We were recently discussing the academic prowess of the regrettable politician Enoch Powell, and little did I expect that I would be presented so soon with an example. Courtesy of Laudator Temporis Acti (where you will find a grudgingly admiring response from Peter Richardson), this quote from Powell’s The Evolution of the Gospel: A New Translation of the First Gospel with Commentary and Introductory Essay, discussing Matthew 6:28-30:
The words ‘card not’ οὐ ξαίνουσι—the process preliminary to spinning (as ‘sow’ above is preliminary to ‘reap’)—generated, by a slight misreading, the corruption αὐξάνουσι ‘they grow’, which is manifestly wrong, because it is not growing that is at issue but being fed and clothed. In addition, οὐ ξαίνουσι ‘card not’ has been replaced by οὐ κοπιῶσι ‘toil not’, which, as generic, cannot be paired or contrasted with the specific ‘spin’ (e.g. ‘no money and no shillings’). Thus the wording we have is the product of a (wrong) variant αὐξάνουσι in the margin and a (wrong) interlinear gloss κοπιῶσι in the text.
The antithesis to ‘fowls of the air’ is not ‘lilies of the field’ but ‘beasts of the field’. The beasts are indeed ‘clad’ without industry or artifice on their part. To say that ‘flowers’ or, even more, flowers of one particular sort are ‘clothed’ is absurd: beautiful they may be, clothed they are not.
The alteration of ‘beasts’ into ‘lilies’ may be a corruption. Confusion between ‘beasts’ … and ‘lilies’ … is difficult in Hebrew, whereas in Greek that between ΤΑΘΗΡΙΑ, ‘the beasts’, and ΤΑΛΕΙΡΙΑ, ‘the lilies’, is not. Corruption would then have taken place in Greek in two stages—(1) θηρία, ‘beasts’, changed to λείρια, ‘lilies’, and (2) λείρια glossed with its synonym κρίνα. On the other hand, the rhetorical piece about ‘Solomon’ and the ‘oven’ may be an insertion prompted by objection to being clothed as ‘the beasts’ are clothed, viz. in skin and fur, and this may have suggested ‘lilies’. Elaboration is betrayed by (1) ‘lilies’, for which ‘grass’, χόρτος, has later to be substituted (ovens are not fuelled with lilies) and (2) the absurdity of ‘clothing’ lilies or grass.
I have no opinion on the plausibility of all this (though of course I prefer the traditional and beautiful “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow”), but I do not know any other politician of any prominence who could pull off such a commentary. Color me impressed.
Powell’s attitude to Christianity was also characteristically odd. Apparently he always answered the question whether he was a Christian by saying only “I am a member of the Church of England.”
In anyone else, I think I would interpret this as simply a brusque evasion, but I suspect that Powell meant it as a precise reply to the question. I would guess that he meant to imply that the question had no legitimate meaning except as a matter of professed allegiance (perhaps as a disclaimer, too, of that very horrid thing, Enthusiasm.)
The issue in question here actually rather neatly encapsulates three interlinked deep-seated characteristics of the man (a) astonishing cleverness and knowledge (b) great intellectual arrogance and unwillingnesss to consider alternative analyses from well-qualified others and (c) untroubled willingness to push the logic of an argument well beyond what most people would regard as a reductio ad absurdum. He was wasted in politics: he should have become one of the more frightening kinds of saint, like Ronan Finn, striking kings mad for looking at him funny.
My totally unqualified opinion is that Powell’s version doesn’t fit with Matthew 6:30, which continues the previous reasoning, talking about the “grass in the field” – that makes sense if the preceding was about flowers (=part of the growth on a meadow), but not if it was about beasts. So either Powell is wrong or 6:30 is a later interpolation.
That doesn’t strike me as easy graphically or for that matter phonetically.
There may be a few, perhaps a dozen.
(I started reading that thesis last summer, BTW; haven’t found the time to finish, but so far I’m impressed.)
There may be a few, perhaps a dozen.
You’re talking about “high-ranking politicians with some connection to linguistics”; all due respect to those doubtless fine scholars, but I may be permitted to doubt whether any of them — let alone a dozen — could do plausible Biblical commentary.
Elaboration is betrayed by (1) ‘lilies’, for which ‘grass’, χόρτος, has later to be substituted (ovens are not fuelled with lilies) and (2) the absurdity of ‘clothing’ lilies or grass.
