Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
Dr Anthony Alcock has translated for us all a collection of sayings, some Syriac, some Greek, which are attributed to St Ammonius, or Amun, a disciple of the desert father St Anthony. These take the form of short anecdotes.
It’s lovely to have these in English! The PDF is here:
I learn from the Twitter feed of the excellent and erudite Pieter Bullens of a curious story. One of the most important manuscripts of Chrysostom’s Homilies on Matthew, currently University Library, Basle, under the shelf-mark B. II. 25, is to be sold at Sothebys after a 38-year loan.
The Sotheby’s catalogue contains a number of images, and some truly fascinating details.
The most recent edition of this work is F. Field, Sancti patris nostri Joannis Chrysotomi Archiepiscopi Constantinopolitani Homiliae in Matthaeum, 3 vols., 1839. (The Patrologia Graeca text being a reprint of the 17th century edition). But this manuscript was unknown to Field, being published only in 1900.
What makes it special is a connection with the Latin translations of Chrysostom – in various passages it gives the same reading as Anianas of Celeda in the 5th century, where the majority of manuscripts are in error.
It would be nice to think that the university library in Basle have made a digital copy of the whole manuscript before it went to Sothebys. It might be optimistic, too.
Sales of collections are always sad. Sales of manuscripts often indicate the presence of death taxes, and other signs of the rapacity of the modern taxman. It is probably the German state that is responsible for throwing this item to the mercy of the art market, but I don’t know this for fact.
As I don’t know how long this information will remain online, let me give a copy of the details here. I wonder who wrote it? It is magnificent!
PROVENANCE
(1) Palaeographical analysis by Ernst Gamillscheg and Michel Aubineau suggests that this manuscript was written in the late 9th century in Constantinople; the close relationship with manuscripts written by Nikolaus Studites, notably a codex signed by Nikolaos Studites in 835 (St Petersburg, National Library, MS 219; see S. Lake, VI: Manuscripts in Moscow and Leningrad, 1936, no.234) and another manuscript attributed to Studites (Vatican Library, MS gr.2079; see E. Follieri, Codices graeci Bibliothecae Vaticanae …, 1969, pl.13 and B.L. Fonkitch, ‘Notes paléographiques …’, Thesaurismata, 16, 1979, pp.154-56) may indicate an origin in the Studiu-Monastery. (2) The first and two last leaves replaced in the late 13th century by an accomplished scribe. (3) Liturgical rubrics added by a 14th-century scribe (e.g. ff. 8v, 36r, 54r) indicate that the manuscript was kept at the Hodegon Monastery in Constantinople; another example is the Codex Ebnerianus (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. T. inf. 1.10) that mentions the copyist and annotator Joasaph for the Hodegon Monastery in 1391 (see I. Hutter, Corpus der byzantinischen Miniaturhandschriften, I: Oxford, Bodleian Library, 1977, no.39 and E. Gamillscheg and D. Harlfinger, Repertorium aus Bibliotheken Grossbritanniens, 1981, no.208). (4) In England by 1900 (binding). Offered by Quaritch in their Catalogue No. 271: A Catalogue of Rare and Valuable Books, 1909, no.604; Catalogue No. 290: A Catalogue of Bibles, Liturgies, Church History and Theology, 1910, no.354; and probably also in subsequent catalogues; sold on 30 June 1914 to Karl W. Hiersemann, Leipzig, for £190 (BL, Add.64227: Quaritch, Account Ledgers 1913 onwards, p.174). (5) Bogislav Freiherr von Selchow (1877-1943), lyricist, naval officer and commander of Free Corps Marburg; his coat of arms inside the upper cover. (6) Martin Wahn (1883-1970), vicar and member of the Church Council of the Confessing Church in Kamienna Góra, Silesia, until 1947; died in Singen, southern Germany, just north of the German-Swiss border, in 1970. He may have received the manuscript through Bogislav’s sister Anni von Gottberg who was a member of the Confessing Church, Potsdam, and opponent of National Socialism. By descent to Martin Wahn’s grandson and then on deposit at the University Library, Basel, 1980-2018, under the shelf-mark B. II. 25.
