The counter-coup

Eli Lake: Mossedegh had dissolved the Majles, replaced the army leadership and Supreme Court and closed newspapers by the time the Shah used his constitutional authority to fire him.

The first Parthava Shah, Reza Khan, served under Ahmad Qajar, whom the parliament - which we'll agree to spell "Majles" - had installed over his father. The Qajars were Turks; Khans are also usually Turks, but Reza claimed to be Pahlavi. Someone would have to test that Y chromosome. Anyway as it happens, Khan did the coup - in 1921. This vacated the throne, although the Qajars lingered on, until 1923 when Ahmad gave up and left the empire. The Majles then installed Reza as shah, 1925; as he remained until 1944, when he died and Iran got the Shah we 1970s kids know and love, Mohammed Reza.

I know that it may be bad form to bring Greek standards into an Iranian context. Luckily for you, readers; bad form is exactly what we do here. Mohammed Mosaddegh (sorry, I'm insisting on this spelling) was a tyrannos. This, as opposed to a dictator; we can argue the legality of Reza's rule, but at least the Majles formalised his term, in retrospect, in 1925. For Mosaddegh, there was no Majles. He was simply the commander-in-chief of his own pet army. As well as the supreme Judge. And the arbiter of information.

The only in-house centre of power left as could reinstate any norms at all was the institution of the shah. Off-house, I'll admit, we Brits didn't want Mosaddegh either and who was in charge of the north in 1952-3... well, after March, that's actually a good question, and whoever wanted to be in charge had some motive for a quick victory abroad.

The shah did the only thing he could do, and the Brits were right to support him. This does not excuse how the shah chose to run Iran until the 1970s. But it can't have been worse than arbitrary rule by a tyrant and the likely Soviet invasion to follow.

TANSTAAFL

I am unsure where else than Christianity we hear this:

It's a free gift!

All you have to do is -

The rest may be safely ignored. The Christian has already revealed himself to be peddling snake-oil. Anything that comes after this wastes time.

If it's a free metaphysical gift, then - either it's not real, or - I've got the gift already and I don't have to thank you for it. I don't have to do or think anything. But this line of apologetics is never honest. Anyway, although we're done here, allow me to talk past the sale. Heaven knows the Christian who's already lost the argument will near-invariably switch tactics.

One such is to assert that our life was that gift - so simple honour demands we pay it back somehow, in gratitude ("faith") if nothing else. That assumes we're enjoying life.

More respect may be given to such as argue that the gift however costly should be accepted - and paid for - because of the alternative. This was Blaise Pascal's take. It has some vindication from Cantor (and, they tell me, Dedekind).

But paid to whom? Some Jew on a stick? Or maybe with Richard Carrier and 2 Enoch we assume the act of redemption happened on Mars' Lagrangian haloes (or so I count Fifth Heaven). There's the rub, isn't it?

Anyway, don't take the tack of fREe GiFt. It is not an honest tack so you'll sail to hell on it.

Stop the presses: Vox Day launders lies again

Beale links Neon Revolt, not imagining that Candace Owens has made herself odious all on her own.

Grok thinks the memo is realsies but Columbia University rates Grok poorly. The source is Matt Wallace, somewhere down the Charles Johnson level of credibility (pick a CJ; F. or C.). Some crypto saar confessed to the memo yesterday evening.

I'm not - or I hope I'm not - one to throw out "demonic"; that's how very bad things happen. I might allow it for Tucker Carlson who has admitted to a demonic violation himself (so: take it up with him). I am also unsure of words ending "-path" on account I am not a licenced pathologist. I instead use terms like "opportunist" or "liar". I don't know if I've used "conscienceless" yet.

I find Neon Revolt and Beale to lack conscience. Beale doesn't need the money; he just posts what he posts because he enjoys watching people scramble around to refute his lies. One suspects Tucker Carlson is in it for the money, which goes double for Milo "Nero".

Candace Owens has a husband, but any woman does hope for an independent revenue-stream in case something happens at home. I have, of course, taken no money to call shenanigans on her opportunism. Conscienceless, at that.

The good news is that Laura Loomer and others might be able to dip into the revenue-stream... of the liars. It is unfortunately difficult to come after Beale's clearinghouse; like Mark Tapscott, he doesn't lie, he links to lies and lets you come to your own conclusions (which better be the lies' conclusions).

Jews for the ish malhama

In Exodus, the Song at the Sea anthropomorphed G-d. On visiting /pol/ yesterday: I find that this Song is a proof text for Christians now. Or at least it serves "goys" as a text showing up legacy-Judaism for not being as monotheist as Jews claim it to be - which is why Rabbi Tobias Singer doesn't like it.

Here, I'll lay the case that the Rabbi should buck up... and be a man.

The Song is very old, linguistically. Later literature shows this, textually, as well. A while ago I summed up Emmanuel Tov's textual scuffing; what follows, pulls that content up here, in case anyone missed it.

In the MT, and presumably in the mouths of Miriam and Moses themselves, YHWH is a man of war (ish malhama). Elsewhere Psalm 24 prefers to hail YHWH a gabur malhama. That reading backwashed into the Samaritan Pentateuch, despite that sect not accepting the Psalter. GBR is also in the Aramaic Targum and the Syriac, here as emphatic: the gêvra, the ganbura (w-QRBTN' for the song and the psalm both which is, yes, Biblical Aramaic). I find the "גבור המלחמה" also-also in the apocalyptic War Scroll although the text is a bit corrupt here.

Tov flags Targum's "Samaritan" switch from "man" to "jabbâr" unusual inasmuch as Targum prefers MT; personally I disagree, and consider the Samaritan as inlining midrash into the text itself, as Targum did perhaps-independently. Psalm 24 exists to bind the Psalter's first book (Ps. 3-41), and may be read as an update or even critique to the Song of the Sea. The wordshift to gbr seems also to have afflicted Arab apocalyptic and the Palaestinian tradition.

Anyway. As Ash Maiz points out, ish only means a "man". David tells Solomon (in CBH) to be an ish. Not to be a master or a lord or (lol) a husband; just to be the least of what you are made of. Take care of your business.

It is exactly because ish can only mean "man" that so many pietists referring to it have attempted to change it. As Maiz also points out, none of this is even necessary. Christians don't even bother referring to it much; and - you know why? Because it is a poem. It's just some dudes and young girls singing a song.

Really at stake for Jews (if not for Samaritans) isn't G-d's transcendence, which cannot be harmed by this harmless song. The Jews' Psalter is chock-full of para-pagan imagery, yea even unto CBH. At stake is whether Miriam and Moses and Aaron, supposedly superior to that sinner David, could sing this song.

But - even then; all Israel is on their way to Sinai where they are about to - okay, spoiler-alert. Suffice that their innocent song here might foreshadow their fuller misunderstanding, at that Mount. Maiz could have mentioned this too. I find of interest that Maiz didn't.

Rather: Singer could have mentioned it (a lotta that goin' round). I called yesterday's match 2-0, for Maiz. This one gotta be a 0-0 draw; if Singer had kept it at that, I doubt Maiz even would have touched this one.