I hear echoes of Isaiah 40:6–8 in the nexus of flesh-body-grass-flower. Surely there must be a study of this, but I don’t have time to look into the matter now.
I read somewhere an anecdote from Kingsley Amis, who for some reason was at a dinner where he was seated next to Powell. During the desultory conversation, Powell turned to Amis and said abruptly “tell me, how do you derive the word ‘impinge’?”
Amis struggled to come up with some dimly remembered Latin, but Powell cut him off and provided the correct etymology.
It may have been at the same dinner that Powell said that the thing he disliked most about politics was the need to go out into the world every few years and ask people to vote for him.
Powell was apparently a Nietzschean (unless this was a pose or affectation). It seems difficult for a Nietzschean to be a card-carrying follower of Christ, so Powell would have been at least conflicted. Maybe he thought that he could accept or relativise Anglican doctrine (or just ritual), but not continue to a wider acceptance of the Christian message or precepts that would force him to renounce his Nietzschean ones.
Wikipedia evidently has pages for verses of Matthew, and 6:28 of course mentions Monty Python and Star Trek. And 6:30 does refer to the Isaiah connection that Xerîb noted.
Here is Kingsley Amis’s recollection with a bit more detail, including Powell demonstrating impingo at the dinner table.
χόρτος caught my attention – it’s presumably the ultimate source of the very homely Algerian Arabic word ڨُرط gurṭ “hay”.
Qôl ʾōmēr qərāʾ wəʾāmar māh ʾeqrāʾ
It will surely be old news to Xerîb, but this perfectly matches the traditional account of how the first verses of the Qur’an were revealed.
For myself, without reading any scholarship, I interpreted that passage in a manner that Hans suggested. Lilies are the finery of the field. They are more beautiful than Solomon’s clothes. It is a bit illogical (I follow NIV translation, being devoid of Greek).In “See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.” it’s hard to read “they” as referring to “field”, but the alternative of rewriting the whole passage is no better.
Whether or not you find the numerous quotations attributed to Powell collected in wikiquote to your taste, you might enjoy the “Quotes about Powell” portion attributed to others. Re David E.’s mention of “one of the more frightening sort of saints,” consider this one attr. Harold Macmillan: “Powell looks at me in Cabinet like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes.” There is only the difficulty that Powell himself may be the source of the attribution or the anecdote from which it comes …
Consider also Iain Macleod: “I am a fellow-traveller, but sometimes I leave Powell’s train a few stations down the line, before it reaches, and sometimes crashes into, the terminal buffers.”
Or Rab Butler: “He took an interest in almost every subject, and on almost every subject he had strong and pungently expressed views. Only some of these were eccentric.”
Or the admittedly somewhat ESLish “Therefore I support him as a person which all Great British people should have to be their Prime Minister.” – attr. Idi Amin
Maybe he thought that he could accept or relativise Anglican doctrine (or just ritual), but not continue to a wider acceptance of the Christian message or precepts that would force him to renounce his Nietzschean ones.
Maybe so. I think he may have been an old-style liberal (in the theological sense) who genuinely believed that Christianity as an intellectual system was totally vitiated by the March of Science (or whatever), but was of such value culturally that there was no intellectual dishonesty involved in claiming adherence to to some Christian institution(s); specifically, that this is not hypocritical, because no rational person could actually believe any of that crap. In other words, this is a cultural rescue mission, and you’re doing less rational Christians an actual service by your adherence to “their” side (bless their cotton socks!) It is a position likely to appeal to the intellectually arrogant religiose.
The ne plus ultra of this is the once-modish Don Cupitt, who long ago convinced himself that outright atheism was fully compatible with being an Anglican priest (though I see he did finally cease to be communicant.)
One of my daughters has the given name Lily and there is (at least in the view of the Orthodox Church) no St. Lily, nor have I ever found a Greek or Slavic etc. saint with a flower-name that would calque to “lily” in English. Her middle name corresponds to that of a 3d century martyr, so that’s not an ecclesiastical problem. But I have sometimes taken the position that the Third Sunday after Pentecost, when the section of Matthew under discussion is part of the Gospel pericope appointed in the lectionary,* should be her name day.
