The excellent Claudio Zamagni has now published his edition and translation of the epitome of Eusebius, Quaestiones ad Stephanum et Marinum in the Sources Chrétiennes series as “Questions évangéliques”. It’s available from Amazon.fr.
Category: Information access
Eusebius and Islam
There are some things which are obvious, once they have been invented. It took the genius of Eusebius of Caesarea to digest down into a tabular form of dates and events all the information about dates and events for Greece and Assyria and Persia and Rome — and the Hebrews — contained in the literature available to him. But once this Chronicle of World History existed, running up until the 20th year of Constantine, every copyist would feel the urge to add extra lines on the bottom, to bring it up to date. It’s sort of obvious, isn’t it?
To this obviousness we owe a mass of chronicles, not just in Greek but in Latin and Syriac. One such continuator was James of Edessa, the 8th century scholarly West Syriac bishop who attempted to introduce Greek vowels into the Syriac script, and partially succeeded. His continuation was composed in 692 AD.
The text is lost, but portions of it remain. The text of the 10th century World History of Michael the Syrian makes use of it verbatim in places, although not in tabular form. Better still, a 10th/11th century Syriac manuscript from the Nitrian Desert, now in the British Library (Ms. Additional 14685) contains a substantial chunk of it, albeit in an abbreviated form. It starts where Eusebius left off, and begins with a preface in which James discusses an error in calculation which he has found in Eusebius. Then it goes into a set of tables. Like the Armenian version of Eusebius (but unlike the original, or the Latin version), the columns of year numbers are positioned in the centre of the page, and events for those years written on either side.
I was looking around the web today for the ancient texts which mention Mohammed, and came across this site. To my surprise this chronicle by James is one of the earliest mentions of Mohammed. This has given impetus to me to put it online. But how to do so?
E. W. Brooks published the Chronicle in Zeitschrift fur deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft 53 (1899), p. 261-327. He didn’t publish the preface. He published the Syriac text, laid out in tabular form. He followed it with an English translation, not of all the text, but of the wording (events) against each year. He then republished it, this time with the preface, in CSCO Syr. 5, with a Latin translation of the lot in CSCO Syr. 6. Both text and translation contained the tabular layout.
I’m not going to transcribe the Syriac, or the Latin. I have already OCR’d the English, but there is a problem. The Islamic website above rightly quotes three chunks of relevant information. But… two of these are embedded in the table in the middle of the page, so not present in the English translation. Anyway… don’t we want to see the proper layout? I certainly would!
I think the solution will be to take the Latin translation, lay it out in HTML, and then substitute the English where it is available, translating the trivial bits of Latin where it is not. It will be fiddly; but it will work. Considering its importance, tho, something must be done.
Anti-Islamic sites targeted by DoS attack
It isn’t just bureaucrats trying to silence free speech online. I learn today that the Jihad-watch and Islam-watch sites were subjected to a Denial-of-Service attack, to load them down with bogus traffic so that no-one could access them. As yet the editors haven’t yet worked out precisely which post or comment the Moslem attackers were objecting to.
We do need better materials on Islamic origins online. For one thing, how many of us can even name the primary sources for the life of Mohammed? I can’t!
Getting hold of manuscripts of the Arabic historian Al-Makin
We all know that Shlomo Pines published an exotic version of the Testimonium Flavianum of Josephus, telling of the events of the life of Christ. This he tells us he got from the 10th century Arabic Christian historian, Agapius. But on closer reading, he says that he reconstructed the text of Agapius at this point using the 13th century Arabic Christian historian Girgis Al-Makin (George Elmacin). This hasn’t ever been published, never mind translated.
The text is in two halves, according to Georg Graf’s handbook, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur vol. 2, p.348-351. The first half covers history to the reign of Heraclius, divided into 120 sections on ‘important people’. The second half covers history from the Arab invasions to his own time.
I’d like to get a copy of a manuscript of this work, and see if I can get the portion on Jesus translated. Graf tells us that there is a manuscript in the Vatican (Vat. ar. 169, 1686 AD, on ff. 1r-194r); another in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Bodl. ar. christ. Nicoll. 47, 1 & 2 = Bodl. 316, 1646 AD), which also has a handwritten Latin translation of the end of part 1 and all of part 2; another in the British Library (or. 7564, AD 1280); another in Manchester (ar. 239, 18th century, but incomplete and breaking off at 1118/9 AD); another in Cairo (Coptic Museum Hist. 266, AD 1893); yet another in Cairo (Coptic Patriarchate Hist. 17, 18th century); one in the Sbath collection wherever that is now (Fihris 80 & 81); and finally one somewhere in the Orthodox Library in Aleppo between the wars, mentioned by L. Cheiko.
