The Sunday Sermons of John Xiphilinus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Among the fragments of the Gospel Problems and Solutions of Eusebius is one taken by Angelo Mai, back in the 1820’s, from a then unpublished Sunday Sermon by John Xiphilinus.

Xiphilinus is best known to us as the author of an epitome of Cassius Dio.  The epitome of Xiphilinus, together with that of Zonaras, are now all we have for many books of Dio.

But a Sunday sermon?  That’s new.

A query to LT-ANTIQ pointed me at the BBLK entry, by Erich Trapp.  This reads in English:

John Xiphilinus the Younger, nephew of the patriarch of the same name, also known as a philosopher who lived around 1080 as a monk and Logothetes in Constantinople. He made a name for himself as both a homiletic and historical writer.   In the continuation of Symeon Metaphrastes he wrote for the emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118) a dedicated Menologion for the months of February to August, which is, however, only extant in a Georgian version.  Furthermore, there are about 53 sermons (` ‘Eρμηνευτικαὶ διδασκαλίαι) by him on the Sundays of the year, which have been written by the author in a number of manuscripts.  He models himself particularly on John Chrysostom.  He also wrote on behalf of the Emperor Michael VII Ducas (1071-8) an extract from books 36-80 of Cassius Dio covering the period 68 BC to 229 AD.

Works: Georgian Proemion to the Menologion, ed K. Kekelidse, Christianskij Vostok 1 (1912) 325-347; M. van Esbroeck, La légende “romaine” des SS. Côme et Damien et sa métaphrase géorgienne par Jean Xiphilin, OCP 47 (1981 ) 389-425 and 48 (1982) 29-64; Homilies 1-25 ed. S. Eustratiades, ‘Oμιλίαι εἰς τὰς κυριακὰς τοῡ ἐνιαυτοῡ I, Trieste 1903; Cassius Dio, ed. Boissevain I-V, Berlin 1895-1931.

Lit:: Beck, Kirche 629f. (mit Bibl.); – LThK V (1960)1098 (F. Dölger); – F. Halkin, Le concile de Chalcédoine esquissé par Jean Xiphilin, Rev. ét. byz. byz. 24 (1966) 182-8; – H. Hennephof, Der Kampf um das Prooimion im xiphilinischen Homiliar, Studia byzantina et neohellenica Neerlandica 3 (Leiden 1972) 281-299; – Dict. Spir.VIII (1974) 792f. (D. Stiernon, mit Bibl.); – Der Kleine PaulyV (1975) 1434 (K. Ziegler); – L. Canfora, Xifilino e il libro LX di e Dione Cassio, Klio 60 (1978) 403-7; – P. Brunt, On Historical Fragments and Epitomes, Class. Quart. NS 30 (1980) 477-494.

 So it sounds as if 25 of the sermons have been published; not much.  A search in COPAC reveals that the PG 120 contains “orations”.  But no sign of the Eustratiades edition of sermons.  I haven’t been able to find any sign of these.

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Scanty referencing in older sources

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m going through the fragments of Eusebius printed by Angelo Mai in the 1820’s from catenas.  These often refer pretty briefly to the sources from which he copied them.  Thus one fragment is headed (translated):

From Macarius Chrysocephalus’ Florilegium, in Villoison, Anecdota, vol. 2, p.74.

Hum, yes, well of course.

Fortunately I can find information online, that tells me the book was printed in two volumes in 1781, that the author was “De Villoison”.  Knowing that ligatures are not well handled by Google Books search engine, I search for author=Villoison and title=Anecdota, and behold!  I find that the book is actually on Google books, here, the two volumes bound as one (the second volume starts on p.514 of the PDF).

Likewise I can find a mysterious volume by “R. Simon” which turns out to be A critical history of the text of the New Testament, here.

When I started on the Eusebius project, I travelled by car to Cambridge, spending around $60 in petrol to do so.  I went to the University Library.  I went to the admissions desk, and paid $15, and renewed my library ticket which had lapsed.  Then I went to the Rare Books room (which only Privileged People are permitted to enter, with a letter of reference from an academic), and I ordered up the two editions of Mai’s book.  Then I looked to see which pages I needed.  Then I filled in a paper form, in pencil of course.  Then I handed it in, with the books, and went away, and came back a week later.  And then I paid 25c per page for a grainy photocopy.  This I took home, turned into a PDF, and have used ever since.