Shirk in Judaism

Ash Maiz and R. Tobias Singer, title-fight! The issue here is the extent to which Christianity violates tawhid. Singer proposes, to a Muslim, that Jews don't. It's important to Jews that Muslims don't see Jews as mushriks; on account that, for Muslims, G-d Himself has accused Jews for as much in sura 9.

Maiz points out that Jews do in fact venerate saints. (So have most Muslims, historically. Speaking as an ex-Algerian.) And not just at the Tomb of Rachel or the Tomb of Abraham (or the tomb of 'Alî Reza); but at the Tomb of Schneerson. Visitors leave written notes for this Rabbi. Maiz further points out, whether it's to exonerate these pilgrims or no, that Jews had been doing this since the "first century" which to Maiz means A.D. (Maiz is a converso, like me).

The Jewish attack on shirk by contrast might be more recent. Their term as vocalised is שִׁתּוּף so shitûph in Aramaised Hebrew. I do not find it to predate the commentaries on the Babylonian Talmud; so it looks to postdate [Madinan] Islam, likely 'Abd al-Malik. That Talmud extends into the Islamic era, and was not much adhered until then (probably because it wasn't fixed). Even so שִׁתּוּף does not exist in the text, or at least is not explained.

None of this is to condemn nor to condone sura 9, which I'll leave to others, others as might still think sura 9 is worth defending or opposing. This is to point out that (1) Judaism calls upon Saints for intercession and (2) Judaism's שִׁתּוּף against others is opportunistic and not core to that faith. 2-0 to Maiz.

How Michael Licona can save himself

Revisionist antitheologian Dr Richard Carrier almost restrains himself from ranting about Trump long enough to review some Christian apologists. At bat were Michael Licona and Jonathan Sheffield (reversing Carrier's title), against Bart Ehrman perhaps a para-apologist in Carrier's sight.

Carrier is getting too old to put up with debates much, but he's been at the podia long-enough he can effectively rate others'. Here, Carrier rates the trio Sheffield > Ehrman > Licona. Since Licona needs the help most, let's help him. I share the spirit of Sheffield, as a theist (Nestorian-Christian specifically) willing to hear out the skeptics. However amateurishly in my case.

First, an aside: on Mark's Aramaic. May I suggest - to Carrier, not to Licona - that Mark using targum hardly implies Mark's distance from Peter's ambit. This more implies the opposite, that Peter's people were steeped in the Aramaic culture from Hebron to Damascus (we needn't go further north; Edessa comes later). Hence why contemporaries called him Kepha (Aramaic), and not ho Petros (Greek) until 1 Clement and Mark. Not that it much matters to anyone anymore.

Licona went wrong in that Mark talked more about Peter than "the others". This opened Licona to Carrier's observation that nuh-uh, Matthew was. Licona could - instead - concede Marcan Priority. From this basis Mark would be talking about Peter more than Mark's contemporaries and sources. These would include Paul's letters, which is why Paul's doctrines even show up. One can also bring Evan Powell that some lore against Peter was floating around. This wasn't 1 Clement which is proPeter. I submit it wasn't Paul who was generally amiable to "Cephas"; e.g. Paul says nothing about Peter abandoning Christ at the Passion, as Paul might as he is hotly debating Peter's party and defending his own apostolate. So... who was it? I'd suggest, the Beloved Disciple had put something out - which Carrier is here and there hinting. If we don't like Powell's proposal of John 1-20, Carrier might have to accept *Lazarus its source. Or even some scurrilous Life Of Peter we do not anymore own (think, George of Resh'ayna's take[down] on Maximus).

If Licona had held that stance - that Mark is defending Peter to a Pauline community, against the Beloved Community (John? Lazarus?) - Mark does not have to be taking Peter's direct dictation. Mark can be writing after Peter's death, on the frame of the antiPetrine lore. The late Peter has enough surviving friends who can fill in details here and there; and, of course, Mark has Paul's letters. From the position of Mark as Peter's literary advocate, a Papias can spin that into "amanuensis" (scribe, for us Latins). But Licona doesn't have to.

All this assumes Licona is not tied to an episcopal anvil like, oh, Pitre and Hahn.

Jacob Edessene's dispensationalism

Jacob, or James, was Miaphysite (or, "Jacobite") bishop of Edessa-Callirrhoë AD 684-7 - although he'd call it AG 995-8. He then retired to monasteries, first Tel 'Adda. There he dared define Christianity. Michael Penn has translated what remains of the definition.

Reasonably Penn pins this project in reaction to 'Abd al-Malik's supremacism, perhaps preparing for a debate. Jacob would stay in that abbey until AD 698; Ibn al-Ash'ath hadn't yet proclaimed his "nasirate".

The most striking part of this definition is its dispensationalism. In Jacob's thought, Christianity was practiced by Adam and Eve to the extent they were following God's Command. Christ was known to the Prophets, if they didn't know exactly how He'd show up. Christ's age is the sixth age. Outsiders may observe here sura 3's claim, that Christ was rather the culmination of Prophecy - for the Jews; not otherwise to distract from Allâh.

If God was holding back His epiphany in Christ's form, one can ask Jacob to what degree free-will can exist. I take it that his epistle on the qadar, as summarised Michael Cook, would follow this up.

Faliscan Spain

In a former life I suggested an aspect of Spanish, and of Italian dialect, to be Old Latin. The conjecture was that duenos > *buenos > bueno > buono. Spain got the bueno stage, mid-second-century; Rome got as far as bonu, restoring the -s perhaps-artificially because they had Greeks about. Hey, a Dominican blogger liked it over on his blog . . .

Today, let's discuss the famous f > h.

Ferdinand becomes Fernando in several Iberian postLatin dialects. In Castilian, the man is Hernan or Hernando. Similarly what should be filho is hijo. I'd been under the impression this was late. It has to be annoying to the Portuguese which makes some explanation why they are not part of Spain to-day.

But maybe it's not late. Faliscan has hileo. Some northern Italians have reported this shift in their dialects as well. Sicilians might have the excuse of Spanish occupation but I don't think this ever happened in the north; those guys had to deal with the French instead, whose Romance dialects as far as I know have no such shift.

Also northwest[-of-the-peninsula] Italy endured a Gaulish incursion. The late Republic had to call this place Cisalpine Gaul (Caesar being busy on the transAlps). I don't find anything like hileo in any Gaulish.

Propose here that Romanised Faliscans were recruited to settle Spain. Additional waves of Romans, who weren't Faliscan, came later and got to Lusitania and our Galicia.

The Dark Ages are not selection-bias

A kerfuffle has broken out on X upon Crémieux' memetic chart of what the Louvre displays to tourists. tl;dr it's Greek, with a bit of Roman and then a stark dropoff. The High Middle Ages get displayed again and then modernity.

That arrogant "History For Atheists" guy pipes in, such that the Cruel Sardaukar must spank him. Bryan Ward-Perkins, you'd think, should have been read aloud to the man, perhaps with hand-puppets. Now apparently O'Neill finds his buttcheeks insufficiently-rouged: this quaint “dark ages” designation by that insufferable data bro clownboy.

A descendant of Niall might feel that his family back in Eire weathered this storm fine. I can imagine an Arab saying similar - or, later, a Damascene. For the rest of us, Rome's collapse was a disaster. And not just the West: the Greek world contracted (only surviving after re-"Roman"ising) and today Iranians too will, if asked, or not asked, tell you of "two centuries of darkness".

