Roger Pearse

There’s nothing quite like having a book on hand in paper format.  Last night, troubled with insomnia, I browsed along my shelves for something gentle to read, and in vain.  But then my hand fell on a cheap modern reprint of Harnack, Geschichte der altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius, Teil 1, Halfte 2.

This is the sort of book I just do not buy.  It’s best consulted in PDF.  But … for some reason I had seen it in PDF form, and had felt the urge to have a copy.

Basically it’s a patrology.  It’s stuffed full of Harnack’s notes on authors, full of untranslated bits of Greek and Latin and even Syriac.  Readability it has none.  But as a source to mine for untapped materials, it can’t be beaten.  I have it because of the Gospel Problems and Solutions of Eusebius.  Unlike any other source, it lists bunches of manuscript fragments.

But then my attention was drawn to the fact that Harnack says that Nicephorus Callistus (who?) mentions the Quaestiones ad Stephanum.  Who is this guy?

Well, he turns out to be the author of an Ecclesiastical History in 18 books.  In fact he lived in the 14th century, so was at the end of the chain of authors, extending and extending the basic HE of Eusebius.  There seem to be some letters of his extant also.  A web search revealed little more.

His HE is in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, of course, vols 145-7.  But is there an English translation?  A search on the name revealed almost nothing since Migne, which is very curious.  I wonder if perchance people have started to spell his name differently, with K’s and ‘os’ instead of C and ‘us’, “to be more accurate”?  Such twiddling is a curse for an obscure author.

I did find an elderly text on Google books, W.F.Hook,  An Ecclesiastical Biography, vol. 7, which had something on him, p.411 here:

Callistus Nicephorus, an ecclesiastical historian, son of Callistus Xanthopulus, flourished in the fourteen century. Born with a taste for letters, at a period when there was no means of pursuing them but in the cloister, he became a monk, and passed his time in prayer and study.

He composed an Ecclesiastical History, in twentythree books, but only eighteen have been preserved, which extend from the birth of our Lord to the death of the Emperor Phocas, in 610, and the summaries of the five others, which include the reigns of Heraclius to Leo the philosopher. Callistus dedicated this work to Andronicus Paleologus the ancient; he had completed it before the age of thirty-six. It is only a compilation of the histories of Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, &c., but it contains fragments of some authors, whose works we no longer possess, and is written in a pleasing manner.

Schurzfleisch has called Nicephorus the Ecclesiastical Thucydides, on account of the beauty of his style; and Vossius calls him the Pliny of Theology, because he ornaments his accounts with so many fabulous details. The only MS. known of this history is at Vienna, in the Imperial Library. There is a Latin version by John Lang. Bale, 1553, fol. A French translation by Jean Gillot, Paris, 1567, fol. The Greek text was printed with the version by Lang, corrected by Fronton du Due. Paris, 1630, 2 vols., fol.

Besides this work, there remain some Verses of his; A Catalogue of the Emperors and Patriarchs of Constantinople ; A Short Abridgment of the Old Testament ; A Catalogue of the Fathers of the Church, &c.

Nicephorus is considered to be one of the principal compilers of the Synaxarius, or Abridgment of the Lives of the Saints; Combefis accuses him of having disfigured them, by inserting fables drawn from legends.— Weiss.

Hmm.  Surely a text worthy of a translation?  Let’s try searching for the barbarous-looking “Nikephoros Kallistos”…

A BBKL article in German hides him under Xanthopulos.

We like to work from a critical text, don’t we? And rightly so; a text established in a scholarly manner, from a proper analysis of the witnesses and due consideration of the style of the author and the period is a good thing.

But an awful lot of texts don’t exist in that form.  So … how usable are those pre-critical texts?

Today I compared the text of excerpts of Eusebius from Jerome’s Commentary on Matthew, published by Angelo Mai in the 1820’s from, no doubt, some older edition, with the latest critical text in the Sources Chretiennes.  I was struck by the lack of differences. 

Differences there were.  An ergo for an igitur, a quum for a cum.  A late antique peccatricibus is given by SC for Mai’s peccatores — but the sense is the same.  Indeed I couldn’t find an instance where the text changed meaning. 

I did find that Mai had punctuated his excerpts inadequately.  He didn’t indicate omissions properly.  Where he introduced the “Magi” as the subject of a verb, to clarify the sense, he didn’t indicate that he had added this word.  But what he did quote really differed little if at all from the SC text except in details such as above.

