusebius Quaestiones.

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The gospel of Judas saga continues

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Herbert Krosney, who wrote much the best book on the skullduggery around the finding, selling and dismemberment of the manuscript of the ps.Gospel of Judas has written an update on events since then.  This can be found here, at a page run by Marvin Meyer.  It’s explosive stuff.

The manuscript floated around the art world for 20 years.  It was then sold to an Akron art dealer, Bruce Ferrini, who had started to dismember it and sell it piecemeal.  But he was unable to pay the seller, who repossessed it.  There was always a question, therefore, of whether Ferrini had actually handed back all that he still had.  Ferrini then went bankrupt.

… on March 17th, 2008, St. Patrick’s Day, when Ferrini was finally deposed (after many attempts to get him on the stand) in Akron. The proceedings took a full day.  Ferrini not only admitted that he had withheld materials in 2001.  He also left the court-supervised proceedings at lunchtime, along with his lawyer, and returned to the court an hour or so later with a sort of lawyer’s briefcase with what appeared to be full page fragments inside.

These were delivered to the custody of the court-appointed receiver, and it was agreed that they would be photographed and identified by an expert, a Coptologist, but under strict conditions of secrecy and not for public distribution or knowledge.  No one in the know – very few people outside the lawyers, I should add – were allowed to see the photographs, nor was any public report on their contents permitted.  This secrecy was court-ordered and agreed to by all the lawyers and claimants in the case.

The photographs were sent to Prof. Gregor Wurst … What [Gregor Wurst] discovered within these materials was essentially the balance of the Gospel of Judas.

The site also gives more detail on the missing material.

The question remains, however, as to what has become of the other three manuscripts from Egypt, sold at the same time to Ferrini and given the same treatment.  The Sahidic ms. of three letters of Paul seems to have been recovered, thankfully.  But of the Coptic Exodus, we know little.  The Greek mathematical treatise is still unpublished also.  All this secrecy…

Thanks to Evangelical Textual Criticism for this one.

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New Czech site on Tertullian and Perpetua

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Czech scholar Petr Kitzler has started his own site.  He writes:

I have started my own site, as you advised. See https://sites.google.com/site/petrtert/.   For now, this is mainly my bibliography, with as many resources on-line or full-texts as was possible. I will of course update the pages, but it depends on my spare time (which looks bad these days). I hope people will find it interesting.

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Another chunk of Abu’l Barakat

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The third chunk (of four) of the translation of Abu’l Barakat’s list of Arabic Christian literature arrived today.

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How the first Loebs were translated

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At a conference a few years ago, I remember hearing an anecdote about how the original Loeb translation of the Apostolic Fathers was made.  The translator was the great Kirsopp Lake.

According to the story, Lake made his translation by lying on a sofa in his rooms with a copy of the Greek text in his hand, and simply reading a translation to a secretary as he lay there. 

Those were the days of real classical learning!

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Dreaming of Marius Maximus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We all know the Twelve Caesars of Suetonius.  I suppose most of us have read at least some of the Augustan History, similarly modelled, but largelya 4th century fake.

But I found myself thinking of the author of the next twelve lives after Suetonius, the lost writer Marius Maximus.

Maximus is referred to in the Augustan History, and also by Ammianus Marcellinus.  He followed the tradition of Suetonius by retailing racy gossip as well as material from sources, good and bad.  Apparently his work was favoured reading by senators, rather as modern politicians read Jeffrey Archer.

I wonder what the testimonia of Marius Maximus are.  Who is the last author to display knowledge of his work?  When did it perish, I wonder.

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A quick quiz on evolution at Quodlibeta

Posted on by Roger Pearse

…is here, which I link to mainly as an excuse to display a rather amusing picture from it:

evolution-white

Anyone who has “debated” with atheists online — especially anyone whom the atheists found better informed than themselves — will understand.

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Doing the numbers

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A comment asked how much the various elements of the projects I am doing actually cost, aside from the hours and hours of time.  I thought a post on this might be of interest.

My trip to Cambridge to look at Anastasius of Sinai was 120 miles and cost me around $45 in petrol, plus about $7 of copying.

Translating has no fixed cost; it is entirely about supply and demand.  There are other considerations also, which I will come to.

