PhilosopherJay

Hi Ben,

We may believe that all Christians were blind or illiterate until the 9th Century and did not see Julius Africanus' reference to the eclipse.

On the other hand, we may see that Eusebius forged the Phlegon eclipse reference. As he has a custom of inserting his fables into other author's works (e.g. TF) he put a reference to it in Origen. [His naming of the number of the book is a telltale sign]. Someone came along and realizing that Phlegon could not be meant, changed the reference to Thallus. Someone else realizes that Eusebius and Origen could not have missed the reference in Thallus, and attributes it to Julius Africanus.

Syncellus uses both references, one deliberately forged, the other mistakingly forged.


We should investigate when references to book numbers were first made. I would guess that they were extremely rare or did not exist before the time of Eusebius.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Ben C Smith

Acts 1.1-3:

The first volume I made about all things, O Theophilus, which Jesus began to do and teach until the day in which he was taken up after commanding through the holy spirit the apostles whom he had elected, to whom also he presented himself living after his passion by many sure proofs, for forty days being seen by them and saying the things concerning the kingdom of God.

Irenaus, Against Heresies 5.33.4:

Haec autem et Papias Iohannis auditor, Polycarpi autem contubernalis, vetus homo, per scripturam testimonium perhibit in quarto librorum suorum; sunt enim illi quinque libri conscripti.

These things Papias too, who was a earwitness of John and companion of Polycarp, and an ancient man, wrote and testified in the fourth of his books. For there are five books written by him.

Theophilus, To Autolycus 2.30; 3.6:

For, as we have already mentioned, this subject, the order of the genealogy of man, has been partly handled by us in another discourse, in the first book of the History.

Certainly Plato, to mention him first who seems to have been the most respectable philosopher among them, expressly, as it were, legislates in the first book of The Republic, that the wives of all be common....

Hippolytus, Against Heresies 5.1:

I think that in the four preceding books I have very elaborately explained the opinions propounded by all the speculators among both Greeks and Barbarians....

Origen, Against Celsus 1.14, 16, 36:

It is said, moreover, that Hermippus has recorded in his first book on lawgivers that it was from the Jewish people that Pythagoras derived the philosophy which he introduced among the Greeks.

For any one who chooses may read what Flavius Josephus has recorded in his two books, On the Antiquity of the Jews, where he brings together a great collection of writers who bear witness to the antiquity of the Jewish people....

There is therefore no absurdity in their prophets having uttered predictions even about events of no importance to soothe those who desire such things, as when Samuel prophesies regarding three asses which were lost, or when mention is made in the third book of Kings respecting the sickness of the son of a king.

Galen, On the Natural Faculties 2.5, 6; 3.7:

At the actual moment, however, the Erasistrateans are engaged in a considerable battle, not only with others but also amongst themselves, and so they cannot explain the passage from the first book of the General Principles, in which Erasistratus says....

And if one looks carefully into the matter one will find that even the reasoning of Erasistratus himself on the subject of nutrition, which he takes up in the second book of his General Principles, fails to escape this same difficulty.

...as though Aristotle had not clearly stated in the fourth book of his Meteorology, as well as in many other passages, in what way digestion can be said to be allied to boiling....

These are from a very casual and informal search. How many of these did Eusebius forge?

Ben.

Jeffrey Gibson

Well, as usual, your guesses seem to be mightily uninformed. See, e.g.

Euclid Fragmenta 240.1; Fragmenta 240.21; Fragmenta 241.29; Apollonius Citiensis Med. In Hippocratis de articulis commentarius 18.3; 33:13; Galenus Med. De anatomicis administrationibus libri ix 2.354.4; De semine libri ii 4.557.9; De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 1.10.20.2; De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 2.1.2.5; 2.2.3.2; 2.8.27.3; 3.1.2.2; 3.4.37.1; De sanitate tuenda libri vi 6.357.8; De alimentorum facultatibus libri iii 6.568.2; De marcore liber 7.689.13; De differentia pulsuum libri iv 8.499.12; 8.668.8; De dignoscendis pulsibus libri iv 8.902.16; 8.903.7; De causis pulsuum libri iv 9.116.5: among other works of Galen); Herodianus et Pseudo-Herod. De prosodia catholica 3,1.3.2; Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata 6.2.25.2.3; Alexander Aphrodisiensis in Top 5.27; Porphyrius Tyrius, Fragmenta 2b,260,F.5.2; Historia philosophiae 4.6; Anonymi in Aristotelis Ethica In ethica Nicomachea paraphrasis 220.8; Scholia in Euclid elementa 1.1.108; 1.157.9; 1.159.7; 11.36.2; Scholia in Hesiodum in opera et dies sch.496-497.3; Scholia in Lucianum 33.28.11; Scholia in Oppianum Scholia et glossae in halieutica 2.1.22.1.8; 2.457.2; Musaeus Phil. Fragmenta 6.3

all of which are prior to Eusebius.

Did he forge these too?

Jeffrey

Roger Pearse

Of course he did. We all know that Eusebius forged or interpolated everything; or at least, we do until we finally learn something about ancient literature.

Jeffrey Gibson

You mean like what's found in Plutarch Life of Homer 4 -- where Plutarch observes that the particular division of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad with which he was familiar (into 24 books) had been made by Alexandrian literary critics who lived long before he (Plutarch) did?