TEXT
The manuscript includes the first 44 homilies of John Chrysostom on the Gospel of Matthew. The most recent critical edition of the text is F. Field, Sancti patris nostri Joannis Chrysotomi Archiepiscopi Constantinopolitani Homiliae in Matthaeum, 3 vols., 1839. (Migne’s Patrologia Graeca edition of 1862 simply reprinted Montfaucon’s older edition of 1612). None of these editions took into account the present manuscript because it was unknown to them. It contains numerous instances where its text sides with the Latin translation of Annianus (5th century AD Alexandria) over against the other medieval Greek manuscripts of John Chrysostom, e.g. folio 54 line 34 (Homily 8, vol. 1 p.102 Field) the MS reads parresias (which is correct and adopted by Field) over against periousias as given by MSS A, B, and the Armenian version – so that it can be seen that this MS represents an older tradition.
The manuscript contains extensive quotations (pointed out by diplai [>] in the left margin) from the Greek text of the Gospel of Matthew and other Old and especially New Testament texts. It is worth mention that the 9th-century scribe writes incipits of individual homilies and sometimes quotations from the text of Matthew in older-looking majuscules rather than the 9th-century minuscules for the text of John Chrysostom. There are frequent marginal ANNOTATIONS, some in early hands (if not identical with the original scribe’s), some later (including the hand of the 14th-century rubricator) which provide exegetical glosses, notation of variants from collation with other manuscripts, corrections of copying errors, and addition of scribal omissions (including the missed out text appended by means of the tipped in binding strip before folio 230). Insertions of missed out texts are regularly signalled in the margin preceded by an insertion sign in form of a modern division sign.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
E. Gamillscheg and M. Aubineau, ‘Eine Unbekannte Chrysostomos-Handschrift (Basel Universitätsbibliothek, B. II. 25)’, Codices Manuscripti. Zeitschrift für Handschriftenkunde, 7, 1981, pp.101-08.
P. Andrist, ‘Structure and History of the Biblical Manuscripts Used by Erasmus for His 1516 Edition’, in Basel 1516. Erasmus’ Edition of the New Testament, 2016, p.85 note 14.
Readers will understand if I admit that a purely temporary shortage of funds here at Pearse Towers means that regrettably I cannot save this item for us all. Those truly interested in doing so had better have wallets with more than $250,000 inside them. Petty cash to the well-connected, of course, but not a sum that most of us will dispose of.
Whoever buys the item is likely to be a gentleman and a scholar, as well as a rich man. Let us hope that he will place the item online.
A couple of years after his 1911 publication on the miracles of the Dragon and the Demon, Aufhauser went on to publish the text of 19 miracle stories or other pieces about St George, in the Teubner series in 1913. (Online at Archive.org here).
The book contains text(s) taken from several manuscripts. Unhappily these include the codex Athous Ioasaphaion 308, written on paper so late as 1878. Yes, that is right – only 35 years before the Teubner, and written, much of it, in modern Greek. The stories agree on content, but little else; so, mysteriously, Aufhauser edits two or three or more versions in parallel, in a hard to follow manner.
Here are the items in it (I’ve translated the Latin titles given by Aufhauser). Aufhauser gave summaries of the first 13 items in his 1911 book, which I have already given here. Items 14-19 he prints for the first time.