*I had forgotten this until I just checked, but regrettably the Holy Fathers in their inscrutable wisdom chose to cut the pericope off just before verse 34, with its magnificent ending ἀρκετὸν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἡ κακία αὐτῆς. (“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”)
Well, there is always Lilith, but she is extra-canonical. Also usually regarded as not very saintly, I believe. But we don’t have her side of the story.
ἀρκετὸν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἡ κακία αὐτῆς
Oddly, the Agolle Kusaal version (but not the Toende Kusaal or the Mooré) renders this as an indirect command, “Let [imperative plural] each day have trouble enough of its own.” Strange. Misleading, too.
Quotes about Powell
Particularly good is Mary Beard calling him a first-rate classicist and well, actually-ing rivers of blood.
If, for some reason, you need confirmation of what Xitter has become, search for him there and see the approbation.
Noel Annan’s bit in the quotes about Powell is actually rather too respectful. He doesn’t mention, for example, that in translating the treatise on mediaeval Welsh law, Powell had a co-author who was an actual Welsh language expert (and L1 Welsh speaker), and perhaps knows too little about the issues to know that Powell’s reinterpretation of the New Testament is really a monument to what a very clever Greek scholar can do when he ignores all relevant scholarship by actual experts in the very field in question – characteristic Powell, really. (Powell believed – among other things – in the priority of Matthew’s Gospel, which makes his New Testament position somewhat analogous to that of those people who don’t believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s works. Those people, incidentally, included Powell himself.)
I stand entirely by my characterisation of him as extremely clever stupid man.
In fact, he could be the (frightening) patron saint of extremely clever stupid people.
Belief in the temporal priority of Matthew means siding with the Fathers of the Church over a bunch of unsavory 19th-century German academics (who were all Extremely Clever, as they might tell you themselves whether or not you’d asked them). Which I note only because that isn’t necessarily the side you’d have expected Powell to take based on some other things said about him.
I don’t follow the Shakespeare analogy. What has happened in secularized NT studies is as if some alternative authorship hypothesis had become the academic consensus over the last 150 years and only primitive fundamentalists unaware of, or inexplicably hostile to, Modern Scholarship still believed that Shakespeare himself was the author.
I just mean that it’s similar in being a not-totally-irrational but still fairly fringe position mostly held by people expert at providing plausible rationalisations for a position actually held on quite other grounds. (In the case of Powell and Shakespeare, Powell seems to have felt that no mere actor could possibly have been up to creating the Works in all their literary beauty and political perspicuousness, though he seems to have thought that it was all done by some sort of Bard Committee rather than some individual Bacon or Oxford. It’s a variant on the usual Snob Take on Shakespeare though; I would guess that that holders of such views skew rightwards politically.)
Similarly, Powell’s view on the priority of Matthew was actually a means to an end, the end being a truly weird misrepresentation of the history of the church.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/christ-was-not-crucified-says-enoch-powell-1383775.html
Thinking the near-unanimous view of the Fathers of the Church is a “fringe position” is, I fear, a symptom of likely Protestantism. (And of course thinking that largely unanswerable historical questions about the exact processes by which the Biblical texts were generated are actually incredibly important questions that somehow need definitive answers to be provided by Very Clever people is itself probably a complex side effect of what is sometimes diagnosed as Sola Scriptura Syndrome.)
Not that it particularly matters to me if the Fathers were right or wrong. What would it matter? How would you live your life differently, either in church services or during the rest of the week, if a flying saucer suddenly somehow vouchsafed you irrefutable empirical proof about the relative order of composition (in the approximate form in which the texts have come down to us) of Matthew and Mark?
Sola Scriptura Syndrome
Yeah, I have that. More to be pitied than censured, I dare say …
I agree that the Synoptic Problem is of little interest to anyone who is not in any case interested in source criticism.
In any event, I see that I may have misaligned Powell. The Fathers who thought Matthew’s Gospel was first-composed meant his whole Gospel as they had received it, very much including its fairly detailed account of the Crucifixion. “This Biblical book was tampered with by later hands pursuing their own agendas but I am so Extremely Clever that I have figured out how to reconstruct the pristine original” is very 19th-century-German-academic rather than Patristic. Saying that copyists muddled one specific Greek word for another somewhere early in the chain of manuscript transmission and the passage makes more sense with the proposed emendation is so mild a version of that it is not necessarily a warning of the full-blown thing, but here it apparently is.
