Thoughts on Antiquity

Jim West just wrote a post up about The Jesus Project today and April DeConick (a Jesus Project fellow) did likewise some time before that. For those not familiar, the Jesus Project is a group of 50 individuals - most of whom have published on the topic - who intend to assess the […]

The BBC reports that an Italian professor of anthropology has violated the tombs of Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Politian, for some frivolous reason or other.  Both were leading figures in the recovery of ancient literature in the 15th century.  
I remember one day finding a letter from Politian bound into a manuscript that I was […]

I’m currently looking at an English translation of a later part of this long work in Arabic, which has transliterations of Arabic words in the middle of it.  Some Greek words also appear.
Some are interesting: “al kurban” is the offering of the mass, i.e. holy communion.
Another is “al-Ka‘k” - cakes!
I wish I could work out […]

The excellent Syriacologist Steven Ring has discovered that a good catalogue of all the Syriac manuscripts at Harvard is online here.  Better yet, he’s going out there to take a look at them.
Among them I notice as Ms. 95 a copy of Nestorius, The Bazaar of Heracleides, on which I have written before.  Colophons in […]

James J. Clauss, University of Washington, has reviewed the book The Shadow of Callimachus. Studies in the Reception of Hellenistic Poetry at Rome < Hardcover / Paperback)>. It’s part of the Roman Literature and its Contexts, the definitive works for Roman literature and culture in its own context. This particular one should please students of […]

During my absence, I’ve been working on two projects which might interest readers. First, I’m still working on BibleWorks modules, namely Catullus and a reworking of Caesar. The other main project I’m working on is my Matthew paper.
The subject on Matthew introduces many new questions I had not thought of before. The old paper, which […]

One of the great questions about the Chronicle of Eusebius is whether the format of the tables as given in the Latin translation by Jerome (numbers of years at the margins, text down the middle of the page) is Eusebian, or whether the format in the Armenian translation (numbers in the middle, text in the […]

I am deeply impressed with the National Archives.  I first came to hear of them when I learned that they allow their readers to bring in digital cameras, under reasonable conditions, and I was impressed.  After all, the only certain way to ensure the destruction of a document is to ensure no copies are made.
I […]

In appendices 20-21 of The Messiah Jesus, Robert Eisler gives a collection of texts, many of them Byzantine, that describe either (A) certain statues of Jesus made by gnostic groups and attributed to Pontius Pilate or (B) the physical appearance of the Lord himself.
I have translated most of these texts and offer both the texts and […]

This post is part 8 of my series on ancient canonical lists.
Athanasius was the highly influential bishop of Alexandria and a key figure in the christological debates of century IV. His interest to us here lies in his thirty-ninth festal letter, dated to year 367, in which he gives a list of canonical books whose […]