That sounds a lot – eight copies. But the Vatican library is closed, and emails are being ignored. The Bodleian is going through a greedy-nasty phase, and wants me to pay some enormous sum so they can make colour images for themselves but only supply low-grade monochrome images to me. The microfilm of the British Library manuscript only covers part 2, and the leaves are said to be disarranged anyway. The John Rylands Library in Manchester also demanded some huge and prohibitive sum for their partial manuscript. Manuscripts in Cairo are inaccessible; a set of microfilms in the USA likewise, for practical purposes. The location of the other two is really unknown.
Here we are in 2009; yet a researcher can’t get a copy of stuff held by state institutions. This is a ridiculous situation, surely?
There are also manuscript copies of each half. Perhaps the answer is to obtain some of these. There are three of part 1 in Paris, for instance, and it should be possible to obtain copies, I would have thought.
PS: The great thing about the Bibliotheque Nationale Francais is that they have scanned their catalogues and put them online. A quick search, and I find that Mss. Arab. 294 and 295 should cover the whole text. 294 is 250+ folios in length, tho. Less good is the prices demanded for colour digital images, which are basically free to make. The prices are prohibitive, which is very silly. I’ve been driven to ask for a duplicate of a microfilm in PDF form, for which they will charge 50 euros each (!). Even that is a ridiculous price for what basically costs half an hour of staff time. When will this ceaseless greed stop?
Legal attack on UK blogger
From time to time I comment on free speech online issues. This is not because I want to, but because of the threats to all bloggers which of course includes me. The best way to resist this is to highlight it.
I frequently read Guido Fawkes UK political blog for its alternative and somewhat subversive picture of what is really happening in UK politics. Today I read that a leading libel lawyer has tried to silence discussion online (and presumably succeeded in some cases) concerning one of his clients. See here for Guido’s comments. A court order threatening people with prison for revealing that there is a court order?!?
I recall that during the 80’s UK television acted as mouth-pieces for Irish terrorists. When the then government tried to prevent them, the BBC spitefully announced that “this report has been compiled in accordance with government reporting restrictions” whenever it had an relevant news, which was most nights for a couple of years. But that wasn’t censored in this way. I recall how the New Statesman in the 1960’s used to publish official D-notices, which indicated matters of vital security interest which should not be published, thereby violating them comprehensively, endangering us all, and insulting the system which was trying to protect them. They too went free. But then, they weren’t writing a blog.
UK. Free Speech. Now.
As a postscript, today I was reading a BBC piece about a new Chinese crackdown on dissent in Tibet. Apparently the Tibetan nationalists were being arrested for “trying to stir up racial hatred”; weasel words for “resisting the Chinese occupation.” Goebbels would be proud of whoever invented this phrase, I think.
GCS volumes online at Archive.org
List available here.
Collectio Avellana online
The ever readable Adrian Murdoch has discovered that this collection of papal and imperial letters from late Antiquity is now online at Google books. The Fourth Century site gives some links and a list of contents here. Quite by chance I was scanning a text the other night which made reference to it, and wishing it was online!
Another patristics site
I’d like to recommend Fourth Century, an academic blog. One excellent thing that they have done is to indicate the authors contained in the Clavis Patrum Latinorum and Clavis Patrum Graecorum. There are various lists of authors and works, all very useful. Translations are clearly indicated with authors. The intention is to raise the quality as compared to amateur sites, and a praiseworthy aim it is. My thanks to Ben Blackwell for the tip.
Talk of the CPL and CPG raises the question: isn’t it time these were online? Thick expensive books available only in research libraries were the best we could do in 1990. In 2008, these roadmaps of ancient literature should be online.
Who died and made the “IWF” Pope?
Bfore I discuss this issue, I should declare that I am a committed Christian, and I detest the exploitation of ordinary men involved in the pornography industry. Indeed I feel that criminal prosecutions should be much more common than they are.
But today something truly sinister happened. UK users were blocked from accessing a page on Wikipedia, by a conspiracy between the ISP’s and something called the “Internet Watch Foundation.” The page contained a 1970’s pornographic album cover by the Scorpions. Since the girl was underage, the image is theoretically child-porn. The argument is that we need to be protected from this – maybe – and these people have decided to “protect us.”