The rot had already started, as the Sardaukar details. One interesting point is how Justinian was able to dislodge the Vandals with a smaller force. Some of that is Belisarios' skill. Some of that is because, economically, the middle class - including soldiers - could push for higher wages in the wake of Yersinia. We might believe an incremental improvement in military efficiency and a healthier soldiery. We do not see any such improvement in art. And certainly not in the sciences: a lot of Greeks and Syrians were retreating to flat-earth theory (Latins, being stubborn, stayed round-earth mostly). There's no way that theory helped out with naval tech or its knock-on, trade.

With fewer men and worse maps, the Arabs became more important as intermediaries, because they didn't need maps where they lived. That's where Henri Pirenne might jump in.

Now: where selection-bias might be cogent, is in the choice of Greek/Gaulish wares over principate-Roman in the Louvre. The French are, historically, taught to be descendates of the Gauls so their muséa may prefer that era. Also possible is that Julius Caesar trashed the place so hard it somewhat suffered its own mini Dark Age. Although here I am unsure. If I were running this museum I might play up the western "Roman empires" especially their Constantine III, as well as their rôle in staging reconquistas of Britain. We've recently mentioned Domitian II.

Emic, etic

I'd shuffled "emic" and "etic" into the bin with the pseudo-scholarly ramblings of Foucault and Derrida. Now that these days I'm less hostile to Foucault, Prof. Davila suggests to us we revisit emic and etic, on the Palestine issue.

Since my focus as a Justinianist is deep into the Roman era, I just use "Palaestina" for the region. "Tertia", out where the Arabs are at.

At base, this is why I restrict "AD" to mediaeval ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔲𝔪. Not only do Muslims and Maya not acknowledge our Dominus - the Christians weren't acknowledging His calendar, either. They used the Seleucid count. "AD" is, thus: etic. "AG" for the Seleucids is emic, as is "AH" (albeit also rather etic before 'Abd al-Malik's Caliphate) and the year-of-the-colony if we're talking preIslamic Araby.

On the flip side, etic language is why Erik Larson's publisher "Crown" is demonic, and why Larson should self-publish if he has a shred of honor left in him. They know what they did.

I'm not really here to please anybody, and I suspect neither is Davila - which is why I follow his blog.

BACKDATE 2/21

When China dethroned Allâh

The Shang worshipped the celestial deity 帝, pronounced Têks at the time they tell me (Mandarin di). Mongols, Turks, and probably ancestral Huns will call Him "Tengri". Then the Chinese killed Him.

Specifically: the Zhou were the deicides. In 1046 BC they overthrew the Shang and demoted their Yin rulers. The Zhou came up with a new ideology, of "Heaven": 天. This is a Whig understanding, that the emperor be emperor because he's got the Mandate. Maybe you got a better idea on how to emperor. You - and what army?

Various movements in Chinese history have raised such armies. A couple centuries ago, Jesus' little brother raised one (doubtless pulling from nonsense like this). Thing is... none of these armies have defeated Heaven.

Evangelists must ponder this upon the tree of woe.

The evolution of Oriental monasticism

Contemporary with Babay the Great at Bet-Abe, was Shubḥalmaran. In 2004, David Lane published his work, starting with The Book of Gifts. We are learning that Babay presided over a revolution in Eastern monasticism. Shubḥalmaran wasn't in it.

It was under Babay, that the Eastern monks adopted Evagrius the Pontic. Jerome himself (letter 133) had attacked this Evagrius; but I suppose later readers figured that Jerome attacks everybody so who-cares. A more pointed condemnation occurred under Justinian's synod AD 553 if you want to count that. Latin ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔲𝔪 will know Evagrius for listing the Se7en; well, eight, but we Latins merge sadness with wider acedia.

Among Babay's students was one Ishoʿyahb - Ishoʿyahb III. One of his first preserved epistles is Babay's eulogy. They were, then, in the same party. The present Paradise came from that catholicate. But not all east-Syrians agreed with Ishoʿyahb; and some dissidents may have looked askance at Babay as well. These dissidents are those who preserved Shubḥalmaran, and pieces of what became the Paradise.

Those scraps were collected at Sinai, whence M20N. The monks and nuns at Sinai would not consider themselves "Nestorians". Nonetheless they did keep these Oriental books... as, in the Orient, mah boi Jerome was translated.

Shubḥalmaran is in Ishoʿdnaḥ's book, and he contributed to the AD 612 debate. Otherwise - we're learning - Shubḥalmaran was a holdout of the old-school, from the days of Aphraates. Possibly how come Babay was NOT invited to the debate.

It may be that anti-Evagrian dissidents gathered under Shimʿon. After various synods, like that in Dirin, healed that schism; it may be that diehards fled west and bent the knee to us Melkites and Catholics.

Bird poo kingdom

Among the polities the Inca took over were the Chincha. The reason the Inca wanted that site was guano, which is not a Spanish word; here from seabird.

The paper claims the Moche already knew of this resource, which fertilised - what else - maize. Around AD 1250 the Chincha start using bird imagery on their pots. Possibly the birds' pots; DNA analysis might pick it up.

I do not find noted in this paper, the Huari. Perhaps because the Chincha were too far south, better contemporaries with the Tiahuanaco.

Around AD 1400, the Inca came knocking and annexed this kingdom. This is about when the Inca spread fame of the "Lunahuaná", that is the guano people - north of the Chincha. The paper reports that the Spaniards will observe that the Chincha lord ranked among the high notables in the Inca retinue.

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.

You can't be pope all the time

Theodor Herzl accused Pius X of this utterance:

Noi non possiamo favorire questo movimento. Non potremo impedire agli ebrei di andare a Gerusalemme, ma non possiamo mai favorirlo. La terra di Gerusalemme se non era sempre santa, è stata santificata per la vita di Jesu Cristo (sic). Io come capo della chiesa non posso dirle altra cosa. Gli Ebrei non hanno riconosciuto nostro Signore, perciò non possiamo riconoscere il popolo ebreo.

An excerpt can also be had here. The Vicar of Christ goes on to promise that if Herzl's crew do show up in Palestine, he'll have priests ready to baptise them. But I don't care about that. If a crew of Tamils propose to show up, the pope should have priests ready to baptise them as well - or he's no pope.

Of more concern is that Giuseppe Sarto here assumes that popoli exist for anyone else but, it seems - for Jews. Joseph was born a Venetian / Dalmatian. He might or might not have accepted Venice's ontological separation from Italia. But I am sure that once crowned Bishop in Roma that this man could understand the difference between an Italian and a Frenchman, or either from a Pole. A successor to Pope Saint Martin should understand that nations exist in the flesh but come together under Christ Jesus. Has Jerusalem no bishop in communion with Martin? Pius' defenders might want to look this up.

Denying that a Jewish people exist, and dismissing them as ebreo... seems Pharaonic.

It may be that Herzl misremembered or misrepresented. If not, it may be that Fr. Sarto had slipped off the cathedra and blurted Venetian words as a mortal Venetian might. I suspect, the latter. But that is a debate for Pius' defenders; or for his Church.