ETA: Calling the “Synoptic Problem” a “Problem” is a quite the unexamined presupposition right there in the name. (This is not a dig at David E. for simply using the label that is common in the literature – it’s a dig at those who generated the label. They’re the problem.)
Honest-to-God Robinson believed in the priority of John, which is at least … different ….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Robinson_(bishop_of_Woolwich)
How would you live your life differently, either in church services or during the rest of the week, if a flying saucer suddenly somehow vouchsafed you irrefutable empirical proof about the relative order of composition … of Matthew and Mark?
But neither is knowledge of whether proton is stable or not. Some people just want to know.
Separately as to the political valence of doubt of the Shakespeare-was-written-by-Shakespeare narrative, I’m not that up on its currently-active advocates. From memory I can come up with two fairly recently deceased Americans of prior generations enamored of such doubts, one an unquestionably right-of-center journalist/essayist of some modest prominence (1936-2021) who also expressed contrarian doubts about e.g. Darwinism, and the other the Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (1920-2019), who was in the later part of his judicial service consistently perceived as left-of-center, although the Court’s own center had shifted quite a bit subsequent to his appointment in 1975. A somewhat glib online journalistic piece I googled up that rejects the someone-else-wrote-the-stuff theory gives an eclectic list of prior celebrity believers (“Freud, Whitman, Malcolm X, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, Sir Derek Jacobi”) that is not particularly right-of-center.
But obviously the political mix of current believers is an empirical question with, in principle, an empirical answer although I don’t know that anyone actually has good enough data (via well-constructed surveys or otherwise) to be able to demonstrate that answer.
Although this now reminds me of the following wackadoodle bit of trivia I’d forgotten. If you look at the King James Version translation of Psalm 46, the 46th word from the beginning (omitting the “To the chief musician …” caption) is “shake” and the 46th word from the end is “spear.” Or “speare,” in the orthography of the first edition. And guess who just by coincidence happened to be 46 years old when the KJV was first published, or at least had its text finalized before being sent to the typesetters. (Shakespeare will be thought to have turned 47 in April 1611 and the historical record is apparently unclear on exactly when in 1611 the first copies of the new translation rolled off the presses, although there’s an uncertain tradition that it was in May.)
Talk of Q reminded me that T. C. Skeat had written about “The Lilies of the Field” and οὐ ξαίνειν vs. αὐξάνειν in 1938 after looking at the Codex Sinaiticus under a ultraviolet lamp.
ETA: Which is, naturally, cited in the paper footnoted in that Laudator Temporis Acti post. Though neither Powell’s book nor a subsequent note credit anybody else that I can see.
But neither is knowledge of whether proton is stable or not. Some people just want to know
I suspect JWB is being a little mischievous; perhaps even faux-naïf …
The unsavory 19th-century German academics who kick-started modern Biblical textual criticism were, I think, motivated largely by a perfectly genuine desire to identify the parts of traditional Christian belief that could be shown (they hoped) to be genuine and historical, rather than to debunk Christian belief altogether. The same goes, much later, for the Bultmann demythologiser crowd (for whom I have an intellectual soft spot, though I don’t share the crucial anti-supernaturalist premise which underlay their whole project.)
These people sincerely regarded themselves as Christians and were engaged in what they conceptualised to themselves as a work of preservation, not destruction. They weren’t actively seeking to undermine the tradition: they were defending it as best they could, and if anything they were more guilty of naivety than presumption.
Their unworthy epigones like Cupitt have gone much further than this: in the latter, particularly, I find a strident determination to insist that supernaturalist belief is impossible for any honourable rational person, which I think is readily traceable to his own circumstances: if he admits that this is not so, then his own excuses for continuing in the service of an organisation whose core beliefs he does not share evaporate and he has to face up to his own hypocrisy.
I have personally known undoubtedly sincere Christians (not all Protestant, either) who have evidently found genuine comfort in the works of modern theologically-liberal writers, because they share the fears of the nineteenth-century Germans that their cherished beliefs may be unacceptably irrational and are honest enough to think that if this is so, they should abandon their beliefs, however painful that might be. These writers reassure them that this may not be the case. (It is probably also the case that they find in them a welcome relief from some of the more inflexible ways of thought so often associated with us more credulous types.)
