Samuel al-Suryani

Posted on by Roger Pearse

While I was looking at the medieval Coptic history attributed to Abu Salih and in reality by Abu’l Makarim, I came across the publication of this work, complete, in four volumes by an Egyptian monk, Samuel al-Suryani.  I haven’t ever managed to set eyes on a copy. 

Fr. Samuel went on to become a bishop, and is now deceased.  This was all I knew of him.

But an email brings me more details on his life. 

UPDATE: Apparently this information relates to a different bishop Samuel!  My apologies for the misinformation.  See attached comment.

It seems that he was killed during the assassination of President Sadat of Egypt in 1981.  A prominent figure, he was on the dais with the president at the time, and died from a grenade.

There is a detailed Evening News Obituary online, which outlines his life.  It seems that he nearly became Coptic patriarch.  There is also a book mention.

It’s worth remembering that Coptic Christianity and scholarship takes place against a background of constant violence.  I do wish, tho, that Coptic publications were more easily accessible!

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Chrysostom project dead

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Two-thirds of Chrysostom’s Oratio 2 against the Jews have never been translated into English.  The text was lost, and only recovered a decade ago.  I commissioned someone to translate it, but the sample was unsatisfactory.  I’ve had to cancel him, therefore.  I won’t proceed with this translation project now, as I am feeling rather over-committed and worn out.  So I need to load shed.  Maybe another time.

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More project news

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Origen’s 10th homily on Ezekiel (out of 14) is pretty much done, a bit of discussion aside.

Better yet, I have received the Arabic transcription and English translation of three treatises from Sbath’s collection of Arabic Christian theological material.  These are #17, #18 and #19.  All look very good, and one at least will bear posting here when I’ve paid for it.  All are concerned with the truth of Christianity, ca. 900 AD.

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Cortez would have agreed

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The difficulty with attempting to sound sublime is the risk of sounding ridiculous:

I believe that spending time living in another culture teaches you things that you can never learn in a classroom.

Such as “what are they afraid of” and “where do they hide their gold”…

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State of the al-Makin project

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Back 1971 Shlomo Pines published a strange version of the so-called Testimonium Flavianum of Josephus, where Josephus mentions Christ.   This came from the 10th century Arabic Christian writer Agapius, whose history I have translated and placed online.  But in fact the sole manuscript of part 2 of Agapius, which refers to Josephus, does NOT contain the text that Pines published.  This text is a reconstruction, using portions of text from the 13th century Arabic Christian historian al-Makin or Elmacinus, also known as ibn Amid.  Pines believed that these preserved portions of the text of Agapius lost in translation.

There are five big Arabic Christian histories; Agapius, Eutychius, Bar Hebraeus, al-Makin, and one which I can never remember [Yahya ibn Said al-Antaki].  But no edition or translation exists of al-Makin.  The second half — from the start of the Moslem period — was published and translated into Latin back in the 17th century.  The end portion of the chronicle, which deals with Saladin and his dynasty, was not present in the manuscript used then, but has been published recently with French translation.

An email this morning asked me the state of this project.  I’m not actively progressing it.  But I have obtained reproductions of two manuscripts, and the second half of a third.  I have a partial list of chapters of the first part from one of them.  And I have three translators, all of whom would be competent to work on the text.

As with so much in this life, all we need is money.  Maybe next year, when the downturn eases.

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So who is Theo of Smyrna? (or even Theon of Smyrna)

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Following on from my previous post on Mithras in Zenobius, who is this Theo of Smyrna who also mentions a list of the eight elements, probably from Persian sources?  All I have is an edition, ‘Hiller’ and “p. 104, 20”.

There are times when Wikipedia is a useful summary of whatever there is online.  Theon of Smyrna has an article.  He’s a technical writer, a mathematical philosopher of the early 2nd century AD.  At least one of his works is extant, the expositio rerum mathematicarum ad legendum Platonem utilium or exposition of mathematical ideas useful for the reading of Plato.  A look at COPAC shows me that it was edited by Eduard Hiller in the Tuebner series in Leipzig in 1878.  A photographic reprint was made in 1995.  A French translation Exposition des connaissances mathematiques utiles pour la lecture de platon was made by J. Dupuis in 1892, reprinted 1966.  Thanks to cenforce Google books, both are online.

And finally a curious English translation does seem to exist:

Theon, of Smyrna: Mathematics useful for understanding Plato; translated from the 1892 Greek/French edition of J. Dupuis by Robert and Deborah Lawlor and edited and annotated by Christos Toulis and others; with an appendix of notes by Dupuis, a copious glossary, index of works, etc. Series: Secret doctrine reference series Published: San Diego : Wizards Bookshelf, 1979. ISBN: 0913510246. 174pp. Notes: Cover title: Twn kata to mathematikon chresimwn eis ten Platonos anagnwsin.

Hmm.  That sounds like an amateur translation of the French of Dupuis.

