Roger Pearse

The missing images from the Beirut Ms. 569a have arrived, on CDROM. I have now readvertised for someone to translate Al-Majdalus, and we'll see what sort of text of the 'sayings of the philosophers' his work contains.

I also now have the text of Al-Majd, but I'll wait a bit before I seek a translator for that, as I can only manage so many of these people at a time.

You would imagine that offering money to make the translations would cause all the problems to go away, but it is not so.

Roger Pearse

Dr. Youhanna Youssef has now kindly translated for me a few pages from Coptic Museum Ms. Theol. 196 (ff.268v-270v), which forms an unpublished part of Severus of al-Ashmunein's "Book of the Councils", and also transcribed the Arabic. It's now online here:

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/se...cils_cairo.htm

As usual, this page and everything in it is public domain -- use it for whatever purposes you like.

The text is another collection of sayings, supposedly by pagan philosphers, about Christ; this one does not seem to have anything by Zoroaster.

Unfortunately the reference given by Graf was slightly off; I was able to obtain the pages above, but the collection clearly starts on the page before! Unhappily I don't have a microfilm, or any means of getting one, nor of obtaining more pages, so we'll have to live with that lot.

I still have a couple of Christian Arabic texts that I would like translated into English (by people whose first language is English, please!) I pay 10 cents US a word; if anyone would like to help, please contact me offline.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Clivedurdle

Someone about 1000 AD makes up sayings by famous pagans and uses a few existing quotes from the Bible?

Or with the Plato one about the Most High adds to it with stuff about virgin births?

So?

Roger Pearse

Perhaps a quick summary would be good.

The point of this thread is to track down a supposed saying attributed to Mithras, "He who does not eat my body and drink my blood will not know salvation." As we quickly found, this is merely a mistake in translation of Vermaseren's book. But the *phrase* does exist, in Arabic Christian literature, attributed to Zoroaster, as part of collections of pagan prophecies of Christ in apologetic-type literature. (It might be attributed to other people also; no evidence yet)

So the question is then whether we are dealing with anything at all linked to Zoroastrianism, or indeed ancient, or whether this is something else, and if so what. Only data can resolve this.

Little exists of Arabic Christian literature in English. Nothing of this material on pagan prophecies seems to have been published -- in any language.

However a similar collection in Syriac has been edited with a translation by Sebastian Brock. Of course the Arabic Christians are simply the former Syriac and Coptic Christians who have been forced to adopt Arabic, so there might be some links there.

All this is an investigation into primary data, never edited, never published, never investigated by anyone. Firstly the subject is interesting; secondly, whatever I discover will appear online and be accessible to anyone. (Someone academic has just written to me and asked if I intend to publish a journal article; as an amateur, I hardly imagine that I could!)

Finally, the more that we collect, the clearer it becomes that we are in a genre of some kind. It relates in some way to Greek legends of the Seven Sages; Andrew has found links to the extremely obscure Aristocritus. What are the rules of the genre? Where does this stuff come from?

Of course we are also now in the age of the Arabian Nights, of story-telling, of Aladdin and Ali Baba. We are in a time when certain knowledge of antiquity was fading, when Aristotle and Alexander were names to conjure with rather than figures of history, perhaps to all but a few.

We are in the days when a learned man in the bazaar would be a 'hakim', perhaps a doctor, perhaps a philosopher -- perhaps a magician, or a sinister sorceror, such as Sinbad the Sailor encountered?

Thus in some of these collections we see Aristotle advising Alexander on how to do sorcery to defeat the Persians using talismans, and appealing to a certain Bandaritus, god of talismans.

In short, we are in a wide field full of dark mountains, and trying not to stumble. But whatever we do must be of permanent value... to someone.

Roger Pearse

I went back today to Graf's list of pagan prophecies, and noted that he mentioned something of the kind in Didymus the Blind's De Trinitate book II, chap. 27, PG 39, 753 ff. (He also refers to Theodotus of Ancyra who doesn't seem to do much).