1. De columna viduae – The column of the widow
2. De imagine perfossa – The stabbed image
3. De iuvene Paphlagonensi – The Paphlagonian young man
4. De filio ducis Leonis – The son of Duke Leo
5. De bubus Theopisti – The runaway oxen of Theopistus
6. De visione Saraceni – The Saracen’s vision
7. De imagine – The image
8. De milite interfecto – The murdered soldier
9. De iuvene Mytilenaeo capto – The captured young man of Mytilene
10. De libo – The pancake
11. De Manuele – Manuel
12. De dracone – The dragon
13. De daemone – The demon
14. De zona S. Georgii – The belt of St George
15. Apocalypsis S. Georgii – The apocalpyse of St George
16. Hymnus in honorem S. Georgii – A hymn in honour of St George
17. De mansionario – The inn-keeper
18. De statua marmorea – The marble statue
19. De voto coram imagine – The vow before the image
The contents of items 14-19 are not given except in the text.
I understand that a number of these items exist in French translation, in A.J. Festugiere, Saint Thecle, saints Cosme et Damien, saints Cyr et Iean (extraits), Saint Georges (Paris 1971), 33-82. That’s a lot of pages; maybe he translated the lot! I shall place an ILL and see.
I find that various of these miracles are recounted online on orthodox pages. I don’t know if they have much connection to the texts published by Aufhauser.
My purpose in investigating all this has been to discover if there are literary texts which should be translated into English. But it seems more than doubtful that any of this deserves translation, at least by me. A summary of the contents of each story would serve for most purposes; for none of these texts are canonical, or literary, or form any kind of collection. They are just stories, legends, that circulate. So why spend much time on translating one of the many forms in which a given story exists in the manuscripts?
The passio of St George is another matter, as there is clearly a literary history involved. It is possible that the materials around St George and the dragon might usefully be put into English, because of the importance of that myth to the English-speaking world.
But all in all, it’s some distance from what I want to be doing.
So much is online these days, that I hardly use my local library any more. Also I have rather more money than I did thirty years ago, and the temptation is strong to simply order any book that I want, and have it appear at my house – or my hotel room – the next day.
It is, of course, terribly wasteful to do this. But I admit to having succumbed twice in recent weeks, once for Christopher Walter’s The Warrior Saints – a fine book indeed, and absolutely critical for anyone interested in the St George literature – and also for the Ashgate Research Companion to Hagiography volume 2. The latter was probably a very expensive mistake, for I have still not opened it.
Another text was not online, nor readily available for purchase. So I sent an email to my local library asking them to get it for me. I was mildly surprised to be told that my library card had expired. After using the same card for over thirty years, this seemed very odd! But they ordered it anyway, and it arrived today. For $8 I can have the use of it for two weeks. That’s not very long; except that, of course, I always intended to scan it and create a PDF which would always be with me. As the item was published before WW1, and is therefore out of copyright in the USA, I also intended to put it online.
This morning I collected it, on a steaming hot grey morning. It was good to see that my PC copy of Abbyy Finereader Pro 12 and book scanner still worked. The small size of the volume, and small text size, meant that I had to scan it at 600dpi, which of course meant very large bitmaps. These were almost 20mb per page in .png colour format; half that, on average, in jpg. And they had to be colour, because the spine was tightly bound and the shadow in the spine covered some of the text. Peculiarly the yellowed paper scanned as a faint pink.
Anyway the scan is certainly good enough for my purposes, although I do wish somebody would find a way to produce monochrome scans of tightly bound books!
I’ve been thinking about the legends of St George. A remark by Christopher Walter has resonated. These are not literary texts, where the specific words of the story matter. These are folkstories, where the story is all, but the precise words nothing.
It’s like the legends of King Arthur. There actually is no original text for these. Instead there are the legends, in ever-changing forms, and any two recitings may be cast in quite different words. Such written forms as exist are derivative from this process.
The same is true of the legends of Robin Hood. There are the medieval ballads, but nobody pretends that these are definitive. The story will feature Robin, and Little John, and the Sheriff of Nottingham; and at the end the Sheriff will be foiled and the Merry Men will celebrate in the greenwood. The rest is mere scaffolding, temporary and of no permanent importance.