So… what does he say?  Well, I find from the PDF that the material is actually on p.105 of Hiller, lines 4-5 (p.120 of the Google books PDF).  The magic word “Orphicos” appears above it, and then three lines of quotation.  The name of Evandros appears beneath.

In the notes at the foot  of the page is a cross-reference to Zenobius V, 78, which we examined earlier.  Then a list of related material: Porphyry De antro nympharum 24, calling Mithras “demiurgos” (creator);  and Proclus’ commentary on the Timaeus of Plato p. 93 E, where the Orphic creator-god Phanes is given the same title.  Then a couple of old scholarly works are listed, on Orphism.  All this, incidentally, in a section on numbers.

Let’s see if we can find out what the context is.

So now I go to Dupuis, who gives quite an introduction and even lists manuscripts.  The xanax order French National Library alone has a bunch of them, so this is plainly not a rare work, although I had never heard of it before.

A bit of guesswork and looking at an index for “Evandre” gives us page 173 (PDF page is 210), which is precisely the passage in question.  It is chapter 47 of the work.  Here it is, from Dupuis’ French.

47.  The number eight which is the first cube composed of unity and seven. Some say that there are eight gods who are masters of the universe, and this is also what we see in the sayings of Orpheus:

By the creators of things ever immortal,
Fire and water, earth and heaven, moon,
And sun, the great Phanes and the dark night.

And Evander reports that in
priligy online Egypt may be found on a column an inscription of King Saturn and Queen Rhea: “The most ancient of all, King Osiris, to the immortal gods, to the spirit, to heaven and earth, to night and day, to the father of all that is and all that will be, and to Love, souvenir of the magificence of his life.”  Timotheus also reports the proverb, “Eight is all, because the spheres of the ambien world which rotate around the earth are eight.” And, as Erastothenes says,

“These eight spheres harmonise together in making their revolutions around the earth.”

As a literary reference to syncretism between Mithras and Phanes, this lacks quite a bit.  But interesting, all the same, as examples of the sort of pseudo-knowledge being mixed up in antiquity.

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Zenobius on Mithras

Posted on by Roger Pearse

While working over the Wikipedia Mithras article, I found mention of syncretism with the Orphic deity Phanes.  It seems that we learn of this from inscriptions; but also that there is literary evidence of the syncretism of cialis Mithras and Phanes, in the proverbs of Zenobius.  The reference is: ”Proverbia” 5.78 (in  Corpus paroemiographorum Graecorum vol. 1, p.151) This is Century V, 78 of Zenobius’ work.  The reference comes from Manfred Clauss’s splendid book on Mithras, p.70 n.84.  In the xanax Google books PDF it is p.208.  But… I don’t see the name of Phanes here.   I see a list of deities; the name of Mithras is among them.  Can anyone with more Greek than me help?

I have buy ativan posted about this obscure 2nd century proverb collector before.  His work doesn’t exist in English, and yet here again are interesting snippets on antiquity.

UPDATE: Fortunately I find more information in Albert de Jong, Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin literature, p.309:

A final text that must be discussed is a list of elements attributed to an unknown Evandrus by the excerptor Didymus Zenobius 5.78.  “Evandrus said that the gods who rule over everything are eight: Fire, Water, Earth, Heaven, Moon, Sun, Mithra, Night.”  The appearance of Mithra in this list suggested to some an Iranian background to this passage.  An almost identical list can be found in Theon of Smyrna, but there instead of Mithra we find the name of Phanes.[226] In an interpretation of these passages, Reitzenstein invoked the importance of the Elements in Manichaean and Zoroastrian literature, and concluded that the lists of elements were typical for Iranian religions.

Both phrases, however, are concerned wilh the proverb “All is eight” …; this ogdoad is divided into a monad and a heptad. There can be no doubt that the lists are Greek; more particularly, they have cheap provigil an Orphic background. This is not only evident from the reference to the Night in both lists of eight elements, but particularly from the reference to antabuse cheap Phanes. It is well known that Phanes and Mithras were connected with each other in the context of the Mithraic mysteries. There is not only icono-graphic evidence for this identification, but also textual evidence, from a famous Mithraic inscription to Zeus-Helios-Mithras-Phanes.[228] Theo of Smyrna also explicitly introduces the list as deriving from Orphic literature.

226. Theo Smyrnaeus, p. 104, 20 Hiller.

228 CIMRM 475; for Mithras and Phanes, cf. H.M.Jackson, “Love makes the World go round: The Classical Greek Ancestry of the Youth with the Zodiacal Circle in Late Roman Art’, in Hinnells (ed.). Studies in Mithraism 131-164.

This seems to be the evidence; without the inscriptions, it would probably not be very good.  It would be nice to track down Theo of Symrna, tho.

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Burning the Arian books after Nicaea

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A very nice image has appeared on Wikipedia here, albeit with a daft title.


Bookburning
Bookburning

“Drawing on vellum. From MS CLXV, Biblioteca Capitolare, Vercelli, a compendium of canon law produced in Northern Italy ca. 825.” Click on the image to get the full size image.

Of course the people doing the burning at the bottom are all tonsured, and I suppose represent the church, not the state.