How much easier and cheaper it was today, to find this source which I probably want only a few lines from!  We are truly, truly blest!

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Still asking for those strenae at New Year?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An incoming link from here reveals a fascinating custom:

I leave you with a little philological excursus on the meaning of “bistraynti `alayk”, the traditional greeting that every Lebanese kid learns to scream at the top of his/her lungs on New Year’s morning. I’ve always wondered about the etymology of this term, and I recently stumbled upon an intriguing theory.

In Lebanon, and I am told that it is also the case among Christians in Jordan and Syria, we have a traditional new year’s greeting: we say:

bistraynte @layk/ @layke/ @laykon etc.

What this greeting means is that my *bistrayne* (i.e. new year’s gift) is on you, [so] you have to give me the gift. One has to be quick so as to get the others to give the gift.

He then links this with strenae, the gifts that Romans gave at New Year.  If so — and there seems no reason why not — this must be somehow Byzantine.  Does anyone have any ideas?

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How do I find out how to sell my book online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The two translations that I have commissioned are coming along nicely.   The Eusebius volume is pretty close to done.

So… how to turn these collections of Word documents into books?  And how to sell the things when I have done so?

Off to Amazon, where I find that there is a small industry of people writing books on… how to self-publish your vanity novel.  Hum.  That is NOT the bracket I want to be in.  There’s quite a few on “how to sell on Amazon”.

Trouble is, buy a few and it costs quite a lot of money.  But my local library charges more than 5 GBP per interlibrary loan — around $8 — which means it’s actually not much more to just buy the things.  (I do hate greedy local authorities).  So I’ve bitten the bullet and bought four, and we’ll see what good they are.

I’ve also contacted a small UK publisher, Password Publishing, who offer to copyedit, do the book design, and typeset.  They want about 20 GBP an hour for various activities, which doesn’t seem too bad. Whether they are any good I know not, but will let you know.

So… I don’t know how to sell this stuff.  I do know that I need a quality product.  I do know that just turning a Word document into a PDF will NOT produce something professional; it produces something hard on the eye and almost unreadable.  And … I also need a business plan for this, to check that I’m not just burning money.

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Review: The Goodspeed Syriac fragments

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Fr. Dale A. Johnson has kindly sent me a PDF of his new book, The Goodspeed Syriac Fragments, Barhanna Monographs 2, New Sinai Press, 2009. ISBN 0-4116-1950-3.  The book is 34 pages long.

One difficulty some may have with it is that it is a little hard to work out what it contains, and what the object of the book is, other than by going through and looking.  An index would have been a very good idea, even for so short a book. 

In fact the purpose of the book is to point out various aspects of these manuscripts that might be of wider interest, and highlight them, while attaching photographs of the source.  The content is therefore similar to a journal article, rather than a monograph.

The book is clearly self-published; although the Library of Congress details at the front and ISBN look very professional, the remainder seems more like a PDF export from a Word document, in Times Roman font.  It would have been better if it had been justified text; but it does bring home to me the limitations of what can be done at home. 

The book consists of three chapters, each with images of excerpts from a manuscript,  Goodspeed Ms. 829, 716, and 823, with notes in English.  No transcription of the material or full translation is given.  The images come from the online website.

For Ms. 829, an introduction is followed by images and translations of the text.  For the other two manuscripts, there is an introduction and then a series of images.

One thing that is not made clear to the reader, is that it does not publish the entire manuscript in any case.  823 for instance is 18 folios long, as I learn from the useful introduction to the chapter about it.  It’s a fragment of a Peshitta NT ms.  Some points of interest are made, and then images given of parts of several pages.

Syriacists interested in the text of the New Testament will doubtless add it to their collection.  But the book seems a little overpriced, considering that it contains only a limited amount of original material.  However this material does highlight some interesting points in these manuscripts.

Copies may be obtained from here.

UPDATE: I have revised the review after becoming aware that the colour images are all online.

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Another new year

Posted on by Roger Pearse
Palm trees and coral sands
Palm trees and coral sands

Now is the time of year to see where we’re going.  After all, just like a sailing ship on the ocean, if we don’t check our course periodically, we will drift.  And this voyage is one we don’t get the chance to do again.