Noam Chumpsky

New Yorkers have called their boy "Donald Chump" since at least the MAD parody of Gremlins 2. He's now getting grumblings of "pdf protector" due to his Jeffrey Epstein / Ghislaine Maxwell canoodling up to 2003, when - they say - Trump kicked him and (I assume) her out of his Florida properties. Now we hear that in 2006, Trump ratted Epstein out.

Well, maybe [h/t Carrier, who unfortunately is also laundering Raskin]. We might fault Trump as "Chump" at least for not noticing until 2003. MAD was generally good in the 1980s-90s; I bought it whenever I saw it on the rack. But. We are here for the Chomsky chumps.

Apparently the 2008 court was so lenient that nobody knew about it until Cernovich got the files unsealed. So claims Valeria Chomsky, on Noam's behalf. The Chomskys were canoodling with the Epstein/Maxwell crew in and after 2015. Chris Hedges gives a f-u to that. [COUNTERPOINT 2/16: Compact.]

I should point out here that I believe Valeria - inasmuch as that she speaks for Noam. She is the Ghislaine to Noam-as-Jeffery. You don't hang out with a creep for this long unless you are a creep yourself; so I learnt from all the "muh pdf" commenters plaguing X and 4chan.

And boy-oh-boy did Noam ever put out some disgusting content over his too-many years roaming this Earth. Let's float up here, those Khmer Rouge apologetics. Noam always was a weasel too, as when he subsequently denied ever running cover for those maniacs (I got yo' pdf right here).

So maybe let's not pay attention to the Chumpskys at all.

Archaic poetry in a classical time

In Qumran, the Yahad deemed Habakkuk 1-2 only as worthy of tafsirpesher, famously; despite that all traditions, including the Greek, relate three chapters. In 2021, one Joshua Bryan Henson submitted a PhD thesis on all three chapters. He concluded that the same author composed all of it. Excepting the poems in Habakkuk 3 which are ... older, not younger. So those are cited by the author, which is how they survive.

The language of Habbakuk is, overall, classical "CBH": think, the prosaic frame of MT Deuteronomy and Judges-through-Reigns - once corrected. Theodore Hiebert argued Habakkuk's poetic inclusiones are by contrast archaic "ABH". Henson agrees, on assumption for ABH of this corpus: Gen 49, Exod 15:1–18, Num 23:7–10, 23:18–24, 24:3–9, 24:16–19, Deut 32:1–43 and 33:1–29, Judg 5:1–30, 1 Sam 2:1–10, 2 Sam 22:2–51=Ps 18 and Ps 68. Not any of the Prophets, even Amos or Hosea.

...and not Ps[alm] 78. For Henson, this is a CBH composition affecting ABH style. One imagines such might hold of certain other preëxilic Psalms beside 18 and 68. This blog has endorsed Esther as a late production aping CBH; Henson rolls this into "LBH". So as you see Henson does not distinguish between the Temple cant of core "LBH" from other stuff which just happens to fall at the same time. Since Henson nails Habakkuk as CBH, I assume he takes its "Babylon" as Babylon.

By the way this shows that Psalm 78's composer in the CBH era, presumably ~700 BC, owned a library of ABH work. That library, says Henson, would have included the two poems now in Habbakuk 3. Habbakuk himself of course would have done his work after all that, the Hebrew scriptoria now being under Babylonian control.

Freebird!

A Cath/Orth history buff "Blasphemer1054" wants to know why Jews like Eric Weinstein like to pose giving The Finger to the Arch. Glad you asked! here is some torah for you, no shekels required.

Titus princeps and his dad Vespasian in that office - and before - both did some fine things for Rome and for her subjects. Both are role models for leaders. Titus in his Imperial capacity can especially be praised for his response to Vesuvius. Even Jews appreciate the good they did; Josephus got himself into the Flavius gens, partly because he'd disavowed the nuts who dragged the Revolt longer than it needed to run. Some call Josephus a traitor; most - I think - are (now) willing to hear him out. We can let bygones-be-bygones even for the looting, as I am sure Stacy McGaugh will agree.

Where we part ways with Flavius Titus Caesar is how he raised ... That Arch. Yeah: we screwed up, we lost. The man didn't have to teabag us a decade later. That's how revolts get fomented for the future; as our historians should know by now. So, to Eric: if you need another finger, I have two to spare.

Also I do not denounce the Talmud. Whilst we're at it.

The Buddha comes to Berenice

Romans at Berenice did more than just play with the monkey; they had Indian people there too.

I can fault the editors for letting slip about this "Roman" port named after the Macedonian queens and founded in the 200s BC. It's Greek, morons. Although, yes; imports from the Satavahana would indeed correlate with this port's Roman era.

With that date in mind, also posted to the Roman era is the Vrishni religion now (and certainly then) filed under Hinduism. This is northern India specifically, not Dravidian. Which interests me because usually it's south India that traded this sea, at least on the receiving-end. Of interest to the authors this stele ... isn't an import. It was carved in local plaster.

Also certainly northern are the Buddhas here; at least one is of Gandhara. This is late-antique, probably in the time of the Constantii Eunomian emperors but possibly Julian. That workshop mostly did Isis eidola. I see no ::eff::ing way this is fifth-century with Theodosius' men breathing down everyone's necks.

The article marks as most important - and I agree - the bilingual Sanskrit / Greek stele 9 September 248. (Year six of Philip.)

Phrenology doesn't work

The black hole of the Yucatan yielded up a "Naia" skeleton; Discovery Future discusses it.

Naia was a woman, and had the pelvic birth-pitting to prove it; with, unluckily, the pelvic fragility which helped kill her, when she spelunked into a lower cavern. Her head looked like the Kennewick Man's: more Ainu, or European. Luckily for our sciences, modern scientody has recourse to DNA. Since, well, woman there's no Y-DNA so we can't say much of her paternal ancestry.

We can say instead for her mitochondrial D lineage. This is all over South America mostly today. So nobody is calling her a "Solutrean".

At least, I hope nobody is. Beachy Head woman, for those keeping track, was deemed African by phrenology. She was not. On the other hand they did have some Yoruba or Mende DNA in Updown; this girl (whose own mtDNA was European) was probably brought to protoEngland by the Meroving Franks (which is why you don't see me buttmad over mulatta puppettrice too-tall in mediaeval-static Knight of the Seven Kingdoms).

The overall message has to be: don't use skull shapes as a proxy for race or ancestry.

Uranus, blasted

More news from 34 Tauri: the 1986 readings came during a flare. I see Uranus in the news, I, uh, click.

King George III's kawkab at 20 AU was highly radioactive when Voyager zipped past the bulleye 1986. The survey planned for the polar reading they got. Off the charts suggests they got what the Russians that year might measure as 3.6 Roentgen/hour. Since then in 2019 we've seen what flares can do to Earth's Van Allens.

I'd just apply inverse-square to get 1/400 the incoming energy. But that is a lot for a region so naturally cold.

The paper is "Solving the mystery of the electron radiation belt at Uranus: Leveraging knowledge of Earth’s radiation belts in a re-examination of Voyager 2 observations", Geophysical Research Letters per the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) although only with DOI, not link. Keeping in mind that Sci-Hub at .ru doesn't have everything and that Anna's Archive is likely going offline / darkweb.