The band, however, are in no danger of prosecution. If we can believe the Wikipedia article, the record company put them up to it, many years ago, but are in no danger of prosecution either. No-one in the British legal establishment believes that this is child-porn or actionable, it seems. So I have to infer that the supposed pretext is bunk.
What is really worrying is that 60m British subjects can have censorship applied to their internet access, without their knowledge, consent, without a vote in parliament, without public debate, by a group of unelected unknowns. Guido Fawkes rightly blames the establishment, the unelected people who really wield power in this country, whose decisions are made at dinner parties by “the right people”. For who else could invent such an engine of control, never mind implement it? As Guido remarks, just imagine all the politicians salivating at the chance to censor stuff they don’t like!
What reply do we have, if these people decide to censor this blog, on some pretext or other? In the UK no ordinary person has access to the courts, so that is no defence. Worse, we’ve established in the last week that parliament is increasingly irrelevant and powerless – the Shadow Home Secretary was arrested and his offices searched at the instigation of the government – so even there is no defence. To whom is this new censorship accountable?
Now we’ve all heard stale old anti-censorship invective, and many of us feel sceptical about it. Many uttering it claim that they are opposed to all censorship. We have found that this is often hypocrisy; in truth they mean only that they only want to censor things they disapprove of – as we all do! – and that they have different ideas to most of us. I don’t want to endorse that sort of thing.
Like most people I don’t want to see internet porn. I certainly don’t want to see child porn! But… I don’t want to be placed in the electronic equivalent of chains either! I don’t trust any of the censors of our day to reflect what ordinary people like myself really dislike and object to.
As I see no prospect of rational, fair and sensible regulation of internet content by people whom I trust and who share my values, I would prefer to see none. This means tolerating the inevitable evils – and they are evils – but then I see no prospect that agreeing to censorship will make matters better. When I find that the people implementing this censorship are in fact indifferent to the issue – as the lack of arrests proves -, and and are using it only as a pretext for power, I am afraid. So should we all be.
We need to ask who these people are anyway? What is their agenda? How do they come to have this power? They aren’t normal people, they aren’t elected and I think we can be certain that they are not our friends, if they act like this.
No, this must be the establishment, creating a machine for censorship of the internet. The pretext is “protect our kiddies.” We need to take this claim with a grain of salt. In more religious times, doubtless it would be “protect our morals.” No doubt someone will find a way to claim it is to “protect the planet,” given time. All these are lies, and damn lies. What this is about is power over you and I, power over what we are and are not allowed to say.
The blogosphere has given a voice to the voiceless. We need to resist attempts to take it away.
Later: I learn from this story that Wikipedia owner Jimmy Wales sought legal advice. “My first thoughts when I was told that the Internet Watch Foundation had blocked the Wikipedia page was that we should take them to court. But because they’re not a statutory body, I’ve been told we can’t necessarily challenge their decision.”
Not merely does the establishment want to censor the internet; not only is it by-passing Parliament; but it’s bypassing the courts as well. Wales is rich and can afford lawyers, unlike the rest of us. But even so it will do him no good.
What a situation the UK is in!
Epiphanius: A new edition of “Panarion” in English; and an old one of “De Gemmis”
There is one really important patristic text that isn’t online. I refer to the massive compendium of heresies, the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis. An English translation was made by Frank Williams, and published by Brill. Massively expensive, I cracked and bought a copy some years ago. It is the main source for the Ebionites and Nazorean heretics, for instance.
It seems that a new edition of the translation has appeared. Kevin Edgecomb has done a rather excellent review of it, which indicates that it is a thorough reworking. Indeed the old one was rather stilted, so it needed it. Unfortunately he still translates “heresy” as “sect”. It will be a while before I lash out for it, tho!
I found Kevin’s post quite by accident. This evening I was browsing Quasten’s Patrology vol. 3 casually, and found that an English translation existed of Epiphanius work De gemmis. The work itself is lost in Greek, but a complete version exists in Old Georgian, and was translated in 1934 by R. P. Blake. Fragments also exist in Armenian and Ethiopic.
A google search revealed that Blake’s book was on Archive.org here, much to my delight since it turns out to be a rare book. I will try running that PDF through Finereader 9 and see if we can get an OCR’d text of the English translation.