The extreme Monophysitism of the Cave of Treasures

I've noted a couple times here Cave of Treasures. This was a Monophysite document... at first. By PseudoMethodius' time, Singar had a copy; Singar before it was Yezidi "Sinjar" was a Monophysite stronghold, like Mar Mattai and others too-close to Nineveh for Isho'yahb III's liking. PseudoMethodius although a Miaphysite himself did not push the issue, contrast his elder John bar Penkaye a decade earlier. Sergey Minov about a decade ago did a study; this came out of his thesis, so underpins his 2020 publication of said thesis.

First, a critique: one piece of evidence Dr Minov brings is the Bet Hale disputation. This is, since formal publication, considered an 'Abbasid-era text. It is too late for consideration in this argument. Now, on to happier content.

Minov relates that Singar at its founding hosted Monophysite exiles from Justin I. The Cave raises many Iranian tropes, not least the name "Peroz" for the wise men. Minov ponders if she hosted this book's very scriptorium.

But as it was copied in the Syriac Orient, Minov finds that the Cave suffered some intrusions, which went against its Monophysitism. In this time 'Abd al-Malik was weighing the scale for Monophysitism, going so far as to prevent the Church of the East from seating a "catholicos" pope. It may however be that Singar had access to the altered version as well. Some evidence that the Cave had trickled outside the boundary is John bar Penkaye, who used a parallel Jubal tradition. At any rate Singar dared use the Cave in an appeal to Melkites and even to Latins, two-qnômë stalwarts since Constantine IV.

This text assumes a cult of Christ's tunic. Minov sees this in Palaestinian / Jordanian churches over the later half of AD 400s.

The Cave proffers a legend of Solomon building Baalbek, which Baalbek's own touristry-department wasn't claiming as of AD 502. But we'll see it in pseudo(?)Zecharia of Mytilene. John of Ephesus is late enough I suspect he knew the Cave (Minov assumes Zuqnîn's several editors didn't interpolate the legend). That's a legend as could only come from a westerner.

Minov raises how Mono- is this text's physitism. Eutychian, that's how; or, so its critics following the councils of Ephesus rated it. (Later they will be called "Julianist", which as Minov points out is unfair to Julian.) The Cave didn't think Christ was circumcised in the flesh(!). Of course this note dropped out of the Eastern revisions but not fully, as by editorial-fatigue references slipped through later on. These "Phantasists" remained an embarrassment to Miaphysites in the early 500s, when Philoxenus of Mabbug/Manbij pens a rant against them. Minov uses that to date the original around that time. He might also have said around that city.

I do however think Minov is pushing the edge as he dates it around AD 600. I'd pin it much earlier, perhaps in Justinian's later years when - they say - he was leaning toward Eutychian "aphthartodocetism".

The Syriac archive concerning Abgar and Christ

As long as we are discussing 2021's fragments of ancient religious literature, Andrew Gabriel Roth would float the Christian tradition of the Abgars of Callirrhoë. We've discussed the hash Rabbûla made of it; Roth here has unhashed it. Unfortunately it is still hashed.

So Roth would further recommend we journey back still further, to Eusebius' history. Eusebius in chapter 1.13 claims to have translated from the Syriac. The Syriac which Roth is here editing has preserved a lot more than Eusebius related. However: what is in our Syriac has anachronisms, like "Palaestina"; no Jew was using this name before Hadrian's rampage (and they still dislike it). Also our Syriac is more hostile to the Jews than [even] Eusebius. By Eusebius' time a lot of Melito was extant and other divisive work. In 1 Clement's time, this antipathy was more muted. One example is that where in our Syriac, Abgar fret that the Jews wish to crucify Jesus; for Eusebius Abgar worried only of more-general "injury".

One might argue that Eusebius is muting the antipathy simply to make it match better with the Gospels' "historic" setting. That is: the evangelists did a fiction; Eusebius is following their line. Eusebius knew as well was we do that the Jews had no authority to perform a crucifixion under Pilate's nose. However: in some Gospel readings and particularly in the sermons, the Jews actually do crucify Christ, anachronism be damned, as it were. That makes weaker the argument that Eusebius - in his own day - would invent or alter this text to have Abgar be less antisemitic, as Eusebius in fact portrays. More likely is that louts like Rabbûla "improved" it.

And Rabbûla owned the library in Abgar's city. So whatever Eusebius read from there, did not survive the theocracy.

Juliana and Origen

[INJECT: I apologise for the hiccup in Blogspot like 8-11 AM MST. I don't know what happened; I don't believe I was HAX0RD. Might be a DNS problem at Google.]

We're doubling-up today. I wish to discuss a source for the Paradise here Palladius' vol. 1.

Budge 1.45 talks one sancta Juliana, of Caesarea-in-Cappadocia. Juliana transmitted from Symmachus the "expositor" (= translator), a collection of... these things.

Straightaway this supports Jerome and Eusebius that Symmachus was Christian, against Epiphanius.

On checking, the author of that Juliana anecdote seems to correct her: that the collection was in Origen's handwriting a little later (Origen had made enemies in his home Alexandria, whence he'd fled AD ~230). But we might posit a harmony: Origen 'an Symmachus. Origen had done the same for the Hexapla.