Some translating can be got for nothing.  Much of this is worth what it costs, but an academic will tend to do a good job, even if unpaid.

As a rule I offer 10c per word of the original language, for smaller amounts, and I find that I can usually get someone decent at this price.  For larger amounts I tend to have Migne as a control; I offer $20 per column of Migne (about 400 words).  These numbers apply to Latin, Greek and Christian Arabic.

I have found it quite impossible to get people to translate Syriac at less than 20c per word.  While a lot of people claim to know it, in practice those able and willing are not available for less.

This leads me into the other important aspect — reliability.  There are few things as infuriating as someone who agrees with you to do the work and just doesn’t, or does it to an inferior standard if at all.  I always follow my gut; people who are going to be a pain tend to be a pain pretty early on.  It doesn’t get better — if it isn’t any good initially, it will be worse later. 

You do have to check what you’re being offered, of course.  I always make the first chunk of stuff a sample; if it’s OK, I pay them; if it isn’t, I don’t and cancel the job.  This is essential, unless you want people who wish they could translate offering you gibberish.   The price bears no relationship to the quality of work done, by the way.

Checking means hiring someone to do some work which is really time-related.  I tend to pay $20 an hour for odd bits of work, setting a maximum if I don’t know how long it will be.  Again, this is probably too high, and I try to constrain the price in other ways.

Transcribing text is something I have just started to do.  The web suggests a price of $10 per 1,000 words.  This is probably too much also, but we’ll see how it goes.

Typesetting the book; I haven’t actually done any of this, but the quotes I have are between $300-$700.

Copying in libraries tends to be 15c a sheet.

Are there other costs?  Probably, but these come to me off the top of my head. 

Searching for people to do work: these days I post an ad in BYZANS-L for Greek stuff,  HUGOYE for Syriac.  For Christian Arabic I now have a little pool of people I know are reliable.

So … it can be an expensive business.  But translating the Eusebius and the Origen is turning out to be around $3,300 each.  Now that is not a small sum.  But … it isn’t the end of the world, is it?

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Oriens Christianus come up trumps

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One bit of paranoia concerned the Syriac fragments of Eusebius, printed by Gerhard Beyer in 1926 in the German journal Oriens Christianus.  I couldn’t find any information on when he died.  In Europe, copyright extends until 70 years after the death of the author, you see.  So I wrote to Hubert Kaufhold and Manfred Kropp, the current editors of Oriens Christianus, asking whether they knew when he died and if they claimed a copyright.

I had a very friendly email back from Dr Kropp yesterday, promising to look; and tonight Dr Kaufhold wrote as follows:

… Bei dem Autor des Oriens Christianus Dr. Gerhard Beyer handelte es sich um einen katholischen Priester, der 1931 gestorben ist (vgl. H. Kaufhold, Oriens Christianus. Gesamtregister für die Bände 1 (1901) bis 70 (1986), Wiesbaden 1989, S. 39, 146. Ein Urheberrecht besteht deshalb nicht mehr, so daß Sie seine Edition ohne weiteres verwenden können.

…Dr Gerhard Beyer was a Catholic priest, who died in 1931 (see H. Kaufhold, Oriens Christianus. Collected indexes for vols 1 (1901) to 70 (1986), Wiesbaden 1989, pp. 39, 146.  No copyright exists any longer, so you can use his edition freely.

Full marks to the OC team to keep track of such things!  Who would have guessed that an index with that sort of information in it existed?

I must remember to thank them in the book, and send them a copy of the electronic text when I have it.

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Typing up Origen

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel are mostly extant in a Latin translation by Rufinus.  For the book version, we’re going to need an electronic text.  I’ve scanned a few Latin texts in  my time using OCR, and the results have often been variable.  Back in 2000, the quality of software was lamentable.  Today it is better, but even Abby Finereader 10 doesn’t include recognition for Latin.

So I’ve decided to hire someone to do it manually, and we’ll see how it goes.  Market rates seem to be about $10 per 1,000 words, which is liveable with.

I ought to apologise, by the way, for all the project-related posts at the moment.  These are occupying every minute of my time, so I really am thinking about nothing else right now!

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