by Scott McGill
These versions, however calqued upon their sources, became foundational literature for their target cultures. The early Latin versions, of which there appears to have been a myriad, and later the Vulgate, quickly became literary monuments of Latin culture; the Syriac Peshitta raised the dialect of Edessa to the heights of a standard literary dialect and ensured its dominance for centuries. The Gothic Bible, translated to quiet the barbarian peoples by civilizing their religion, remained the only monument to the literature of that tongue for generations.
Because these translations were often intentional instruments of policy, they could find themselves in conflict. In the fifth century Syrian bishops attempted to outlaw the use of the Diatessaron, an early Syriac version of the Gospels harmonized into a single narrative, as part of their wider efforts to bring the variegated character of Syriac Christianity under a single authority. For many, the Diatessaron represented local tradition over against the incursions of the government‐backed episcopacy. In North Africa the new Latin version of the Hebrew Scriptures translated by Jerome was the cause of rioting in some churches – not because the congregations could understand the finer points of the arguments for this or that approach to literary translation, but simply because of the perceived threat to what were viewed as local traditions.
Similar tensions lay behind another set of Scriptural translation texts, the Aramaic Targums used in the synagogues of late antiquity, whose congregations no longer understood Hebrew. Here literature and performance once again intersect, for the written Targums are only the physical representations of public readings – the Aramaic interpreter (meturgeman) speaking alongside the reader of the Hebrew Bible. “He who translates a verse literally is a liar; but he who adds to it is a blasphemer,” quipped one rabbi (b. Kiddushin 49a), but the efforts of the meturgemanim reflect the theological tendencies of rabbinic Judaism and the authorities’ concern to protect their sacred text from being misinterpreted, often by the technique of (sometimes considerable) expansion. The written Targums were only guides to live performance, and we can even read in the notes to the Targums (Masora) some of the instructions given to the interpreters for this purpose (Klein 1998, p. 10).
Just as Latin and Syriac versions of the New Testament contended for prestige and authority among church groups, so Targum competed against Targum, with the wide variety of Palestinian Targums gradually being superseded by official versions from the Babylonian diaspora; Targum also competed against original as the rabbis attempted to enforce a strict and thoroughgoing distinction between them and to prevent the former from becoming an authoritative text. They were only partly successful, while for many religious communities, translations came to take on the tincture of the original’s authority.
32.6 Parabiblical Texts
Alongside the core canonical books, those others must not be forgotten that lived on the boundaries. The pseudepigrapha were translated with as much gusto and frequency as those “core” books. Some, such as 4 Ezra, underwent fascinating alterations and expansions as they passed through a variety of guises. Others, such as the novella Joseph and Asenath, became well‐known literature throughout western Asia and beyond. The Ethiopic version of Enoch, translated from Hebrew or Aramaic, sometime during late antiquity, remains our principal source for this vital piece of Jewish scripture. A relatively less well‐known text such as the Testament of Adam affords us a picture of just how easily such texts radiated – the original Syriac composition has been found in Greek, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, and Ethiopic. Texts of this sort traveled so well and were translated and adapted so readily that it is frequently not known for sure which of a number of extant versions is the original.
The vast majority of texts of this type are located not in biblical manuscripts but in collections of monastic or other theological or popular philosophical texts. Many are narrative in style and, being open to adaptation and a cut‐and‐paste approach, may often be read now as political propaganda relating to the time of transmission rather than to the time of original composition. Hence their genre was in many ways closer to that of prose fiction and, in literary terms, would be better analyzed in that context.
32.7 Theology
In partly overlapping contexts are located the extensive translations made of works of a more theoretical theological nature, designed for the specialist rather than for a popular audience. We have already come across the spat between Jerome and Rufinus, which had to do with the status of translations of Origen, once their author had been condemned as a heretic. Both men published their own versions of Origen’s On First Principles, following them up with an escalating sequence of vitriolic attacks upon one another, an exchange of views that reflects key issues facing a sociohistorical interpretation of translations (Rebenich 2002, pp. 20–24). They debated whether the translator is by default implicated in the errors of his text (is he an “author”?), and whether the translator does not have a duty rather to “correct” those errors in the interests of his audience. The translator is a powerbroker and a teacher whose bilingual talent also comes with a responsibility, just as the rabbis felt responsible for controlling the Targums. What may be defended as responsible translating by one party, to another will readily shade into deception.
In the field of translating the holy dogmas of the church and the expositions of the Church Fathers, this issue only grew in importance during late antiquity, as the Origenist controversy testifies. For many bishops in the fifth century, accurate doctrinal teaching came to focus increasingly upon the interpretation not of Scripture but of the Fathers themselves; hence, whereas for Jerome the translation of the Bible was sui generis, while all other genres could be treated otherwise, to the Syriac translators of Greek theological texts in the sixth and seventh centuries, the two genres were on a par. The techniques of extreme verbal mirroring that were brought to a peak in Thomas of Harkel’s version of the New Testament (616) were also applied to the Syriac versions of Severus of Antioch, Athanasius, and Gregory Nazianzen, who were looked upon as the founders of true doctrine by the Miaphysite Syrian community (Brock 1983). Among translations of religious texts, therefore, there is good cause to treat these patristic works as generically separate from the looser and much elaborated translations of pseudepigrapha that, again in terms of the canons applied to them, belong rather with novels and popular literature.
