Roger Pearse

Thank you for the kind words. The way I see it is that, as an amateur, my opinions are worthless. But if I can get the raw texts online, then this at least is of use to everyone.

I'll see what I can do about the Dionysius bar Salibi.

I suppose this is possible. I found myself sat at dinner recently next to Sebastian Brock, and asked him what the chances were of new finds of unknown texts in Syriac. He said the chances were pretty much zero, because the vast majority of Syriac mss from the (I forget the exact words) 7th (?) century on were collections of extracts. So this would fit with this.

Possible, of course.

The heading he says he made up himself. But Epiphanius does not say that this is a composite grouping, but talks about them in much the same way as he does other groups. I think Hill's reading is a possible reading of the text, but I'd feel nervous: the approach is a little too much like reasons to ignore the testimony. Epiphanius' sources are inscrutable, and speculation in the absence of evidence is dodgy, IMHO. (I wish the Panarion was online in English...)

Abject grovel: I was thinking of codex 48, but the hand typed 121. Not sure how I did that.

Thank you for the details above, which are most interesting. I'd always wanted to know something solid about Gaius and the alogoi, and never got around to it.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Ben C Smith

I could not agree more! (About me... not you. ) I like to leave the original ideas and detailed dissections for the S. C. Carlsons out there, and just try to present good examples of intertextuality in my little corner of the web.

I tend to agree... so far, at least. (I am only on my first time through the chapter.) It would appear that Stephen also disagrees with Hill, judging from his comment in the second post on this thread.

I probably should have clocked that. Inaccuracy does not seem to be one of your defining traits.

Same here. I had always wondered why the secondary sources never just referred to one or two of our ancient writers and had done. Now I know why; Gaius, presbyter of Rome and attacker of the Johannine literature, is a construct. (Perhaps a plausible and even necessary construct, but a construct nonetheless.)

Nice to meet you.

Ben.

Roger Pearse

That is very kind, but, believe me, I suffer from slips of memory as much as the next man.

It's an important point: the distance between "the historical record says x" and "the historical record supports the theory that x".

And you. Thank you for the education.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

S.C.Carlson

Yes, that's basically right. Hill too often relied on the individual source's silence without considering other reasons for it. On the other hand, Hill is a useful corrective for showing how tentative our understanding of the historical situation really is.

Stephen

Roger Pearse

I've placed online two 19th century articles which translate 7 passages from the "Commentary on Revelation" of the 10th century Syriac writer Dionysius Syrus (also known as Dionysius Bar Salibi or Jacob Bar Salibi). I think these are the passages we are discussing.

Stephen, does this include all the material from Dionysius Syrus that Hill discusses?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

S.C.Carlson

No, Gwynn did not have the benefit of an unmutilated introduction to Dionysius Barsalibi's commentary that explicitly states that Gaius opposed both Revelation and the Fourth Gospel.

I'll try to dig the exact wording of it up later.

Stephen

Roger Pearse

Interesting indeed. I'd like to learn more about this; did Hill do the work on Dionysius, or is there some other source one needs to get?

Thanks,

Roger Pearse

Ben C Smith

Wow, thanks, Roger! I shall cross Gwynn off my list of books or articles to look up.

This is what Hill has to say (on pages 180-181) about the other passage that Stephen mentioned (there are actually two passages in question):

Another advance, however, came in 1895, when Rendel Harris reported the existence of another fragment from bar Salibi, this one in a Latin translation made by Dudley Loftus in the seventeenth century (Bodleian Fell 6 and 7) from a now lost Syriac manuscript of bar Salibi's Commentary on the Gospel of John. In this work Gaius is recorded as criticizing the author of the Fourth Gospel with one of the same objections which Epiphanius had attributed to the Alogi.[22] 'A certain heretic Gaius criticized John because he did not agree with his fellow evangelists who say [emend to: in that he says] that after the baptism he went to Galilee and performed the miracle of the wine at Cana' (John 2:1-11).[23]

