Roger Pearse

Some people might be interested in this query which I am pursuing at the moment. Eusebius' refutation of Porphyry's attack on the Christians is lost; but it seems it may not have been lost that long ago.

Does anyone know whether there are manuscripts still in Rodosto, a town 60 miles west of Istanbul and now known as Tekirdag? Or if not, where the mss of the expelled Greek community now are?

I ask because of references to manuscripts of Eusebius of Caesarea against Porphyry. There is a statement in Harnack's edition of the fragments of Porphyry's Against the Christians, p.30 (pardon my transcription of Greek in a 7-bit ascii editor):

"A listing of manuscripts in Rodosto, written between 1565 and 1575, on p.30b: Eusebiou tou Pamphilou Kata Porphuriou (s. Forster, De antiquitatibus et libris ms. Constantinopolitanis, Rostochii, 1877; cf. Neumann in Theol. Lit. Ztg. 1899, col. 299). In 1838 a great fire broke
out in Rodosto."

It would be most interesting to know whether this ms. exists anywhere. Does anyone know who would know?

The next paragraph continues with a statement that an ms. in Iwiron on Athos, cod. 1280 (s. XVII) contains Eusebius, biblos peri ths euangekiwn diaphwnias; Eis thn prophhthn Hsaian logoi t konta [sic]; [Kata] Porphyriou logoi l' [sic]; topikon logos a' etc (see Meyer, Ztschr. fur.
K.-Gesch. XI, p.156).

Does anyone know who knows about the mss of Iwiron? Both the 'Diaphonias' (Quaestiones ad Stephanum/Marinum) and the 'Kata Porphyriou' seem of interest, since both are lost.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Julian

Well, it would certainly be a major coup if that MS could be recovered. I suspect the only way to do this would involve some amount of physical travel. The mention of that fire is worrisome.

What is the spelling of Iwiron? Is it iota omega iota rho omicron nu?

Julian

S.C.Carlson

My thoughts exactly.

ΙΒΗΡΩΝ

See: http://www.inathos.gr/athos/el/

Stephen

Roger Pearse

It is worrying; also the Greek population was expelled by Ataturk, after Harnack wrote. Mss. from that period ended up all over the place, sold in curiosity shops by naval officers, etc.

Harnack wrote it in Roman letters. It's one of the monasteries on Mount Athos, and has a famous library. I've also seen it written Iviron.

There was a project to digitise all the Athos mss, but the website looks abandoned and the top-level page has vanished. It looks as if they got through a lot of grant money first, tho.

I've written to one of the people involved and asked about the Iviron Cod. 1280.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Further to this, the Iviron mention looks like a red herring. It turns out that the Meyer article is online, and, slightly embarassingly, I was the one who scanned it and I also translated it into English:

MEYER, Ph., Der griechische Irenäus und der ganze Hegesippus im 17. Jahrhundert, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte (1890) pp. 155-158 (English translation).

Iviron 1280 mainly contains church music, but at the end is a letter with a couple of pages containing merely a list of books, which mentions Hegesippus, Irenaeus, Methodius against Porphyry, plus Eusebius against Porphyry and his Biblical Questions (diaphonias).

There are a number of these lists from the renaissance and later in existence. Nigel Wilson has written that at least some of them look like the productions of dealers in the East, intended to draw in the too eager western buyer in order to do a 'bait-and-switch' scam. One of them even looks like a deliberate joke.

This from Iviron would appear to be one of these, since it is difficult to believe that so many lost texts -- and had not Hegesippus ceased to exist a millennium earlier at that date? -- would all be available in one place.

All the best,

Roger Pearse