Looking at this in the PG, I find quotes from

• the Sybil
• Orpheus 'who is the first theologian among the Greeks'
• Plato Comicus, some verses (different to those given by Clement of Alexandria in book 5 of the Stromateis as belonging to a Plato Comicus)
• Hermes Trismegistus, from three books to Asclepius (although apparently Cyril of Alexandria quotes similar material with different ascription in Contra Julianum 1)
• Porphyry, saying that Plato ascribed three hypostases to God.

Most interesting is the similar manner in which phrases glide from person to person, as in Arabic.

There doesn't seem to be any modern edition or translation into any modern language of any of this part of book 2, unless someone knows of a translation of this work by Didymus the Blind.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

A possible theory of origins of all this

There are a number of questions about all this material.

• How did these collections of material come into being, given that most of them are clearly inauthentic?
• Did the authors simply invent them?
• How do we account for quotations moving from one author to another?
• How do we explain the way in which pagan authors are made to speak like fathers of the church?
• Why do we have so many 'authors' whose names are unintelligible?
• Is this material derived from Syriac, or even Greek, and if so, how?

I have devised the following theory.

If we examine one of the earliest collections, that in Didymus the Blind (q.v.), we find a handful of quotations from pagan authors interspersed with commentary and interpretation. The authors includes the Sybil, Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus, and Plato -- but this time, Plato Comicus, not Plato Philosophus whom we would usually understand. If we examine similar material in the slightly later Contra Julianum of Cyril of Alexandria, we find some of the same material, but given as being from other books than Didymus gives it. We know that Cyril quotes his pagan authors mainly from quotations in the Fathers -- in particular Eusebius of Caesarea -- rather than from the original sources. If we have collections being assembled, not from reading the pagans, but from reading the fathers, this process must become standard in later writers, as the pagan texts become less accessible.

Christian authors did sometimes quote pagan authors in support of Christian views. This begins in the second century, when Justin is at pains to defend the illegal and despised religion by suggesting that its beliefs and practises were individually no more exotic than some found in legal or mainstream pagan religious practise (without, of course, trying to tell people who knew different that Christianity was paganism). Clement of Alexandria continued this; and Eusebius in his Praeparatio Evangelica goes through Plato and Aristotle and illustrates Christian teaching throughout, as a way to bring pagans over to Christianity.

Ancient copies of texts were not punctuated in the way that a modern text would be. In particular it could be hard to see where a quotation finished. If Plato said something which could be understood in a Christian sense:

Plato: God is abstract.

Someone quoting this might then write his own comment after it to make the sense explicit:

Plato says God is abstract. So we see that God is spirit.

Without any dishonesty, this could easily be read as (and quoted as):

Plato says, "God is abstract, so we see that God is spirit".

A subsequent reader, likewise looking for a quotation in support of Christian beliefs, might then quite sincerely quote this as:

Plato says that God is spirit.

And the process could then go round the loop again several times, the 'quotation' from Plato getting more and more Christian with each pass of the loop. This explains why the quotations are often like the Fathers; because they are, in fact, the Fathers speaking!

We have only scattered witnesses to the collections of sayings in circulation. But we can see that they tended to be combined (JS is the product of S and M), and it is likely that division and recombination would happen in every case, as an author adapted material from whatever collections he had to hand for whatever purpose he needed. This process explains the manner in which the size of the collection continues to increase, as we pass from the Greek to the Syriac to the Arabic versions.
It is similarly easy to see how quotations can move from being attributed to one philosopher to another, when copying takes place. If the name is omitted, the quotation will be attached to the preceding quotation, thereby changing authorship. The next excerptor may only use part of the double-length quotation. So:

Plato: quote 1. Aristotle: quote2.

can become, in careless copying:

Plato: quote 1. quote2.

A subsequent excerptor, uninterested in quote 1, will render this:

Plato: quote 2.

And the process is complete.