What I tend to do is look back over the last 12 months.  I look at what I can remember of that period, and ask what I did with it.  What do I actually remember?  Which bits of it will I still remember in a year’s time?  If nothing… did I use it wisely?

A dying old man is grateful for every sunrise he sees.  One more day is one more victory.  But all of us are in fact in the same position.  We feel rich, we feel that we have plenty of time.  Until, that is, we don’t. 

An awful lot of people work away steadily all their lives, doing what they’re told, earning a wage at an office.  One day they’re old.  They’re tired.  There’s a retirement party, and a gold watch.  “Good old Bill!” everyone says, “Have a happy retirement!”.  But they go home alone.  And the next morning, they wake up and … there’s nothing.  Their whole life is behind them.  “What do I do now?”  Suddenly life is empty.  But they’re too old now, too tired to start again, to make something of their lives, to fulfil ambitions.  “What’s on the box?”

This will surely happen to each and every one of us, unless we force our will upon our lives.  Drift is ghastly.  Drift is walking on the treadmill, earning money to pay the bills, getting home tired each night.

But we have only this time on earth, for whatever we want to do.  Each year gets shorter, as anyone in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s will tell us.  What are we doing with it?

The best guide to what we will do next year is what we did last year.  In my case, I worked for most of it.  I earned money.  But I come to the end of the year, and the money is mostly gone.  And so is another year of my life.  What was 2009, to me?  If I died tomorrow — unlikely — and someone wrote an obituary of me — unlikely — what would they say that I did in 2009?  What was memorable?  In what way did I warm both hands at the fire of life?  Or did I just plod on, doing the urgent things, the things that don’t matter once they’re done; and never getting to the important things, the things that warm our hearts and make life worth living.

We’re not ants.  We don’t live, just to live.  We are men and women, full of the fire of creation, capable of anything and nothing.

In 2010 I shall go to Syria and Lebanon.  That much, at least, I will mark on the pages of my life.  That much I shall remember when I am old and tired; that in 2010 I got onto an aircraft and flew out to the East. 

Indeed one of the few things I can recall from 2009 is that I made a day-trip to Edinburgh.  A small thing; but whatever became of the other 364 days!?!  I cannot well say.

Grab hold of life.  All of us have things we want to do.  I want to see the Northern Lights.  I want to see an iceberg.  I want to see a glacier calving.  I want to see an active volcano.  I want to go to Australia.  I want to go to the South Seas, and see coral beaches and palm trees on the Indian ocean, as I did when a child.  The beach along which I walked at the age of 5 may have long since been washed away, but in my mind I still stand under the palm tree and look at the lagoon and hear the roar of the surf and see the blue water, and baskets of red starfish by the roadside. 

These memories I store up in my heart, against the cold times.  I have been remiss this year, in filling the granaries of my heart.  Now is the time to plan, to book, to divide the year into sections and to make things happen.  They don’t have to be expensive things.  They just have to be things that we want to do, which are neither trivial nor tedious.   For remember; next year, we shall be just a little more tired again.  It gets harder, not easier.

In this way only may we reach year end with contentment. 

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The perils of translating from old editions

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still working on editing the translation of the Gospel Problems and Solutions by Eusebius of Caesarea.  The fragments of catenas and the like are all printed by Angelo Mai in the early 19th century, or reprinted by him from yet earlier non-critical publication.  In other cases he is printing unpublished material.  This means that I need to check for subsequent publication.

Several extracts come from the Questions of Anastasius of Sinai.  A web search — thank heavens for Google — reveals that an edition appeared in 2006, by Marcel Ricard, in the Brepols Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca, vol. 59.  I need the text of questions 9, 148 and 153, so my translator can compare the text given by Mai with that of a critical text.  Sadly the libraries are all closed when I am at home, so a day off for a day trip to Cambridge will be necessary.

Another extract — not actually from the Gospel Problems is given “from unpublished chronicles by George Hamartolus and Johannes Siculus.”  A search reveals that the chronicle of George Hamartolus or George Monachus was edited badly in 1859 by a chap called Muralt, and reprinted by Migne in PG 110.  No sign of a fresher edition, so I’m not sure I need to do much more.