This, at last, appeared to establish that Gaius had also opposed the Fourth Gospel—though doubts were still possible for the sceptic, for Loftus's translation of the name of Gaius was evidently based on a Syriac text which included it only as 'added in the margin by a later hand'![24] Another Syriac copy of the text discovered later (British Museum Add. 12,143) in fact did not include the name of the heretic.[25] The objection is followed in the commentary, however, by a reply from Hippolytus, as in the extracts from the Commentary on Revelation. In any case, Harris's discovery was corroborated when T. H. Robinson in 1906 discovered and published a manuscript of bar Salibi's Commentary on Revelation which contained its prologue (missing in the manuscript used by Gwynn), in which bar Salibi explicitly named Gaius as one who attributed both Johannine works to Cerinthus.[26] 'Hippolytus of Rome states that a man named Gaius had appeared, who said that neither the Gospel nor yet the Revelation was John's; but that they were the work of Cerinthus the heretic. And the blessed Hippolytus opposed this Gaius, and showed that the teaching of John in the Gospel and Revelation was different from that of Cerinthus.'[27]

[22] J. R. Harris, Hermas in Arcadia and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1896), 48-9.
[23] Text from an unpublished Syriac MS, Cod. Paris. syr. 67, fol. 270, r°, col. 2, contained in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, tr. by Smith, ‘Gaius’, 200-1, 591.
[24] Smith, ‘Gaius’, 201. That MS is Cod. Mus. Britt. Add. 7184, fo. 2432.
[25] Cf. Brent, Hippolytus, 145.
[26] T. H. Robinson, ‘The Authorship of the Muratorian Canon’, The Expositor, 7/1 (1906), 481-95.
[27] Ibid. 487. Dionysius’ commentary was finally published in full in 1909 (I. Sedlacek).

The footnote to Brent is Alan Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century: Communities in Tension before the Emergence of a Monarch-Bishop, VCSuppl. 31 (Leiden, 1995). The footnote to Smith is Daniel Joseph Smith, Jr., 'Gaius', apparently the title of his Yale dissertation. I can find no publication info.

Hope this helps a bit.

Ben.

Roger Pearse

Glad to help!

Many thanks indeed for this! Which are the two passages?

That is quite hard to read, so just unpacking it for my own benefit, and perhaps for bystanders:

1. Harris reports that Loftus made a Latin translation of Dionysius Syrus, Commentary on John, which he never published. But his handwritten copy is still in the Bodleian Library (as Mss. Fell 6 & 7). He made it from a now lost Syriac Ms. of that work.

2. One passage of this, when translated into English reads 'A certain heretic Gaius criticized John because he did not agree with his fellow evangelists who say [emend to: in that he says] that after the baptism he went to Galilee and performed the miracle of the wine at Cana' (John 2:1-11).[23]. The English translation was done in an unpublished Yale dissertation of uncertain date by a Mr. Smith.

3. Note [23] refers mysteriously to yet another Ms., in Paris (BNF Syr. 67) from which the translation comes, not from the Fell Ms.

The Harris volume is actually 80 pages and available cheaply as a reprint (almost as cheaply as I can order it through a library) so I've ordered a copy of this from a bookseller.

I've also emailed Yale library to ask about dissertations. It's not to be found in Proquest/UMI, as far as I can see.

Loftus actually published a couple of printed English translations of the gospel commentaries of Dionysius Syrus, but these I had no time to look at.

It would be possible to go and look at those handwritten Latin translations, of course, if we have to. I hate to think what they would be like to read. What I want to know is, who actually found out that this was there in those Fell mss? And why, and what did they do with the info? It may have been our friend Smith.

So:

1. Someone says somewhere that the name 'Gaius' was only written in the margin of the lost Ms by a later hand. Note 24 is a bit baffling in this context.
2. BL Addit. 12143, another Syriac Ms. of the Commentary on John, does not contain the name at all.
3. But the passage is followed by a rebuttal from Hippolytus, just like those in the passages from the Commentary on Revelation, so Gaius may be the right reading.

That's clear enough.

Dionysius bar Salibi In Apocalypsim, Actus et Epistulas Catholicas Part: [1]: [Syriac text] / edidit I. Sedlácek
Series: Corpus scriptorum Christianorum orientalium ; vol.53. Publisher: Parisiis : E Typographeo Reipublicae, 1909. Physical desc.: 170p ; 25cm. Note: Syriac text and Latin translation. Other Names: Sedlácek, Jaroslav, 1860-1925.

I suppose it could be worse -- it could be a German translation.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

I have now heard from Yale about Mr. Smith and his dissertation:

Author: Smith, Joseph Daniel.
Title: Gaius and the Controversy Over the Johannine Literature [microform].
Notes: UMI80-11552
Dissertation: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, Department of Religious Studies, 1979.

I can now find it in UMI, but they want $61 for a copy, to me here in the United Kingdom. Does anyone have a means to get a copy at a lesser price?

All the best,

Roger Pearse