BACKDATE 2/8

Zuqnîn after Palmer

Philip Wood, whom we've met here before on the Church of the East, has content on the Church of the West. This is a draught from 2011, or earlier; it's been edited and published since. I missed this at the time, and the final version seems hard to get to online. It may or may not affect my work - or/nor Andrew Palmer's. This is "PseudoDionysius" compiled at Zuqnîn.

"PseudoDionysius" tends to be applied to the earlier volumes, which plagiarise John of Ephesus. "Zuqnîn" is what Palmer called the seventh-century in the Syrian chronicles' excerpt, up to AD 715ish / AG 1026ish. Wood was arguing the content after Palmer left off.

A chronicle existed up to 731 / 1042. Wood calls it "A". From what Palmer relays of it, it is rife with errors such that I doubt anyone went back to fix it. (I have found little utility in it.)

This "A" was then copied and revised in 748, to add content starting 718: to chronicle "the Third Fitna" (I think the Muslims' word fitna is borrowed here). If this sounds like what John Ben-Penkâyë was doing for his near-apocalypse of the Second: yeah, we do get "antichrist" memes here. John was an autistic nutcase and an antisemite... which traits "B" shares. The 'Abbâsids were coming from the east and "B" didn't like it. Which was all the Jews' fault of course, as Barbara Roggema, who might not be autistic, lately may attest.

Hither, then, the 'Abbâsids came. So we have a Phase C 742-751; and a D, 749-763.

This is (for me) a lot of "phases" to keep the track thereof. The Zuqnîn MS is, itself, an autograph. How did we get so many editors before this MS? What happened to the earlier chronicles? Did no-one drop by the monastery and copy them?

Perhaps C is a separate smaller chronicle (Palmer relates some of these) and the D guy was also the B guy, splicing the C content into the longer work. That would render suspect the earlier content from 718-763. Why would D care about Marwân as much? This content should also be earlier, like C. Also I didn't see the "distaste for Jews" in A that Wood sees in B. When a charlatan exploits the Jews in the earlier decades, Zuqnîn laments this.

So I don't think "A" and "B" were the same. I think "A" had the core, and that other people wrote their own thing, although if they were all at the monastery they at least owned the "A" basis. The "D" guy brought the "B" Marwân lore and the "C" chaos into the "A" frame. The Marwân lore came from Arabs and the "C" stuff might have been brought from some other Syrian monastery.

BACKDATE 2/6

Zapotec

Last month we got reports of a Zapotec tomb. I was holding off but it is news now so, let's get into whatever I can tell of it.

This tomb has glyphs. They are not just pictographs [em-dash] they are blocky and stylised, like the Maya. The entry is flagged with a stone owl, like we see in the prolog to Raiders; owls were heralds of Xibalbá. The glyphs are, they say, calendrical; they don't report on when-exactly, but the claim is contemporary with the Maya after the AD 536 disaster. Of course they say "CE" but I deem that fair (Christians weren't even using "AD" much, then).

The term "Zapotec" is foisted upon them from the Mexicans. Today they call themselves Bën-za. Their civilisation at this time is best known for the White Mountain site, Monte Albán. This was contemporary with the similarly-exonymed Teotihuacan; that site had a Bën-za quarter, as also a Maya quarter. This tomb may have been cut toward the declining decades of both.

The Zapotec language, something like "Diidxazá", is related to Mixtec and more-distantly to Otomi, around the Teotihuacan region today. Jennings was fond of this language. I expect since the classical Chorti "Maya" were calling Teotihuacan something like "the place of reeds", that so did the Bën-za.

BACKDATE 2/6

Blat in Perú

Matt Stoller has a must-read on how we in the West got from winning the Cold War to creating a late-Soviet superstate based in Little Saint James. Stoller calls it "blat", due to Epstein himself being some sort of Memelite or Königbergian like, in all likelihood, my great-grandmother. Same with the Maxwells.

I wonder if we should trace this to the Americas however. Hernando de Soto in Perú was reporting on the "informal" economy in the 1980s there. You wouldn't call this country Marxist; I hold fair to tag their system Left-Wing Apartheid. South Africans were bitterly saying of their own nation it was capitalism for whites and Jews, socialism for Boers and fascism for blecks.

Listening to Epstein tee off on "goys", that's how he saw the entire planet. And why not? That's how the entire planet was behaving around him.

There were young women, and some females better classed as girls; but that was just for special. Mostly Epstein finessed conflicts-of-interest between others, on the Q.T. Every deal then became a blackmail possibility, even without it being sexy, if nothing else because all those who didn't get that special deal would certainly be angered - and either go to the courts, or find other means of vengeance.

Back to de Soto, his brief for making informal networks legal and formal got a lot of rave reviews, including from Bill Clinton. What we should have read more-carefully in de Soto's book, which got into English in 2002, is that some people like the networks staying informal. Stoller uses the word "Governance" - I think, deliberately pulling the G out of E.S.G., corporate social responsibility, corpocracy whatever you like to call it. Governance requires not just the public face of Davos.

Hedge

The Hedge Knight is on telly as Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I am here more concerned with its sequel, which we stand maybe a 65% chance of getting to watch next: The Sworn Sword. Specifically whether such a thing as a knight-errant existed, rather than "big guy shows up to tourney with armour".

The name is sus, as a mix of Saxon and Norman. Wiki wants me to think it is a creature of romance, like the Japanese ronin. I am unsure. If it be a trope, why is it seen across the globe wherever feudal societies crop up?

The Sworn Sword somewhat illustrates how a knight might end up errant, sleeping in hedges. Feudal lords come into border-disputes. They might reach a deal; that is somewhat the plot of this novella. Sometimes however they fall to blows; and a baron loses his lands, title, even life... but not his men.

Those knights might not have a baron anymore but they still have a king, often the same king as the other lord has. Those now-landless knights are still not traitors; or, if perhaps they were, the king might figure these men are worth some clemency, since they maintained their honour, of a sort, and the king cannot waste good men.

This is how bandits happen of course. Here we may defer to Weis' Daughter of the Empire: knights without portfolio will gladly hire under a lord, or in Weis' case a lady, who promises to restore to them their purpose. For Weis these knights formed a band, and were on their way to banditry - before the lady Acoma rescued them.

But perhaps some knights might hold to their vows ("sigma", Beale might say) to refuse that dubious company.

BACKDATE 2/4.

rOygbiv

They say that if you live long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float past you down-river. I don't know that I have much seen this in my life. But it does sometimes turn out you see an evil person sent up that river. Like Sonya Jaquez Lewis.

Coloradans know what Lewis helped make of their state. Less known, perhaps, is how she lied and how she forced others to affirm her lie, namely her "marriage" to a woman. The laws of nature and of G-d meant nothing to this state's SJL. And if the laws of man and of woman told her otherwise, she'd just change them.

But she couldn't change all of them.

Vox Popoli is a Hitlerist site

Richard Carrier argues that "Christian Nationalism" means NSDAP. To be more precise: NSDAP as ex-Catholic Hitler envisioned it post-Beer-Hall is a natural outgrowth of political Lutheranism.