But “Johannes Siculus”… that could be anyone.  All it means is “John of Sicily”; every third Byzantine was called John, and thousands of them lived in Sicily.  A search in Google on “Johannes Siculus” was rather dispiriting!  Fortunately “John of Sicily” was better.  This led to H. Heinrich, Die Chronik des Johannes Sikeliota, Graz, 1892, edited from a Vienna manuscript. A book of that date ought to be online, but … it’s in German.  Das Reich ist immer offline.

So off to COPAC to search for a copy offline.  Several searches later, I draw a blank.  Even a search by author=Heinrich, date=1892, draws a blank.  But I have played before, and am not dispirited.  I am reasonably sure that a copy exists in the UK.  So I wonder if this dratted thing is hidden in a serial?  Hmm.

Back to Google to look for clues, searching for “Johannes Sikeliota”.  And sure enough I find the book mentioned with an addendum, “In Reihe: Schulprogramm Graz / 1892”.  This gives the author as “Alfred Heinrich”.  Search COPAC for the series; nothing.  Ah, the joy of offline knowledge…

Then I remember that Google book search doesn’t work properly outside the US.  I retry via a US server.  The book at least appears now, albeit clearly not online, here.  I click the “Find in a library” link (to worldcat).  And it turns out to be a thesis, or dissertation, never published.  Boy that site is slow, tho.  It never actually finished displaying.

Does anyone know where I could get a copy?

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Angelo Mai comments on a catena fragment of Eusebius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the fragments of Eusebius, Mai added this note.  It was translated for me by the translator, but has no place in the book, so I give it here.

Another delightful thing has happened to me.   While I was translating from Greek into Latin all the passages of Eusebius in the MS of Nicetas’ Catena on Luke, I fortunately observed that the last passage of Eusebius, written on the two final pages of the MS, corresponded word-for-word with Theophania bk 4 chs.8 and 9, as read, in translation from Syriac, in the English edition of the Rev. Samuel Lee, top of p.224 – top of p.229.   The original Greek fragment discovered by us will now have to be placed in our own Greek edition of Theophania, between nos. 5 and 6 on p.121.  Furthermore, as I have already more than once said elsewhere, Nicetas was in the habit of reproducing portions of Theophania in his MS catena, sometimes with the actual title of the work, but sometimes just ascribed to Eusebius by name; hence, before finding out about the English or Syriac editions of the work, we could not ascribe them to the Theophania.  This we have now done, thanks to the English book; just as the English editor will, we think, be pleased in his turn to incorporate our Greek originals, when convenient, into his book.   To avoid repetition here, let us refer our readers to the discussions in the Observations on p.108 and pp 157-9 above, as well as in scattered remarks in the notes.  In any case, it is evident from this that another fragment of ours, cited by Rev. S. Lee in a note on p.224, cannot, as he would wish, be applied to this passage of Theophania.

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More on “Greek without Tears”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been in correspondence with Dr Flynn, the author of the package Greek without tears.  This is essentially a keyboard for polytonic Greek, at a pretty cheap price.  My translator used it to enter the Greek text for Eusebius, so I have had to take an interest in it.

The software has been upgraded to work with unicode, and his proprietary font, GrkAcca, now has a unicode version GrkAccaU.  Even better, the new version of Greek without tears contains a conversion utility.  This means that the new code can easily be turned into some standard unicode font.  This will make my Eusebius translation rather easier to print, when it arrives.

I’ve also been going through Angelo Mai’s edition of the fragments of Eusebius Quaestiones, and the notes are actually quite interesting.  I’ve asked the translator if he fancies doing these as well, as I think quotation might be a good idea.

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Pseudonymous emails

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I received a delightful email today from someone calling themselves Pseudonymous.  I can’t ask his permission to post it, since he gave no valid email address.  But I would like to reply, and this seems to be the only way to do so.  The email began:

You commented that Lewis apparently was unaware of IVF: perhaps it was too Low Church for him to take seriously. I wonder whether he had any knowledge of J. I. Packer’s writings or the sermons of David Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

I wonder too.  But I don’t think that Lewis would worry about churchmanship. 

… as for the pseudonym, you seem to be several titles ahead of me in the game of “oh, that hasn’t been translated yet” and I’m rather cranky that you got there first 🙂

I’m not sure that I entirely understand.  I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage anyone wanting to translate stuff.  But there is no end of useful texts that have never been translated, and I would encourage anyone to take some on and get them translated!  The more the merrier!

This blog allows anonymous comments, and the email address supplied is not vetted.  So feel free to reply that way.

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