stephan huller

I find this interesting Roger with respect to another issue - the disputed Mar Saba letter. Any idea how common this practice was of reusing books to copy out other books? I know there is a difference between ancient and modern books but leaves (or 'leafs' if you are from Toronto) become toilet paper if you are lost in the woods.

Roger Pearse

I don't know, objectively. But probably fairly common in the early Dark Ages.

Parchment comes from sheep. To get some, first catch your sheep, skin it, and prepare it. That's hard work. It's a by-product of the monastic farming industry in a way.

On the other hand, in the early Dark Ages there were lots of books about, written on parchment, of no use to anyone. So ... why not use it?

Most people couldn't read anyway, and sneered at those who could as sissies. The 9th century scholar Lupus of Ferrieres recounts this; and also tells us of a poverty-stricken monastery whose monks were driven to sell handfuls of nails or whatever else they could find, in order to eat; and they wrapped these trade goods in pages torn from a classical text in their library. The book was the last copy in the world of that text. Every page torn out was another page lost to mankind. But of course to the monks it was just parchment, of no use to them.

We suffer from stories told by well-fed revisionists today, who try to claim that life in the Dark Ages was not "nasty, brutush and short". I'd exile all these people to Zimbabwe, so they could experience first hand what it feels like to watch civilisation collapse, and know that everything is getting worse and worse, and that you have no hope of your children getting even as good an education as you have. We should all remember that the arrival of the Dark Ages was heartbreaking for civilised men to witness. The urbane letters of the late Roman aristocrat Sidonius Apollinaris show little sign of the collapse going on around him, apart from one letter, written in a rage to a treacherous bishop who has just collaborated to betray Arvernia to the Goths. Such treachery is endemic in our day too.

And once the light has gone out, books are just fuel.

Only those accustomed to every privilege can be so self-centred as to forget that everything we have today can vanish, and vanish very fast. The ruins of the shining cities of antiquity should remind us of that. The barbarians broke the aqueducts that supplied the cities, and watered their horses at the breach; and those cities and the lands around them went back to desert.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Minimalist

One of the finest observations that I've seen you make, Roger. So very true.

Frank

Right, but Cicero himself gives us some information on Caesar (although I didn't mean to imply anything regarding why the monks wrote over some of these works, I have no idea, and even historians can really only speculate).

Nonetheless, this is the sort of deep well apologists try to dig to obfuscate the simple fact that people don't come back from the dead after three days, and we don't believe tall tales like that without enough proof to overcome its intrisic unlikelihood. If we did, then which tall tale do we choose (there's certainly plenty to choose from)?

Let me guess, the one we were raised to believe?

mountainman

So who started burning Porphyry, the light of the Greek NeoPlatonists, and for what reason ? The light was not on after Nicaea, and it was the christian orthodoxy who were burning the books. Eusebius is the first to open the ledger on what was to become the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum". The list of books to be burnt.


In the blink of an eye.

Roger Pearse

You're welcome. Glad to find I am not the only one.

Roger Pearse

Indeed he does, many times. In one of his letters he tells Atticus about a house-visit from Caesar as dictator. In another he writes to Brutus and Cassius lamenting that they had not involved him in the plot.

I'm not a great believer in comparing people at the centre of ancient events with someone like Jesus who was in a marginal area. It's better to compare like with like.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Minimalist

At Archaeologica.org every so often the discussion comes up about early humans being grunting beasts. I enjoy pointing out that if we sophisticated modern humans were suddenly dropped into a flint-tipped spear environment we'd all be dead in a week. Our ancestors were survivors and far tougher than we.

Frank

I fully agree with you here. However, I'm not sure how comparing first century Christians to ourselves helps validate Christianity? There's millions today who believe their favorite guru can levitate and perform all sorts of other magic tricks, the followers of Joseph Smith followed a known con man, in what was one of the most laughable scams in history, people willingly surrender the lives of their young children because some guy many centuries ago claimed a divine encounter while alone in a cave, etc. I just don't know how you guys can go from a few tid bits of historical proof that Jesus may have been a real person (e.g. Tacitus, Seutonius), to believing all these miracles actually took place. Even if the bible was consistent, it wouldn't help it very much. There's not a shred of independent substantiation for any miracle claim, and I see little reason why we shouldn't treat these claims like we treat every other mythic legend that was told about people in history (e.g. Alexander was the son of Zeus, incarnated when his mother had a dream of consummation with a lightning bolt). If one is going to use these sort of historical examples as an argument, then they should probably also mention the mythic legends associated with these historical figures, and why we shouldn't believe those myths (over, say, the miracle claims associated with Jesus)?

Roger Pearse

I'm very sorry, but I suspect that you are perhaps addressing some form of argument that I am not making? You see, I can make no sense of your reply, or relate it to my comment -- yet I get the impression you think you are replying to my comment? We're at cross-purposes here.

IIUC, the argument was about the quantity of data about two people in antiquity, in order to make some argument from that comparison.

To do so, we need, I would have thought, to ensure that the two are comparable in some way. Thus it is useless to list an emperor, and compare him to a peasant. Emperors can carve things on rocks and issue coins. But this does not mean that the only people who existed, or of whom we can have knowledge, are people who are rulers. We would need to compare non-ruler with non-ruler. And even some Roman emperors are barely known to history.

All the best,

Roger Pearse