The Catholics have a vision of the state as well: the pan-Christian "Christendom", backed up in dogma with the paraNestorian filioque. Obviously this vision conflicts with Luther's. As a result, Lutherans as of AD 1925 used the Catholic word "Christentum" to mock it.

When you look at Theodore Beale's site with the "voxday" URL, you often read the term "Churchian" and "Churchianity". These are Christian institutions which, in Beale's mind, are unfit for purpose. The Venn containing the "Churchianity" and "Christentum" circles is one circle.

I don't think Beale can (or should bother) argue with Carrier's finding. What he might argue is whether the NSDAP was in fact too tolerant, as to make it a poor vehicle for Christian Nationalism. Until the Long Knives the NSDAP was something of a coalition, from Röhm's brief for sodomía to Himmler's mysticism. Neither are particularly easy to count as Christian.

Beale also can't complain about Carrier's arrogant style and willingness to throw names about like PZ Myers at his worst. I might so complain.

Cucked by a plant

PBS / Brilliant, which is unfortunately a Climate site half the time, sometimes comes up with a gem. Here, they bring to attention the cuckoo-effect... for plants. With bonus antiLysenkoism.

We Neolithics like our wheat (and barley... and millet). Apparently, other C4 grasses were able to mimic what wheat looks like. So these "tares" got into the harvests and sometimes got their seeds mixed with the corn. Vavilov found that rye, for one, was a weed in several societies. Oats for another.

I mean, sure; not everyone likes rye, Return to Zork aside. It happens however that rye and oats although annoying when competing with the "real" crops be edible, if pungent; and may survive environments those other cereals can't. If nothing else the livestock'll eat it (and oh boy are oats ever associated with them).

Barnyard grass, reported in 2019, started around the AD 1000s with the Song Dynasty, a short of Chinese exile-state in the ricepaddy southeast. This weed is the problem.

M-dwarf life is colonial

Joseph J. Soliz and William F. Welsh have looked into - what happens with photosynthesis on M dwarf planets with liquid oceans around the rim. h/t the Wonderful Anton Petrov.

The duo looked at Trappist-1, especially e. -1e doesn't get photosynthetic energy. Maybe in 63 billion years LOL. (This star is 7.6Gy.) We kind of already knew this. Purple photosynthesis is possible but that doesn't cough up oxygen for us.

We then must look to nonphotosynthetic solutions: básalt, or not. On the ice side, other side of the rim.

Or, says Petrov: K stars, although I dunno. Alternatively if we do find oxygen in a M-dwarf system, then somebody has dropped by to terraform a planet there...

Brett Devereaux disappoints

The Baghestan is has been overall a proDevereaux blog. Lately however Dr. Bret (PhD) has been astoundingly uncharitable to one of the Right's higher-IQ spokespeople, here the serving Vice President.

For those without X subscriptions, presently nitter.net will get you there; xcancel seems down this cold weekend. But anyway.

Bret questions whether a concentration of infants signifies a special grave for infants - for everybody; or a trashpit, for brothels. This likely depended on the culture. It is, I think, a conversation worth having. Some - also with PhDs - have tried hosting that conversation, which is how the V.P. knows about it. Because this Veep is smart and reads things. No Quayle he. No Harris neither, for those on the other team; note that Dr Bret can't call this man an idiot.

'Tis also possible the article has been DEBOONKED!!. We've had a dozen years since 2014 to have that conservation too. If there is lying going on, why hit the V.P. and not the authors of the original paper? or anybody else still defending it. At best you hit the V.P. with the accusation his scholarship is out of date (even here, 12 years ain't the worst I've seen in literature).

By the way - as long as we're talking about playing games with our sources, how come Dr Bret didn't provide the link I just did, which his commenters are forced to bring to the table? That sounds like something that raises OBJECTION in courts of law here. Did Dr Bret ever watch My Cousin Vinny?

The online rent-a-sage has, it seems, received the rent he sought. So when he's going into theatrics about, oh, ICE; keep this in mind.

UPDATE 2:40 PM MST - h/t Gaius Latine, from 12 September 7:16 PM UTC last year, here's Dr Bret defending that Charlie Kirk's murderer might be a mainstream conservative(?):

To the center right, at least in American terms. It's an anti-fascist/anti-nazi slogan and quite a lot of conservatives, in theory, do not particularly like fascists or nazis.

Last I checked.

Dr Bret is what Righty bloggers term a Concern Troll. He is making plausibly-deniable insinuations. He is the Hollywood crew preaching Turn The Other Cheek at Christians. Chances that he'd buck any Current Year trend are zero. His integrity is zero. His scholarship, therefore, must be doublechecked.

Europa is basalt

Buzzkill here, courtesy Fraser Cain: Paul Byrne [et al.] says Europa's seafloor is básalt. That's like the Lunar "seas", and most of Mars. This was reported 8 January but this youtube interview is our Q-n'-A.

The tidal processes on Europa suffice for an under-ice ocean; everyone has known this since Arthur C Clarke. But beneath this, is a black boring Abyssal Plain. No mountain ranges, no volcanic hotspots - thus sprach Dr Byrne.

Byrne notes the possibility of radioactive decay 19:15, but that's probably less 5.3 AU out than it is down here. Cold hydrothermal vents might form but they aren't warm enough for life.

So Clarke was wrong about what matters, which is whether Europa Report gazurtoids could form down here by nature.

BACKDATE 1/23

Early uses of John 1-20

I went looking for "Apocryphon of James" refs and found Julia D. Lindenlaub, then - 2020ish - teaching in Edinburgh. She proposes to bring the Secret Booke of John the Apostle alongside the Epistle of the Apostles ... and the Johannine Gospel we got, which has 21 chapters.

To whit: John 1-20 proposed the Beloved Disciple as a literate man and the Gospel genre of text as a written genre. All three - John 21, EpAp, and ApocrJas - ran with this. It may be Dr Lindenlaub didn't take Evan Powell as seriously as other 1994 work she cites; but - to this paper, that doesn't matter. John 21 itself makes clear that it be afterthought, whether by the original author or no.

The fact of a "synoptic gospel tradition" across the other three NT "memoirs", as Justin (maybe also Papias and Irenaeus) saw them, rather forces that assessment. Luke states it outright. I don't think any of Lindenlaub's texts had any knowledge of Luke but, again, that doesn't matter; anyone faced with Mark and Matthew together had done so as readers of writings. Certainly Augustine will do this (even if he got the order wrong).

I didn't know that the Apocryphon was postJohannine. But then: I hadn't been keeping up with the scholarship. Lindenlaub seems solid. So, here by this blogpost we'll catch up.

BACKDATE 1/27

Daniel 8-11

This month we're all discussing Daniel's carbon dating... and AI. Two highly controversial tastes that taste [like poo] together.

Carbon-dating is a nightmare the further back you get. Qurân parchment-ologists already had problems with clearly-Umayyad scrips of that sacred book. How are Dead Sea Scrolls more credible?

Anyway: this side of Daniel does seem early. I recall its "prediction" of the Maccabees is more-accurate than that of our 1 Maccabees. The Masoretes likely knew it: such they permitted Daniel in the Writings but not the other one, until these days of Zionist backtranslation. The Greek Daniel appears to be a rewrite.

