Roger Pearse

Currently presented *only* by Ken Olson, I believe?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Solitary Man

And members of IIDB...

Roger Pearse

Material starts to be translated into Arabic after about a century, I think; i.e. around 750 onwards, and reaching its height in the 10th century, iirc, with Hunain ibn Ishaq and his school. This is always translated from Syriac; Hunain knew Greek, but always made a Syriac version from it first, as there were well-understood principles for translating Greek to Syriac (the product of the big explosion in translation of the 5-6th centuries), while Arabic and Syriac are closely related Semitic languages.

Unfortunately none of this really helps. The text of Michael the Syrian's Syriac version at one point is identical with Jerome's Latin: "He was believed to be the Christ." It has been suggested, since these two languages had no real point of contact from the 4th century onwards, that this is a witness to a variant Greek text of the TF extant in the 4th century. This is quite possible, although by no means certain (the 'variant' might be a 'correction' that could occur independently).

It is equally possible that manuscripts with that reading continued to exist in Greek quite late. Hunain was able to find considerable numbers of Greek manuscripts of Galen etc in the Arab-occupied former Greek cities of the East even in his own day, although they were often rather damaged. We know that Photius in the 9th century in Constantinople had access to extensive quantities of Greek literature since lost; or lost since 1204. (Indeed we know of at least two works by Eusebius himself, lost since 1600!)

But it is most likely that Agapius is working from Syriac sources. It is, therefore, entirely possible that his text reflects an early variant. We know that the Greek texts tended to change to reflect the text of the TF in Eusebius. We know that this did not happen in Latin; we may therefore presume that the same would be true in Syriac.

None of which really goes anywhere, but I hope it helps.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Toto

No one else is going to copy his work - that would be plagiarism.

I think Olson is still working on his PhD under Goodacre.

Roger Pearse

The reference was to scholars, I think. Likewise the idea was also held by the late Solomon Zeitlin, a Jewish atheist of curious views, who rightly debunked the exaggerated claims about the Old Slavonic Josephus, but also believed that the Dead Sea Scrolls were a medieval forgery.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Solitary Man

Zeitlin had some good ideas. I never understood why he hated the scrolls so much - he spoke out against the "early dating" of the scrolls with so much vengeance.