In this kind of context, I can imagine someone really wanting to know, for example, if Q was real, because they felt it might get them closer to the “real thing” underlying the later accretions and distortions. I don’t share the assumptions that would drive this, but I can understand the attitude.
Talk of Q reminded me that T. C. Skeat had written about “The Lilies of the Field” and οὐ ξαίνειν vs. αὐξάνειν in 1938 after looking at the Codex Sinaiticus under an ultraviolet lamp.
a monument to what a very clever Greek scholar can do when he ignores all relevant scholarship by actual experts in the very field in question
And whose mater gave up work purely to learn Greek so that she could teach it to Him in two weeks of Christmas holidays. I think we need to probe closer into Ellen Mary’s influence.
search for him there [Xitter] and see the approbation.
What I don’t get is that Powell is clearly a stinky swot and too clever for his britches. Exactly the sort of person Middle England would distrust instinctively. (Contrast Boris must also have been a swot — I’m not suggesting clever — but goes to lengths to dissimulate; and Farage is no sort of swot.)
Skeat and several others are naturally cited by the paper footnoted in that Laudator Temporis Acti post. I guess Powell took that for granted, though neither his note nor the book credit anybody. And the innovation was solely the more tenuous ‘beasts’ versus ‘lilies’.
David E. is being very polite and charitable, in the best Christian tradition. Indeed, he may be non-judgmentally respecting the fundamental humanity and dignity of the aforementioned 19th-century-German blah blah blahs in the same manner as Shem and Japheth did the humanity and dignity of their somewhat imperfect father in Gen. 9:23. κῦδος to him!
One person who publicly promotes „Shakespeare didn’t actually write the stuff“ is the screenwriter John Orloff (currently responsible for „Masters of the Air“). He wrote a forgettable movie about DeVere being the true author (directed by Emmerich). Based on his Yale/Hollywood pedigree, (and his spouse whom I know to be on the left), I assume he is also at least left of center.
and there is (at least in the view of the Orthodox Church) no St. Lily
Previously on LH. TL/DR: there’s apparently a 9th century Spanish martyr named Liliana, but it’s not entirely certain 1) whether she qualfiies as a saint, 2) if so, whether she qualifies as an Orthodox saint.
Powell’s audacious emendation flies in the face of Bengel’s wise Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua (words to live by!)
In his cleverness, he does not notice the unlikelihood of a copyist altering a comprehensible (if dull) trope into what Powell clearly imagines to be nonsense.
Like the 19th-century unsavory German academics that JWB rightly likens him to, he may have conceptualised the copying of manuscripts as an essentially mechanical sort of activity, rather than one permeated by the copyist’s efforts to understand what is being copied. Bengel knew better.
If so, he may not have profited as much as he might from the study of mediaeval Welsh laws. The oldest strata were written in Old Welsh, and appear in Middle Welsh in the manuscripts because successive copyists gradually updated the language unawares.
Speaking of synoptic gospels, the April issue of The Atlantic (monthly magazine) has an article that I recommend:
Ariel Sabar, “THE ‘SECRET’ GOSPEL AND A SCANDALOUS NEW EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF JESUS:
A Columbia historian said he’d discovered a sacred text with clues to Jesus’s sexuality. Was it real?”
Here’s an excerpt:
“Scholars who knew him well suspect that whatever triggered his break with the Church was the key to understanding his life and work, even if—perhaps especially if—Smith never spoke of it. The historian Albert Baumgarten, who was one of Smith’s first doctoral students at Columbia, believes that “something took place in Smith’s life that shook his certainty.
Smith’s literary executor, the Harvard religion scholar Shaye Cohen, told me that he’d never ruled out the possibility of a “secret Morton,” a part of his past he’d hidden from even his closest colleagues.
Was there a secret Morton? I began my search with a visit to a pair of Texas scholars who had a new theory about Secret Mark. Not because their theory was fully convincing—it wasn’t—but because their analysis of the text pointed to why Secret Mark might be something other than early Christian scripture.”
So if it’s pango/panxi (at least one possibility for the supine), does that mean that the present stem is not *nu-infixed, or is it just boring old analogy? (The other options are pepigi and pegi, it seems).
Also new discovery: It’s cognate with E bang! The semantics are obvious.
For a St. Lily… etymologically, you could claim St. Susanna, ultimately from שׁוֹשַׁנָּה ?