Chapter 1.34 itself concerns the time of Athanasius who only really gets going from AD ~320, laying the antiArius case before Nicaea. That chapter is here at 1.34 discussing a 20 year old virgin, nameless, who hid Athanasius from "Constantine the Less". Constantine II's full reign AD 337-40 is possible; the editor Budge prefers however Constantius II, who ruled the East earlier. She is 70 at the time of writing, and still won't divulge her name - suggesting the imperium of Valens, which seems (to me) early, for Palladius. Whoever was the author, he thereby makes the case for Juliana as this virgin's predecessor in True Faith.

As to the content of that collection, there is no way a man of Valens' imperium had met Juliana in the AD 240s. I note that 1.46 moves from Cappadocia to Galatia. So (pseudo?)Palladius is, I think, roaming the Anatolian hinterland looking for rare books and stories AD 360s.

I suggest, behind 1.35-46, Origen's abridgement of Symmachus geared toward holy women of lower Egypt, which Juliana - a holy woman elsewhere - commissioned. The Paradise collects much content about holy women, mostly virgins, from 1.34f; in here, besides the oral account commencing it, is lore interpolated from Hippolytus of Rome; but most is later and Egyptian.

The Paradise of the Monastic Fathers

Not to be confused with the Cave of Treasures is the Paradise. The latter will do a fine job doing the confusionment for you. One step toward lightening that confusion is Adrian Pertea's job.

Paradise is the title ʿEnānīšōʿ dropped upon his edition, under the Caliphate; this seems to be what Budge edited. ʿEnānīšōʿ's base text was called Sayings of the Elders, before him. ʿEnānīšōʿ worked at, where else, Bēt-ʿĀbē.

The Sayings of the Elders as a title really only refers to the fourth - which may be the first collection. The first two parts, ascribed to Palladius, are lives of said elder saints; so is the third, which is mah boi Jerome's. I expect Palladius aimed to introduce it all with some clue as to who these guys even were. I don't blame ʿEnānīšōʿ for renaming it. As to why Jerome is here... maybe Palladius injected it and then prefaced it with saints he couldn't find in Jerome.

This divers grouping spread from Egypt to Syria where copies were made, without much reference to other copies, accumulating sayings from later saints somewhat-independently of one another. So the core text is, as noted, a mess. Bedjan and then Budge made editions of manuscripts those two liked. As usual for Budge, he jumped ahead of more-careful scholars... but also as usual for Budge, those more-careful scholars weren't doing their job at the time.

Hence, the mess. Although as a mess, the collection is diachronic. It spans centuries. Some of the later "bad" editions might hold lore deep into late-antiquity, like Anastasius of Sinai. The parallel which Pertea brings is the Pratum Spirituale, which also has deep additions, in its case a somewhat-famous (ie. Hoyland) Georgian edition as might witness to Islam.

Fraktur (sigh)

If you read German literature from the early 1800s, or German scholarship, you'll run into the Fraktur font. The first edition of Nöldeke's Geschichte is in this. Luckily its readers don't have to bother much with that edition no more because he and Schwally revised it into standard Roman. Subsequently-if-belatedly Behn has in 2013 translated all of it. Less-luckily the Hamasa got translated into this font too back-when, which nobody's since updated.

What I didn't know, is that it's a Nazi font now, according to Evan Gorelick. Like... uh. What? It is simply a bad font, mostly illegible to nonGermans. This opinion I share with no less than the Austrian himself - who banned it in 1941 upon taking a panEuropean empire.

Hooray, we can all agree on something! - which is that Gorelick watches too many "Loony Tunes" cartoons on Youtube. Seriously, the cartoonists should have known better too by wartime; but they were running an antiGerman campaign at home, which weird font was just too easy to pass up.

Before Yu

The Shang, and probably Erlitou before them, were Chinese. The Shu probably weren't. Somewhere downstream of Shu was Shijiahe on the Yangtze. This civilisation collapsed 1900s BC.

Jin Liao leads a quintet looking at rainfall "4.6–3.5 kyr BP". At the 4.2 mark, started "disturbances". 3.95–3.84, they got what France got in the early AD 1300s: rain, and mortalité. They couldn't drain the rain so left the plain.

Sturtian news, II

I hadn't looked in on the Cryogene in the last couple years; let's try again.

Last October they were looking at "ooids", laminated pearls but without the oyster. Each layer has data, like tree-rings (or indeed like pearls I guess). Back then, they were looking at "organic" carbon, the carbon in living tissue; even if it's plankton or paramecial tissue, as one might expect before the Ediacaran from 635 Mya on. They didn't find much. So it wasn't plants locking up the carbon from 717 Mya on (this is oft-rounded to 720).

Recently other scientists were looking at the climate patterns - at least during the Sturtian patch 717–660 Mya, from Garvellach. Now they know: climate was happening. A lot of that ice melted 660 Mya, so... yeah. Before the next cold snap, which they call Marinoan (650–635 Mya).

The article hints that Garvellach snapshots a mere 3 ky span, in this 57000 ky Sturtian; but... it's something. Maybe they can finetune more exactly when the sample was laid down, like with ooids.

They can say definitively, during the Sturtian at some point anyway, that some water did peep out from time to time, like 15%... of the ocean. The land at the time is assumed also covered in the white stuff (and quite dead), although Antarctican summer vacationers may ponder Dry Valleys.