While we’re on the subject of freedom of speech, I enjoyed the note at the bottom:

The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that “faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain, and that claims to the contrary represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain”.

Well said.  Attempts by libraries to extort money through blocking circulation of images like these are scandalous.

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Revising the Wikipedia Mithras article

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Last night I sat down and spent several hours working on the Mithras article on Wikipedia.  The effort is probably futile, but the article has been one of the worst on Wikipedia, and a constant source of misinformation online.

My principle was to ensure that there was either a reference to a primary source, or to a modern Mithras specialist; or to remove the material.  The curse of information on Mithras online is the tendency to attribute without reference every event of the life of Jesus to Mithras, usually for reasons of religious hate.

This was all sparked by an email from another editor, “Fullstop”, who was trying to heal the article.  He supplied me with a very useful review by Roger Beck of a book on Mithras by Reinhold Merkelbach, which incidentally reviewed most of the scholarship.

He also supplied me with an article by Vermaseren [1] discussing the idea that Mithras (meaning Persian Mitra) was born from a woman, or was a son of Ahura-Mazda: 

The scarce literary evidence as well as the abundant archaeological material give us different versions of the way in which Mithras came into the world and it is hardly possible to reconcile the two.

In the Yasht 10, the hymn of the recent Avesta, in which Mithras is specially invoked, the Persian god of light appears resplendent in a golden colour on the top of the mountain Hara berezaiti, the present Elburz in Persia, from where he looks over the whole earth of the Aryan people.

This is not a description of a real birth, but this manifestation of the deity as the giver of light, pouring forth his largess every morning anew and, besides, the feminine name of the mountain were apt to lead to the conception of the birth of the god from a Mother-Goddess. Yet, the idea of Mithras as a son of Ahura-Mazda, the Knowing Lord, or as born naturally from a woman, though attested by some late Armenian writers, did not become traditional 3). Mithras’ birth remained an obscure affair:…

3) In general Cumont, Mon. Myst. Mithra I 160 f ; G. Messina, “Magi a Betlemme e una predizione di Zoroastro”, Roma 1933; Christensen, “L’Iran sous les Sassanides”, Copenhague 19442, 155.

The sloppiness of references in earlier writers on Mithras means that we are left to wonder just who said what.  Does anyone know who are referred to here?

UPDATE: An email tells me that Cumont, Textes et Monumentes II, pp.3-5 (online here), contains some Armenian sources.  And so it does.  First is a fragment of Eznik of Kolb, De Deo; then one from the Agathangelos.  Neither is to our purpose.

Next up is “Elisee Vartabed” (which may be French  but doesn’t sound Armenian) and his “History of Vartan”.  Apparently this is a 5th century author.  Cumont quotes two different French translations, which I have run into English:

[From the apology for Christianity addressed by the Armenian bishops to Mihr-Nerseh, the minister of the king of Persia, Yezdegerd II:]

You have said that God was born from a woman; you shouldn’t probe this, or express horror at the idea.  In fact Ormizd and Ahriman were born from a father, and not of a mother; if you think about it, you can’t accept that.  A thing still more singular: the god Mihr was born of a woman, as if one could have commerce with one’s own mother.

[Apparently a better translation of the last sentence:]

Your god Miher is not only born of a woman, but what is still more ridiculous, he is born from an incestuous commerce with his own mother!

[A little later:]

One of your most ancient sages has said that the god Mihr was born from a mother, who was of the human race; he is no less a king, son of God, and the valiant ally of the seven gods.

This is followed by a quotation from Moses of Chorene — also not relevant for us — and that’s the lot.

So Vermaseren’s “some late Armenian writers” reduces to one, the 5th century historian “Elisee Vartabed”, in a speech given by the Armenian bishops to the persecuting Sassanid Persian governor.   I wonder if there are any more?

So, what can be found out about this author?  Well, first, there is at least one English translation, from 1830, here, where he is called Elisaeus.  A more modern English version exists by Robert Thomson, Eliseus Vardapet: History of Vardan and the Armenian War, Harvard (1982).  The text does not seem to be online, however.  I might fix that by OCR’ing the 1830 version.

[1] M. J. Vermaseren, “The Miraculous Birth of Mithras“, Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, Vol. 4, Fasc. 3/4 (1951), pp. 285-301

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Notes on progress

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Sorry about the lack of blogging: 

I try to take one day at a time, but lately several days have ganged up and ambushed me. — Anon

The sample of the translation of the lost portion of Chrysostom’s sermon 2 against the Jews has been reviewed.  It isn’t wildly satisfactory, and I need to consider whether another translator would do better.  The problem is with the more complex sentences, where he seems to get lost.

I’ve posted the two treatises by Yahya ibn `Adi in the NASCAS Arabic Christian group; and got feedback that the commas in the Arabic are the wrong way up!  I’ll put these on my website and announce them properly at the weekend.

The Eusebius Syriac fragments are being worked over, and the translator has asked if I would like a transcription. I would, of course; but at what price?

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