The same must be true of the stories of St George. Nobody ever cared about the precise words. It is the story that matters. Consequently almost every other copy is quite different. It is qualitatively a mistake to try to trace a stemma in the way that we might for a literary text.
The legends of St George, like those of Robin Hood, have an oral element. On the feast day of St George, it would be necessary to give an account of the saint. Collections of brief accounts of saints exist, in the synaxaries, compiled for just this purpose. But longer accounts would naturally be given, sermons might well incorporate other material, and so tellings of the legend would extend.
I’ve also been mulling over the question of whether St George is English. This sounds like a strange question! But today English nationalism is held in great suspicion by the British ruling class, who rightly see it as a threat to their internationalist policies, and attacks on English institutions are encouraged. St George as a symbol of England, wearing the red cross, is therefore suspect.
On twitter I saw a jeer that St George was a Palestinian immigrant. Much nationalism has been excited by the settlement of more than five million immigrants in the last decade, which gives the jeer its point. Like most good jeers it is designed to be hard to respond to. But we instinctively know that something is wrong. And it gives us the chance to clarify what we mean by a nation’s patron saint.
St George was adopted as the patron saint of England by the crusader kings of England. The invincible warrior on horseback was about all they took from earlier Greek legends. But saints of that period belonged to all of Christendom. Possibly this is still true even today, for Catholic saints. St George was not a Palestinian, even if his shrine stood in Lydda. The original St George, if he existed, was a Greek or a Roman. Like the heritage of antiquity, like the Holy Roman Emperor, he belonged to all Christians everywhere. Any nation was at liberty to adopt a saint, and customise him for their nation. And that is what kings like Richard the Lionheart and Edward III did. In a sense, they created St George of England, from a mixture of existing materials – this linked him to the cult of the saint – and their own contemporary need for a hero-saint. St George is not an immigrant, but a home grown expression of what the English wanted.
Is this perhaps some sort of reply? At this point we pass rather beyond my period, so I can’t say how accurate all this is. But it is certainly more true than the gibe of St George the immigrant, which nobody ever heard of until these unhappy days.
I confess that many of the working class nationalists that one sees depicted on the television are wildly unattractive. But if we must have such people, would it be such a bad thing for them all to revere St George?!
That said, it seems most unlikely that anybody will. I am the last person to predict how things will be.
That said, I have nagging doubts about the direction of modern life…!
If you want to know about the origins of St George, it isn’t very long before you hear that a church inscription in Syria exists, dedicated to St George, and dating from the 4th century AD. The details are often a bit vague; but the site is the town of Shaqqa or Shakka, ancient Sakkaia or Saccaea, sometimes called Maximianopolis, after the co-emperor of Diocletian.
Let’s have a look at this.
The inscription was published in 1870 as entry 2158, vol. 2, p.505-6, by Waddington in his Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie.[1] He lists it as Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum 8609, although I find it quoted as CIG 8603. Here’s Waddington’s drawing:
He says that the inscription was on a large stone, broken into two pieces, lying in front of the liwan of the sheikh. The middle contained a cross in a circle which had been “hammered”. He also says the text was better preserved when Burkhardt saw it.
Thanks to the genius of Pawel Nowakowski and the CSLA, we can have a transcription and translation here, with an image of Burkhardt’s drawing:
+ οἶκος ἁγίων ἀθλοφόρων μαρτύρων Γεωργίου καὶ τῶν σὺν αὐτῷ ἁγίων. ἐ[κ π]ρ[οσφ]ωρ(ᾶς) Τιβερίνου ἐπισκ(όπου), ἔκτισεν ἐκ θεμελίων τὼ ίε[ρ]ατῖον καὶ τὴν π[ρ]ο[σ]θή[κ]ην τοῦ ναοῦ, ἰνδ(ικτιῶνος) ιε΄, ἔτους σξγ΄, σπουδῇ δὲ Γεωργίου καί Σεργίου μεγάλου διακ(όνων)
+ The house of the holy prize-winning martyrs: George and his holy companions. From the offerings of bishop Tiberinos. (He?) built the sanctuary and the aisles (prostheke) of the church from the foundations. 15th indiction, year 263. By the efforts of the deacons Georgios and Sergios the Great.