If so, he may not have profited as much as he might from the study of mediaeval Welsh laws.
Sadly, that’s true of far too many of us.
I find it odd that anyone might think there was a political element to Shaxper denialism; that form of nuttiness goes back centuries and attracts its own species of nutters regardless of positioning on the putative (and less and less helpful) left/right scale.
Yes, the facts do not seem to bear out my conjecture (I was unwisely generalising from some of Powell’s own remarks on the matter.)
It seems to be a fairly benign form of nuttery, not only in itself but in often coexisting with quite rational views of other matters in general. Not invasive, as the oncologists put it.
Lily is sometimes* short for Elizabeth, which provides a wide range of saint’s feasts and name days.
*although Elizabeth Yeats was Lolly, whereas her sister Lily Yeats was Susan, perhaps per anhweol.
>whatever triggered his break was the key to understanding his life and work, even if—perhaps especially if—
Initially, despite clues to the contrary, I read this as if it referred to Jesus and not the scholar studying him. 🙂
Though maybe the impact is about the same, now that I’ve read a bit more.
The Atlantic piece is paywalled but does it add anything substantive (other than perhaps a lively retelling) to wikipedia’s fairly elaborate recounting of the controversies about the purportedly lost gospel fragment and its purported discoverer.
“Grass dries up, flower withers” is more accurate.
Likewise, the last line means something like, “Our God’s word […] forever.” I am stuck with how to translate the word in brackets into clear English. yāqûm, lit. ‘rises’ (in the imperfective) signifies God’s word becoming a reality, which in this case is noted for its permanence.
(Technically, I’d think grass, flowers, and flesh would also be the physical manifestations of God’s word. I’ll send a memo to the theology desk and let them deal with it.)
I had clean forgotten the 2016 thread that addressed the question of my daughter’s potential name day and am grateful to January F-o-M for the reminder. I will say that while my standards for confirmed historicity and/or active online presence for 9th-century martyrs are pretty minimal, I did not in some follow-up googling turn up enough about the supposed Spanish Liliana of that era to find that a workable solution. Separately, our particular Lily was not intended to be an Elizabeth-variant and, perhaps due to the presence of a Susan in the extended family, was not intended to be a calque of Susan although I was aware when Lily was born/named of the Hebrew etymon of Susan and the wide range of flowers it has been applied to. ETA: And indeed one of Lily’s siblings has “Rose” as a middle name, so the fact that both of those separate names could be calques of Susan (or its etymon) kind of underscores that neither of them are understood in our household as such.
I have learned that Ljiljana/Љиљана is a given name that was or is somewhat popular in the former Yugoslavia. I haven’t been able to determine thus far what Orthodox girls with that name do in terms of a name day. Wikipedia’s list of “notable” bearers of the name has no one born before the 1940’s, but that isn’t proof that it wasn’t in use earlier. But it may well have come in as a borrowing of the Italian Liliana at a time when comprehensive catalogs of old Orthdox saints were no longer the sole source of appropriate names for newborns.
Re the letter of disputed provenance in which the alleged block quote from the alleged secret Gospel is found, it seems that the author of the letter is either Clement or Pseudo-Clement. Is there a handy scholarly-sounding way of saying “maybe-Clement” if one needs to talk about the author w/o taking a position one way or another on which of those possibilities is the true one?
The Atlantic piece is paywalled
Here you go.
Reminds one of Powell!
…which makes him a very naughty boy, as his name says.
Copying of manuscripts is, and was at the time, the more mechanical a process the more professional the copyist was. But now that tons of fragments containing all imaginable kinds of variation are known, it is clear what could have been suspected in the unsavory 19th century but apparently wasn’t: for its first few centuries, Christian writings simply weren’t copied by professional copyists. Christians had neither the money nor the prestige that could have attracted the kind of people who copied the Aeneid, and it shows.
My half-cousin Marko/Марко was meant to be named Ljiljana/Љиљана and Biljana/Биљана. Instead of with one large boy, his mother was thought to be pregnant with two small girls… something about limited availability of ultrasound during the war.
(All stresses on the first syllable.)
I’ve encountered quite a bit of introvertedly-but-fervently religious interest in reconstructions of Q, and in reconstructions of Aramaic originals of which the Gospels or parts thereof would be translations, that is like that. From Catholics, mind you.