But preMaccabean? Come on now.

BACKDATE 1/26

Doping with thorium-oxide

Nuclear clocks help to fine-tuning location out in deep space, which is how we can improve bandwidth communications with probes. Last December we got a report about it, specifically Thorium-229. Be great if we had a lot of this. We don't, of course; it is radioactive such that it tends to be found only in uranium waste.

What we do have a lot of, is Thorium-232. This is a chemical proxy for Th-229; so suppose we ran experiments on this to see how little Thorium(-229) we actually need to make a clock. That seems to have happened: electroplating onto iron. "Stainless steel" if you like.

It wasn't a septuagint

In 2007, one Hayeon Kim earned his PhD by demonstrating the five translators of the Five Books, the Pentateuch. He then migrated off to being a pastor, as one does; getting around to publication just a few years ago. Emanuel Tov has endorsed this. Tov has earned some credibility over his decades-long career.

Jews don't like the Greek translation, historically. R. Tovia Singer calls the Psalter a "hoax". Serious Biblical scholars many Jewish (yo, "Tov"?) would rule Singer as out of line. For the Psalter. But today we are not talking about the Psalter.

The Alexandrine Jewish diaspora, in fact, did get overexcited about part of the Greek Bible (or "Tanakh") - and that's the most important part, the Torah part. That whole "Septuagint" / 72 / LXX meme came out of there. One might compare this to a targum: a harmony for the plebs in translation. But it's worse: the Samaritans' Torah was similarly expanded, fixed-up, whatever. A targum or midrash can tweak this or that - maybe they even should - but a Jew demands the Hebrew baseline stay where it is. This was not done by the Samaritans, and most agree it was not done by whoever passed a similar Bible-2.0 to the Graecophones. A rabbi would be in his rights to say that tweaking the base text for tendentious purpose is cheating. Philo didn't help by touting the translators as prophets.

If a cheat, the LXX - better, the V - Vorlage remains a very early cheat, sometimes holding onto readings where the masoretes would go on to cheat... or simply sometimes misspell some things. This happened in the Psalter... and it happened in the Torah too. We're all human, even Jews. This is why we are still talking about this translation.

The consensus - if Tov be that consensus - on the five translators seems to be that they started off sharing some basic vocabulary, and then branched off. Whatever was done to bring the translations back into line, was left to future copyists. There's no real consensus on the order in which they did the work; den Hartog thinks Leviticus and Numbers were secondary, but Tov leaves this without comment to a footnote. Den Hartog also thought Deuteronomy was secondary but that seems overstated, which Tov was too polite to note.

The real problem hits in Exodus. For some reason Exodus 35-40 is shorter in Greek, excepting the usual little harmonies... and excepting Exodus 38, which has Bezalel do some metalwork. But why? and why wouldn't this Greek or protoGreek splice in a lot more content earlier, where more people would care (yo, the Exodus?).

Domitian II

Every now and again someone turns up a (base) coin from the provinces we otherwise wouldn't know about. A few years ago we got hyped about Sponsian. Another was Domitian II... except that coin, found in northwest France, was ruled a froggery. Somewhere around here is one Silbannacus, which is a funny name such that he may as well have called himself "king" and issued commands in Gaulish.

Turns out that another Domitian coin has turned up - this time in Britain. Like the suspect original, this cannot be a coin of Flavius Domitianus. It has the copper composition of a coin of the rusted age of the postSeverans, that Third Century Crisis. Our man simply didn't own the mines to strike good silver.

Given that only two coins survive (and of them the old Gaulish one is lost now) out of the many thousands of cheap third-century coins in the hoards; Domitian II likely was not emperor long. It might not have been his name in the first place. He was a pretender who had some legions and lands, but was swiftly swatted away by the competent legions of the region. "Domitian" as a name was mud among Senators of course, but the milites hardly cared for what Senators thought.

Anyway TopRomanFacts is telling us about Chalgrove.

Sheep plague

I don't quite know what "Late Neolithic Bronze Age" means, but it seems Central Asia had one: 2900-500 BC. That sure covers a lot of definitions for "bronze". They also had plague as we know. What wasn't known was if this could infect animals besides rats and humans (and fleas).

Now we do: the yersinia affected sheep, in the 1800s BC. This specie of peste seems not to have got into fleas; I am unsure that fleas even like sheep. But if it were pneumonic, or blood-transmitted directly, it might not have to jump to fleas.

BACKDATE 1/10

Continental drift started late

From Australia come some rocks 3.7Gya. These are anorthocites, like on our Moon. They start disappearing ~3.5Gya. h/t ScienceDaily finally getting around to this November release.

Some conclusions result Our Earth and our Moon share surface qualities, subsequently obscured by later Lunar impacts up there and by much continental drift down here. Later our continents - as such - start rollin' 3.5Gya. The bash which created said Moon may even have delayed the continents' formation.

BACKDATE 1/10

Samuel's poetry

In the early twentieth century of our era, Hirschberg and Cheiko published editions - "diwans", to use the Persian - of Samuel's poetry. Both editors thought the poems were preIslamic. Hirschberg thought they were Jewish; Cheikho, Christian (as usual for him). Either would be interesting if true. The second poem is probably the most famous to Orientalists, canon in Aṣmaʿiyat #20 thus ending up - via Wellhausen 1913 - in What The Koran Really Says.

Since 1913 we know better. BSAOS 1931 dismissed that argument with reference to a rebuttal by George Levi della Vida in Revisti degli Studi Orientali 13, 53-72; which is online, sorta.

The other sendero

My sister in law let me borrow The Other Path, in its 2002 paperback. This is the delightfully-named Hernando de Soto's neoliberal Bible for Latin America. If you took International Studies 'neath the elms in dear old TrinCol, CT; this was the Satanic Bible.

I haven't finished this book yet. I can for now offer some basic philology.

The title deliberately confronts the luminoso of Guzman, graduate of Peru's version of Trinity College. Beyond that: I see some translation-decisions which may or may not distract the reader. I, as a reader, accepted such decisions, as easing me into the alien world of 1980s Perú. "Popular" is here to be understood as the Roman populares, that is the street-merchants of Rome. Also-latinate "violent" and "invasion" don't have the valence, in Peruvian Spanish, as an American might understand.

Perú, I need hardly mention, had a nasty history. To bring this blog's readers up to speed: after Bolivar, the criollos took over. No longer could the "indíos" appeal to the Crown over their masters' heads. Here was imposed an apartheid, avant la lettre, if I may code-switch. Lima, the capital, was to remain Spanish, or at least not indio (think, Cape Town; or, Mérida up here norte); any investment in the Quechua and other hinterlanders was to be directed toward keeping those "peasants" (per de Soto) on their farm.

Problem: the farm boys didn't want an eternity of peasant-heid. Why should they? They were "liberated".

So the farm boys "invaded". They flocked to the cities, especially Lima - tried to, anyway. Lima, as Mérida-de-Sul, resisted, off-and-on. In the 1940s the Lima élite tried what Trujillo and others were trying, to BLEACH the locals by inviting Europeans; where Trujillo wanted Jews, the Limans wanted "Scandinavians" (Argentines can pipe up, anytime). Peru simply had too many Quechua for that BLEACH to work.