I have highlighted the era in use, the ἔκτους τῆς πόλεως.
The question is what the year 263 might refer to, in years AD. This is not simple. Waddington suggested that it couldn’t be in the era of Bostra, which would make it 368 AD, as the indiction number was wrong. But this was the only date Waddington attempted, and consequently it passed into literature.
Y.E. Meimaris, Chronological Systems in Roman-Byzantine Palestine, (1992) p.321, (online here), discusses several inscriptions from Shaqqa and attempts to work out the local era. But in fact it was J. Koder and M. Restle who worked out that the era must start with the acclamation of Maximian Herculius as Caesar in 286.[2].
So year 263 of Maximianopolis would be 549 AD; quite a lot later than many books and websites suggest.
There is a wrinkle on this; that 549 is not the 15th indiction. So we have to correct for this also; either the year is wrong, or the indiction is. This gives a range of possible dates between 549 and 567.[3]
The actual inscription has not been seen since Waddington. But it is the dedication of a church, and the remains of the building are known. Pascale Clauss-Balty, “La kalybé de Hayat (Syrie du Sud)”, in: Syria: Archéologie, art et histoire, 85 (2008) (Online here) identifies it as one of a series of temple types called “kalybé”, some of them visited in the 19th century by Vogüé. He adds (p.262):
In Byzantine times, the kalybé of Shaqqa was transformed into a martyrion dedicated to Saint George. Vogüé states that the altar had been placed under the dome, behind a wooden fence whose post-holes he could still see in the piers of the central bay. In front of the facade, there was also a kind of vestibule (pl. 11), the northern limit of which was to correspond to that of a levelled area still in place.
It is the lintel of the entrance to this vestibule which bore the inscription seen by Waddington in 1860 and which attributed to Bishop Tiberinus the construction of the small sanctuary, placing in the year 263 of the local era the completion of the works, i.e. in 549, 550 or 565. Butler merely reproduces the Vogüé plan and section and adds some minor information.
The sober profile of the mouldings, the resemblance with the kalybé of Umm az-Zeitun and the membership of the same program as the Kaisariyeh allow us to date the kalybé of Shaqqa of the 2nd half of the 3rd century.
This is good news, as we can have a look at the building. Vogue is online, but the contents have been scanned poorly and the images are better in the Clauss-Balty article.[4] Here’s the facade from the north and the floor-plan:
And here a modern image from the same article:
But it is easy enough to find more online. Not sure who the author of the first one might be…?
Ross Burns is in fact an author on Syrian monuments, and this comes from his website, monuments of Syria. Googling using the Arabic name for Shaqqa (found on Wikipedia as “شقا“) produced a few more:
It looks as if the lintel was removed, the central arch collapsed, and the modern house was built in the ruin at some subsequent date. Is the Vogue drawing a reconstruction, I wonder? He states (vol.1 p.42) that the covering of the central aisle has fallen. But the poor quality scan of the images makes it impossible for me to say.
I do wonder where that inscription is. It’s probably in a wall, somewhere in the town. If only one could visit and just ask!
It is interesting to see this pagan temple, rededicated to St George in the 6th century. But the date of dedication is not the earliest known, in fact. This we will discuss in another post.
Dr Alcock has kindly translated another Eastern Christian text. This one is a collection of miracles by St Ptolemy. It’s here:
Thank you so much, Dr A.!
For the last few weeks I have been trying to find out about St George. Starting from nothing, I want to know when the first mentions of him are, what literary texts are available, etc. It’s been amazingly hard work, poring over century-old German monographs, the Acta Sanctorum, trying to find more recent works, and so forth. Hagiography is dreadful to work with; and where on earth do you start, trying to find out inscriptions and church dedications? Who knows??