We can see in some of the Arabic sources that material is feeding in from fictional sources as well. The stories about Alexander and Aristotle relate to those told in the Secret of Secrets. There was no reason why someone compiling a set of useful proof-quotations should not include material from these as well, in ignorance of their nature.

Finally the people using this material were probably not very educated in ancient literature. Most of the people were just names, no doubt. If we imagine that in some cases words were misread as names -- the lack of vocalisation would assist such mistakes --, this might account for the presence of very obscure figures or names that are otherwise unknown in the collections; particularly if a subsequent and better educated copyist has 'corrected' a name into the name of a figure familiar from Eusebius or some other source of ancient history. Thus we get 'quotations' from Augustus, perhaps.

A small stock of material from Greek sources was enough to prime the 'stew', starting in the late 4th or early 5th century. It would soon be translated into Syriac or similar compilations made in Syriac, just as catenas are made in Syriac as well as in Greek; the driver for making them is the same in both languages. In time, the Syriac compilations would be translated into Arabic, and both Syriac and Arabic versions would continue to be augmented. Perhaps they even augmented each other?

Zoroaster would certainly find his way into such collections. We might leave aside his identification with Baruch -- which could place him anyway inside collections of Jewish predictions of Christ rather than pagan ones. But the genuine Persian story of a virgin giving birth to a mighty king at the end of the world is quite enough for some now-forgotten Syriac writer in contact with Persian sources to include some kind of snippet from this source. It is perhaps unlikely that this would happen after the Islamicisation of Persia, which sets a terminus ante quo for the arrival of Zoroaster into the collections.

Once Zoroaster was 'in the pot', simmering with all the other material, his name might easily be attached to any of the sayings already in the pot. We even have evidence of a saying attributed to him in J being similar in substance to one attributed to Hermes in S. Thus, I suggest, did our saying arise. It never had a genuine Persian backstory; it is merely a piece of patristic comment on some now unidentifiable material, to which the name of Zoroaster became attached sometime during the early middle ages.

What do you think?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

andrewcriddle

Hi Roger

I think I already suggested that faced with the supposed Zoroastrian prophecy of Christ with Zoroaster saying things like: a Christian (possibly Aristocritus) may have glossed this with quotes from the end of John chapter 6.

If so, it would, as you suggest, be easy for a later writer to confuse the claim that Zoroaster said things which have parallels with the end of John chapter 6, with the claim that Zoroaster actually said things which are really from John chapter 6.

Andrew Criddle

Roger Pearse

Hi Andrew,

Ah, I hadn't picked up on that. Because then yes, that sounds entirely possible. That's another chunk of genuine Zoroastrian stuff that could have gone into the pot; then the gloss is added from John 6; then the 'quote' is edited so only the John 6 stuff remains, but is still attributed to Zoroaster.

Roger

Roger Pearse

The new translator for Gerasimus whom I engaged on Saturday has already transcribed the whole thing and done two pages of the translation to what looks like a very high quality, and pretty quickly. I've asked him to carry on, and will pay him for what he has done so far.

He tells me:

"The section you are interested in ends at f.132v. After that is a series of Qur'anic quotations which Gerasimos sees as supporting Christianity. I can either transcribe and translate this part or leave it out.

Additionally, the material used here by Gerasimos may have been taken in part from the Kitab al-Manfa'a of Abdallah b. al-Fadl (fl. ca. 1050) who himself claims to have partially relied on a work of John Philoponos. I have scans of manuscripts of the Manfa'a and I'll let you know if there's any affinity."

Graf in fact says that chapter 32 of this work (The Book of Benefits) is indeed related to Gerasimus. The possible link to John Philoponus is certainly worth pursuing.

He also tells me that the Saint Shenouda Society may be able to help with Cairo mss.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

I've also learned today that Brigham Young University are going to deposit copies of all the microfilms of Arabic mss in Cairo at Oxford University and perhaps other institutions in Europe, in order to make them more widely available.