I am rather heartened by this.  I had expected worse. 

It will be interesting to do the same exercise with Ambrose’s Commentary on Luke, where again Mai quotes excerpts and the SC is the critical text, and see what the results are.

If I’m going to print a text alongside the translation of Eusebius, then I need to try to print a critical text.  Now I’m not going to edit the text — that crosses a line which I have decided not to cross.  But if the text has been edited more recently than Mai — not that difficult, in almost 200 years! — then I need to use the more up-to-date text.

I think I’m on top of the Greek and Syriac fragments.  I did go and find the text from the catena of Macarius Chrysocephalus, which Mai reprinted from an early publication — it was horrible to read, all abbreviations and ligatures.  It’s on Google books, thankfully.

But what about the Latin fragments?  There’s a couple of pages of these, excerpts from the Commentary on Luke by Ambrose of Milan, and the Commentary on Matthew by Jerome.  And both of these have been edited, I find, by the Sources Chretiennes.  So it looks as if I will have to ask for permission on these.  But first, I shall need to see whether the text really does differ.  I haven’t looked at either much.

Here’s the details I have on Jerome.  Even the Migne is more recent than the Mai!

• Migne, ed. Commentariorum In Evangelium Matthaei Libri Quattor, PL vol. 26, coll. 15-218D.
• E. Bonnard, Saint Jerome: Commentaire sur S. Matthieu, SC volumes 242 and 259 (Paris, 1977 and 1979)
• And Thomas Scheck has just translated Jerome’s commentary on Matthew in its entirety (Catholic University of America Press, 2008), which is online in preview here.

I’ll need to get hold of these, compare them with the excerpts used by Mai, and see what the damage is.

I never use my PC on Sundays.  I sit before the magic box all day and all evening, six days a week.  If I used it on Sunday too, I think I’d become insane.  I always recall the poor cabman in Black Beauty who had a seven-day licence, and died of overwork.  “I never got my Sundays,” he lamented at the end.

But a very interesting email came in an hour ago as I was off to bed, with some very sound suggestions about how to make and sell the Eusebius book.  It’s way too late for me to digest, so I’ll mull it over on Monday.  It included a sample page that had just the look that I am aiming for.

However, it also recommended strongly that I print a Greek text, rather like the Loebs.  This I have very much wanted to do.  But there are obstacles, which I need to find a way around.

The book consists of an epitome, plus catena fragments, plus Latin fragments, plus Syriac fragments.  The catena fragments are printed from Angelo Mai, and were reprinted by Migne.  This exists in electronic form, so would be simple to include.  The Syriac would need to be typed, and I’d have to pay for that.  But I have someone in mind who would do it.  The Latin, if necessary, I could do myself from Mai. 

However, it’s not so simple for the epitome.  This was translated from the critical edition by Claudio Zamagni, published a few months ago by Sources Chrétiennes.  It would be a bit odd to use Migne’s text instead of that, although I suppose I physically could. 

While I don’t believe that Zamagni’s text can be in copyright (although the apparatus and translation certainly can), I don’t want a law suit.  In fact I don’t want to do anything that Zamagni wouldn’t like, since I’ve swapped emails with him and know him.  So I need to discover who “owns” the text, and find out if I would be allowed to reprint the bare text.  As a plus, they should probably have an electronic text available.

I don’t want to use their apparatus; this is not about printing a critical text, but about allowing readers to check interesting points in the translation against the original.  Anyone who wants to see how Claudio made his text should use his book.  It’s sobering to reflect that Claudio’s dissertation, of which the SC text is but a part, blows the socks off almost any piece of anglophone scholarship that I have ever read.  This is a book, remember, from a man just out of university.  What a guy!

So I’ve fought off the urge to go to bed, and written to Claudio to ask about these issues.  Who owns the text?  Can he help?  I’ve also written to a French Jesuit scholar whom I know, whom I think is associated with the SC.  He may know who I need to talk to, and put in a good word for me.

It’s worth asking.  If they are willing for me to use that text, and can provide an electronic text, then that settles it; I will print the original language on facing pages.  I’ll commission the transcription of the Syriac, and we’ll do it. 

But if it gets all difficult, or they want serious sums of money, then my choices will be to print the Migne text anyway with a disclaimer — rather horrible — or else omit the original languages altogether.

Decisions, decisions!  In that situation, I wonder what readers would prefer?