But this week I discovered a mighty, mighty aid to my quest: The Cult of the Saints in Late Antiquity project. This is a massive database, which contains every reference in the historical record to a saint, up to around 700 AD. The “about” page and the “search” pages are here:
So what’s in here? An entry can be a list of all the data for a saint, such as Saint George. With a bit of fiddling, you find that he is S00259, and you get a list of data points back, in chronological order:
Not everything is completed yet. The greyed-out entries – which are still useful, note – are yet to be written. But so much is done. Each entry is a text, a translation into English, some discussion, maybe a photograph if they had one, and a very up-to-date bibliography. Note that this is not just Greek and Latin; Armenian, Coptic, Syriac and Georgian sources are also included!
Since I have been searching for some time for information on one inscription, I am painfully aware of how much labour must have been undertaken to produce an entry far more up-to-date than anything that I had been able to obtain. Frankly it’s gold. You will save yourself so much effort.
I have yet to use it for its design purpose, tho, of picking up cross-references. This, I imagine, is where the database design will really pay dividends for researchers. I heartily approve.
The entries are becoming visible in Google, which is how I became aware of the project. Make your obscure query for some Syrian church, and you may well get a line from this database appear. I hope that the links are indeed permanent, for this is quite a resource. Usefully each page indicates how it should be referenced for publication (although more should be done to this, I think). I hope that the pages get archived at Archive.org as well; the last thing we need is for material to vanish offline in 5-10 years time.
If you have any interest in hagiography at all, you need to get familiar with this site. It’s simply the best tool to hit the hardware department since the Acta Sanctorum.
The contributors are listed here; many of the names will be familiar, all doing very good work. The project leader is Bryan Ward-Perkins.
I truly approve of this site. It’s accessible to ordinary chaps like you and I, all around the world. It’s something that would have been unthinkable before the internet. Johannes Bollandus and Daniel Papebroch would have given their eye-teeth for it.
This site almost justifies the existence of Oxford University all by itself; for it gives access to the fruits of so much learning to so very many more people than could ever research it themselves. Words fail me. Use it.
The first evidence in the archaeology of St George is from a little church in Syria, in a town called Izra, or Izraa, or Ezra, or Ezraa, or Zorava, with the usual Semitic indifference to vowels, and the usual consequent confusion.
Here is the relief, in a nice new modern photograph from here. I spent a profitable hour thrashing Google before I located it.
The text is as follows:
θεοῦ γέγονεν οἶκος τὸ τῶν δαιμόνων καταγώγιον·
φῶς σωτήριον ἔλαμψεν, ὅπου σκότος ἐκάλυπτεν·
ὅπου θυσίαι εἰδώλων, νῦν χοροὶ ἀγγέλων·
ὅπου θεὸς παρωργίζετο, νῦν θεὸς ἐξευμενίζεται.
ἀνήρ τις φιλόχριστος, ὁ πρωτεύων Ἰωάννης, Διομηδέως υἱός,
ἐξ ἰδίων δώρον θεῷ προσήνεγκεν ἀξιοθέατον κτίσμα
ἱδρύσας ἐν τούτῳ τοῦ καλλινίκου ἁγίου μάρτυρος Γεωργίου
τὸ τίμιον λίψανον τοῦ φανέντος αὐτῷ ἸωάννῃS
οὐ καθ’ ὕπνον, ἀλλὰ φανερῶς. ἐν ἔτι θ΄ ἔτους υ̣ι[.]΄The abode of demons has become the house of God. The light of salvation shines where darkness caused concealment. Where sacrifices to idols occurred, now there are choirs of angels. Where God was provoked, now He is propitiated. A certain Christ-loving man, the town-councillor (proteuon) Ioannes, son of Diomedes, offered a beautiful building to God from his own offerings, after installing within it the worthy relic (leipsanon) of the martyr George, who appeared to this Ioannes not in a dream, but manifestly. In the 9th (indiction?) year. The year 410 (?).