But isn't that another Eusebian interpolation?

Jeffrey

PhilosopherJay

Hi Ben,

Thanks for these possible counterexamples.

I'm on a holiday and only have limited access to my library and notes, so I can explain my meaning only generally.

As a book collector, I know that having a book jacket on a book increases the value of a book. Today, almost all published hardcover books have book jackets, but before about 1930, they were extremely rare. It is a good bet that if you are purchasing a book with a book jacket that it is less than 80 years old.

ISBN book numbers were started in 1966, so any book containing one can be dated from that point.

Book jackets were not invented to help date books, but that is an incidenta effect that they have. The ISBN system also has the incidental effect of dating books.

DVD's first came out a bit over ten years ago in 1997. One of the effects was that sequences in movies were divided into chapters. In finding a scene or sequence in a movie, we now tell people to go to chapter six or chapter 14 on the dvd. Before DVD's were invented it would be absurd to tell people to go to a chapter in order to find a scene in a movie. We could only point people generally to the scene -- look at the beginning or middle or near the ending of the movie. The incidental effect of movies is to help in locating specific scenes within movies.

We know that the invention of the book was a technological development that occurred during the first centuries C.E.. Portable literature was primarily in the form of scrolls before this point. Scrolls were separate books. Numbering a scroll, book one, book two, book three etc., would not necessarily help in finding a scroll as the scrolls, would change position in their containers. One could put a label on the outside of the scroll, one, two, or three, but that would not be a permanent part of the scroll, but simply a librarian's label.

On the other hand, once scrolls were transferred to books, the order would be fixed within the book containing them. This process really did not take place until the third and fourth centuries when books grew to a certain size. At this point, pointing out the book number would be more important to finding a text within a book.

So it is not just the use of the word "book" (biblia or libros) that we have to look at, it is the way the term is used when it is used with a number.

Thus, look at the usage in Acts:
Acts 1.1-3:

The first volume I made about all things, O Theophilus, which Jesus began to do and teach until the day in which he was taken up after commanding through the holy spirit the apostles whom he had elected, to whom also he presented himself living after his passion by many sure proofs, for forty days being seen by them and saying the things concerning the kingdom of God.

It is clear that the usage here is not locate a text within a book. Here the usage is clearly to convince the reader that the writer of this work is the same writer as the writer of a prior gospel <note incidentally that the description does not match any known gospel>.

The second quote by Irenaeus is cited, I believe, in Eusebius, so we may indeed investigate if he is the author. I am sure that Eusebius has interpolated some material in book III in Irenaeus. I would have to investigate this particular text to see if it is also Eusebius.

Theophilus seems to just be pointing to an early part of certain works when he uses the phrase Book One. In fact, in the Republic, Plato does not broach the subject of women in common until what we label as Book IV. If that is to be called Book One, then Theophilus either did not know Plato or thought of the Republic as containing only two books.

The date of Hippolytus or the writer of Against Heresies is problematical, but could well be near the time of Eusebius.

The reference of Origen to Josephus seems to indicate that he is regarding War of the Jews as a different work from Antiquities and that Josephus has written two works. The other references of his are also problematical as indications of textual location.

The Galen quotes appear to be good counterexamples, but I would have to study the exact circumstances of the transmission of the text to be sure.


Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

PhilosopherJay

Hi Roger,

I do not think that Eusebius forged everything. My rule of thumb is that if we find a text that Eusebius cites and nobody has cited it in a relevant context before, we should consider it possibly a forgery. If it contains telltale signs like the phrase "until the present day" or the mention of a book number, we should put it in the probably category.

I think attributing everything to Eusebius forgery is as unlikely as attributing nothing to Eusebean forgery.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Jeffrey Gibson

Why? Why does no one else citing a text that Eusebius cites render the authenticity of that text suspicious? Would you say the same thing about pre Socratic texts that Aristotle cites that are not cited by anyone else but him?

And what is a "relevant context"?

Why? Why is the phrase "until the present day" or the citation of a book number" a telltale "sign" of "forgery"?

Moreover, how have you gone about determining that texts that Eusebius cites have not previously been cited by anyone else?

In other words, what is the nature and the extent of the research that you have done in the extant corpus of ancient literature with respect to texts you think might be Eusebian forgeries, that confirms that these suspected texts have not been cited by anyone besides Eusebius?

Jeffrey

Roger Pearse

It's nice and safe to have rules that no possible evidence can refute, isn't it?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Ben C Smith

Note how quickly after the invention of the DVD we were able to start to refer to movie chapters. Almost instantly!

Same thing goes for volumes of a work. As soon as any given work was split up into volumes, referring to a text within that work by its volume number became a viable option.

We know that works were divided up into volumes long before the NT period.

All of this is misguided. Scrolls were numbered by their contents, not by their position on a shelf or in a basket. And they were numbered before the NT period.

What has this to do with anything? It shows that referring to a work by its volume number was a viable option at this time.

Eh?

Eusebius quotes this particular piece of Irenaeus precisely in order to disagree with it. Is he disagreeing with his own interpolation?

I certainly encourage you to do that, and to look up the information on the list Jeffrey gave you.

Ben.