Then the political establishment pretty much gave up. Peru got a series of Left-elected governments and military takeovers who also promoted Left ideals, up to 1978ish. De Soto doesn't mention any Yanqui interventions; it's possible that the doodle dandy simply wasn't much involved, seeing Peru (correctly) as a mess.

Under this sloppy post-criollo Leftism from the 1950s to the 1970s, Peru looked the other way when the countryfolk... invaded. It wasn't legal for them to squat in Peru-owned land, but they did it anyway and - trapped by ideology - Peru's "leaders" couldn't lead. Some politicians exploited this mess. Some were "Marxist", or at least claimed as much. For de Soto, the "mess" was just the free market in a failure of institutions; a lot of the squatters / "invaders" accepted the protection of Marxists/Marxians despite being entrepreneurial because nobody else was helping. This "informal" regime in Lima made it a lawless slum - if less actively dangerous than (say) Detroit or Jo'burg, if you weren't in the way. De Soto's glossary has a "slum" as different from an "informal": the former being in private land, the latter Peruvian-government land; but I don't see the difference.

De Soto's book, then, exists as a counter-manifesto for the invaders. De Soto was on the side of the entrepreneur, or at least got out into the (illegal) markets to listen to such.

De Soto reminds me of William Lind in his "fourth generation warfare" book. "Non Violent Resistance" comes up when people on the outs attract media attention, making a moral crusade out of a land grab. And then we can bring "Moldbug" Yarvin: 4GW tactics like the "nonviolent" (de Soto: "violent") landgrab be possible only where the government is complicit. Yarvin wasn't (probably isn't) on the side of the grabbers. Lind ... well, it's not his land being grabbed. De Soto to his credit accepts that "nonviolent" is newspeak for violence, but bends over for the violation.

In 1978, a Moldbugger took Lima, with a mandate to crack those squalid sidewalk vendors and squatters. By then, the latter had a generations-long tradition of existence, to themselves and to the community at large. Here's about when Guzman shows up. Whose Path is not the urban Marxian path.

UPDATE 2/10: Oh boy. h/t Homefronts. I had that feeling.

Fomalhaut

25 lightyears away is a bright star in the Southern Fish - Pisces Australis - which we call Fomalhaut. It is a young star of A type, so is bright to us. In the last few decades we've found that two other stars, the variable TW P.A. and also LP 876-10 [P.A.], were formed around the same time and place and going in about the same direction. As Proxima is now known as bound to the Alpha Centauri binary, so C; so might be Fomalhaut B and C.

Also found: debris. Young stars especially large ones seem to get those. There was a bright spot imaged in A's debris in 2008, which - they said - was a planet. But then it dimmed.

A couple weeks back they caught another one. Instead, "F b" was - is - probably a dust cloud from a collision.

Einstein was WRONG

Albert Einstein, famously, contracted Issues with the field of quantum-mechanics he'd started. In 1927 he floated an experiment to refute Niels Bohr, at least his Complementarity.

The year after that, Paul Dirac would incorporate Einstein's (special) relativity to formulate quantum-mechanics in its mature form. Thus, I think, explaining why gold is yellow and why quicksilver melts. Dirac tends to be hoisted to about the same rank as Einstein himself for this work.

Meanwhile apparently nobody could actually run Einstein's experiment. Or, wouldn't. I don't know why not; it seems excellent grist for research. Most physicists were chasing particles, Sabine thinks. This left gaps in the lower-budget verification of basics which is still, you know... physics. What if someone's wrong?

Einstein being wrong about the quantum level isn't really news (as Dirac noted, Einstein was right about relativity). That he put up rather than shutting up, is what I like best of him.

Serapion's ordination

Antioch claims itself as one of three coëqual Petrine sièges. Rome retains her dignitas as the see of the west, up to Corinth, via Clement. Alexandria has equal respect due to Saint Mark, the Evangelist. Antioch can boast of Ignatius. But what if... Antioch can't?

Yesterday we stumbled upon the case against Palut. Part of that case is that Antioch - where Palut was ordained - itself was too Roman at that time. Brought here was the lore that Pope Zephyrine r. c. 200-217 had ordained a Serapion. Looking them up, one does find a Serapion contemporaneous with this pope. And he's famous!

Problem: he's famous. We know too much of him to be gulled by Rabbula. Here's mah boi Jerome:

Serapion, ordained bishop of Antioch in the eleventh year of the emperor Commodus, wrote a letter to Caricus and Pontius on the heresy of Montanus, in which he said that you may know moreover that the madness of this false doctrine, that is the doctrine of a new prophecy, is reprobated by all the world, I have sent to you the letters of the most holy Apollinaris bishop of Hierapolis in Asia. He wrote a volume also to Domnus, who in time of persecution went over to the Jews, and another work on the gospel which passes under the name of Peter, a work to the church of the Rhosenses in Cilicia who by the reading of this book had turned aside to heresy. There are here and there short letters of his, harmonious in character with the ascetic life of their author.

Commodus-XI is AD 190(ish). This means Zephyrinus became Roman bishop during Serapion's episcopate.

Math is hard. Harder for theocrats.

The correction of Palut

Somehow, Academia.edu and/or Charles Stang's publishers are allowing Invitation to Syriac Christianity on their site... the whole thing. Believe me, I am not complaining. Read it whilst you can. Michael Philip Penn is involved so you know it's good.

Presently I'm intrigued by the Teaching (or: Doctrine, maybe Didascalia) of Addai, which may be had from the public domain. After the main of it tells how Addai made Palut a presbyter, we get this appendix:

Because [Addai’s successor Aggai] died speedily and rapidly at the breaking of his legs he was unable to lay his hand upon Palut. Palut himself went to Antioch and received ordination to the priesthood from Serapion, the bishop of Antioch. Serapion himself, the bishop of Antioch, had also received ordination from Zephyrinus, the bishop of the city of Rome, from the succession of ordination to the priesthood of Simon Peter, who received it from our Lord, and who had been bishop there in Rome twenty-five years in the days of Caesar, who reigned there thirteen years.

We've met Palut, of Edessa Callirrhoë. In Ephrem's day, rival Christians were calling Ephrem a "Palutian". Ephrem wrote enough that we may assuredly talk of an Ephremian theology; Ephrem's enemies, however, did not use that term, insisting on Palut's school.

The core "Teaching of Addai" is properly Palutian. This, the coda corrects... sort of. By the coda's time, Addai remained a hero in this town. But Palut was now a problem. Palut would then have been too-associated with Ephrem, Aphrahat and other protoNestorians even quasiArians. Some would cut him from the Apostolic Succession, at least here.

This "Teaching" meanwhile was interpolated with a "protonike" legend, probably by that awful Rabbûla AD 412-36.

Proposal: As long as people were adding to the text, this coda was added as well. By association with Antioch and Rome (both!), Palut could be tarred with Diodore of Tarsus and all the dyophysite enemies of Rabbula. Not like us, my dear boy...

But to add mine own coda: if propagandic, this coda might not be a lie. The rest of this text was the lie. Here Rabbula may have insisted on the truth, or at least on some contrary lore as might be useful. CONCLUSION 1/2: Nah, it's a lie too.