The era is not AD, of course, which had yet to be invented, but the era of the Arabian province. This gives a date of 515 AD.
This splendid transcription, and much else, I owe to Paweł Nowakowski, Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity Database, E01754 – http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/record.php?recid=E01754. This had a wretched photograph, from IGLS 15/1, 244, which shows what rubbish scholars have to endure:
After seeing it, I was determined to try to find a better image. Searching for Izra St George brought up quite a few images of the church, such as this:
The Wikipedia article for Izra has another. It also had a link to Google maps, showing a reddish sand desert in which the modern town stands.
It shows the importance of uploading high resolution images. The author of the inscription photo above had no intention of photographing it. But his image of the west door of the church was of sufficiently high resolution that I was able to excerpt that picture above. Marvellous!
We don’t get a lot of new ante-Nicene material these days, which is why such a piece is very welcome. Peter I of Alexandria was put to death in 311 AD in the persecution of Diocletian.
This fragment of a sermon is preserved in Coptic. Anthony Alcock has translated it, and here it is!
Well worth reading! Thank you Dr. A. It’s always good to read material written before the church was legalised.
I’ve been trudging through Krumbacher and another heavy old German tome, running the text into English and looking for pointers to understand the mass of literature about the Passio or Martyrdom of St George. While these give a great deal of detail, the beginner would often be grateful for a roadmap.
Today, quite by accident, I came across an article in two parts which illuminated a great deal. A google search introduced me to two articles in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, (list of volumes online here), in vol. 17 (1903) and vol. 18 (1904). This is John E. Matzke, “Contributions to the History of the Legend of Saint George, with Special Reference to the Sources of the French, German and Anglo-Saxon Metrical Versions”. Not all older US literature is worth reading; but these are gold. They also publish various versions of the Passio.
But their real value is in allowing us to understand what happened to the legend.
The various editions of the Passio can be distinguished by variations in the story. In particular the name of the emperor who is in charge at the start of the text varies; and varies over time.
The earliest form known to us is a mention in the Decretum Gelasianum, in which a passio of St George is condemned roundly as a disreputable heretic forgery. It seems that we may have this version. In the earliest texts, the emperor is called “Datianus” or “Dacianus”. The trial takes place in Egypt, and the emperor summons a sorcerer named – what else? – Athanasius – to cast wicked spells against the miracles of St George. Finally the passio is attributed to George of Cappadocia.
Now the real George of Cappadocia was a rather dubious Arian, who got himself appointed as fake-bishop of Alexandria while the real Athanasius was in exile, only to get lynched by the Alexandrian mob in the times of Julian the Apostate. So any “martyrdom of George of Cappadocia” is likely to be Arian. The name of Athanasius as a villain is likewise an Arian thing. Finally we may consider that throughout the 5th century the church writers inveigh against Arianism as the worst of heresies; no doubt influenced by their fear of the Arian Goths then taking over the empire.
Matzke’s theory, then, is that this text is extant, in various forms, and the name of Dacian is the fingerprint for it. This he calls the “apocryphal version”, and it was clearly popular.
He suggests that a “canonical version” was produced by some educated man who made the emperor into Diocletian – someone who actually existed! – and otherwise revised it. This then underwent further editions and revisions.
But the apocryphal version still existed, albeit in various forms, especially in the west. One edition changed the name from Dacian to Decius; in one version the name change only appears in the opening sections of the work, and reverts to Dacian later on.
All this I got from a quick read of part 1 this afternoon in the office while waiting for a long build to finish. I suspect part 2 might deal with the vernacular, and be less interesting.
I can’t say if this is correct. But if so, it makes for an interesting view of how the text evolved! I need to read more.
I must say that I am surprised by the lack of references to modern scholarship on St George. They must exist, surely?