I’d go for “(Pseudo-?)Clement”, but that looks silly if it’s repeated too often…
Similarly for OHG words/phrases in Latin documents slowly becoming MHG.
I’d go for “(Pseudo-?)Clement”, but that looks silly if it’s repeated too often…
Elegant variation to the rescue: the soi-disant Clement, the alleged Clement, Clement-as-may-be, Clement (if that is his real name)…
In legal jargon we might say “the putative Clement.” Maybe Putativo-Clement?
Paraclement.
The Clement claimant?
Perfect!
That the Letter is not by Clement has been rather decisively shown by, e.g., Andrew Criddle, Eric Osborn, and the G. Smith/B. Landau book.
I am happy to presume that Dr. Goranson understands this all a lot better than I do, but I am still interested in useful ways of talking about disputes in a way that avoids seeming to take a side as to who is right and who is wrong. I’m also a bit bemused by the sequence:
1. Supposed Inquirer (Pseudo-Theodoros, let’s call him): Your Grace, is it true what I hear that there’s a secret extra part of Mark’s gospel that uses such-and-such kinda-homoerotic-sounding wording in connection with our Lord and Savior?
2. Pseudo-Clement: Thanks for your question, Ted, but that’s a damnable lie spread by those vile heretics and gnostics the wutchawutchaites. There is in fact such a secret extra part in our files, but I can assure you it most definitely does not contain the kinda-homoerotic-sounding wording those jokers falsely assert that it does. To the contrary, it says BLOCK QUOTE ALLEGEDLY FROM SOURCE WE HAVE NO OTHER EVIDENCE OF.
3. Controversial 20th-Century Scholar: Hey, maybe that other language that Pseudo-Clement said *was* in the secret extra part is also kinda homoerotic-sounding if you think about it in the right nudge nudge wink wink frame of mind.
With the usual disclaimer about Koine being weird, καταμάθετε τὰ κρίνα τοῦ ἀγροῦ πῶς οὐ ξαίνουσι doesn’t strike me as a very plausible Greek sentence. πῶς isn’t a general-purpose subordinator; it means “how, in what way”. But there’s no specific way in which lilies don’t card. You’d expect a simple ὅτι.
Greek is very fond of this construction, where (to put it in generative-speak, saving the mark) the subject of an indirect question is raised to be the object of the main clause: “consider how the lilies grow” becomes “consider the lilies how they grow”. I recently learned that this is sometimes pleasingly called “lilies prolepsis” in honor of this very verse.
On the subject of stupid clever British politicians with impressive Greek, consider Boris Johnson how he recites the first forty-odd lines of the Iliad in this video. He misses a line or two, but no mean feat nonetheless.
On that topic, Victor Mair has often been impressed with the Mandarin spoken by Mark Zuckerberg, another clever idiot.
Re Liliana, that’s also a name I’ve encountered among Russian speakers.
Quasi-Clement-wise,
in addition to the scholars mentioned above, and Stephen C. Carlson (who has moved on to more constructive pursuits, such as his 2021 book on Papias of Hierapolis), another scholar who shows why the “Clement” text was written later than Clement is Grant Adamson, “What Are the Odds?: Serapion, Eusebius, and Secret Mark,” Novum Testamentum 64 (2022) 364-384. Also, by the same, co-authored with Michael Pope, “The Strange Significance of the Name Carpocrates in Early Christian Polemic,” J. Biblical Literature 142/4 (2023) 717-733.
Re Liliana, that’s also a name I’ve encountered among Russian speakers.
Yes, my Словарь русских личных имен includes it… but has no name day for it, sadly.
high-ranking politicians with some connection to linguistics
The other possibility is low-ranking politicians with solid connections to Biblical Studies, like John Massie, Labour backbencher and editor of The Century Bible for Corinthians.
I also imagine that whoever one finds will not be so polarizing for at least one of their faces.
A fine example; Atherstone (/ˈæðərstən/, for us ign’ant Yanks), St John’s College, and Leamington (/ˈlɛmɪŋtən/) can all be proud of him. (I corrected a misspelling of the word “Exegesis” in that article — what would Jno. Massie have said?!)
Liberal rather than Labour (he lived in the wrong era to be a Labour backbencher, really, although it would have been chronologically possible.)
Yes, of course, What Hat said about Americans.