There are some differences between the texts favored by Latin and Syriac patrons and translators at this time. Latin readers, especially from the fourth century, sought the works of the “orthodox” leaders of the Eastern church: Basil, the two Gregories, and Chrysostom, in addition to Origen, Evagrius, and the authors of hagiographies and monastic advice; the sixth‐century translators Dionysius Exiguus and Rusticus were concerned to translate the Acta of the Eastern councils and the dogmatic works surrounding the Nestorian controversy. The Syrians were more focused on a slightly later era, on authors who constituted their “founding fathers”: Theodore, Nestorius, and Theodoret for the Easterners who rejected the official theology of the Council of Ephesus; Severus and Cyril of Alexandria for the Westerners who rejected the Chalcedonian position. The explosion of Armenian translations (fifth/sixth century) included many of these same authors, while adding a particular fascination for Philo that was unparalleled in either the Latin or Syriac environments (Lombardi and Pontani 2010). In Egypt, however, much of this material lay untouched by Coptic translators (Maccoull 1984). Even the monastic works of the renowned Evagrius, which were extensively translated into Syriac and Armenian, are almost unknown in Coptic. The scribes of the Egyptian monasteries never developed that hunger for Greek learning and science that was so marked a feature of the educated Syriophone and Armenophone elites. Some theological works beyond the Scriptures and pseudepigrapha are, however, to be found in Ethiopic, which, although not numerous, serve only to render their absence in the Coptic sphere all the more marked. The spread of monasticism around the East was naturally a spur to the translation of numerous works belon
ging to that field of human endeavor into languages as far afield as Sogdian and Ethiopic, even before the end of late antiquity.
32.8 Conclusion
Translation offers a view of aspects of the late ancient world in microcosm. The multiple translations and retranslations of popular religious narratives embody the new ways in which religious life was being imagined: the rise of the cult of saints and martyrs, the refashioning of the classical past in the light of the Christian saeculum, the power of the book in a Judeo‐Christian worldview. Competition for authority among several translations of a single text reflects in physical book form struggles between multiple elites contesting authority in the political or ecclesiastical sphere. Translations with an official imprimatur gradually push aside “provincial” competitors representing communities that had failed to “make it” at the centers of power. Conversely, the latter may be symptomatic of a democratization of literature in late antiquity. We can also learn a great deal from the canons of translation, the variety of techniques that different translators brought to their trade. Contrast the extraordinary suppleness of the Alexander legend to Justinian’s strictures on the translation of his laws – the ever‐negotiable canonical status of a text was a vital consideration in the translator’s approach.
Late ancient translation literature was a diverse phenomenon and so reflects the characteristics of the world from which it emerged. It represents at once both centrifugal and centripetal forces: a literary force away from the traditional foci of culture, on account of the expanding self‐awareness and self‐confidence of non‐Greek language communities – Latin and Syriac, Armenian and Coptic, even nascent Anglo‐Saxon and Arabic – in their own non‐Greekness; at the same time a force toward the center, because translation implies a longing or a need for one language community to possess the products of another, rather than to be content with introspection. In late antiquity especially, Christianity was a uniting force of empire that gave incentive to the translation of genres as diverse as martyrologies and conciliar Acta, into all of its constituent literary languages. If late antiquity was a world in the process both of fragmentation and of homogenization, the world of literary translation holds a mirror up to this paradox.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Antiquarian Literature
Christopher Kelly
Late antique Christianity was tightly bound to its past. However its Christology was to be properly formulated, all Christians recognized that the Incarnation had taken place in (fairly recent) historical time. More expansively, an informed engagement with a distant antiquity might support the claim that the comforting message of Christian salvation had run like a silken thread through human history since Abraham. But the past was not neutral territory. For all that human progress might be presented as a providential prolegomenon to Christ (and, more recently, the emperor Constantine), Christians also surveyed a past that, like some postwar landscape, was cratered with error. In Peter Brown’s attractive formulation, “The question which faced Christians in the world of late antiquity was how much of the past could be put in the past, and how much could be allowed to linger in the present” (2004, p. 116). Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that so much contemporary literature was engaged with precisely this problem. A substantial number of the works discussed in this Companion were shaped by a set of intellectual and lit
erary strategies that positioned them more or less explicitly in relation to canonical antecedents. In that latitudinous sense, a wide range of late antique texts might be said to be broadly “antiquarian”: that is, one significant preoccupation (or anxiety) is an exploration of the possible connections – by turns tight, tense, tenuous, tendentious – between a non‐Christian past and a Christian present.
Conventionally, “antiquarian” has been more narrowly deployed to denote a particular subset of interests in the classical past. (And this chapter courteously resists the urge to disappoint the editors of this Companion by dissolving its allocated subject.) Broadly stated, the antiquarian project may be distinguished by an emphasis on some kind of systematic subject taxonomy – that is, the collection and arrangement of material thematically (as opposed, for example, to chronologically) – and by a lack of any explicit concern to interrogate the items so assembled or to explore analytically the connections between them. In Arnaldo Momigliano’s tart aphorism, the antiquarian is “the type of man who is interested in historical facts without being interested in history” (1990, p. 54). But that opposition – not to be overdrawn – is perhaps better seen as pointing to a difference in approach to the past rather than to any exaggerated contrast between dull pedantry and critical sophistication. (Nor is there any need to share the disdain of the modern professionalized academy for the enthusiastic amateur, connoisseur, or gentleman scholar.) Antiquarian texts, which chiefly delight in the careful collection and display of data, with an open enjoyment of the puzzling and obscure, can profitably be set in a wider field, surveyed elsewhere in this volume, which might usefully embrace encyclopedism (with its concern as to how knowledge might be ordered, presented, and retrieved) and a range of enterprises – grammars, commentaries, paraphrases, epitomes, breviaria, technical treatises – that aimed to systematize, codify, and correct the past (Formisano 2012, pp. 512–520; 2013, pp. 204–15; König and Woolf 2013, especially pp. 59–63; Chin 2008, pp. 54–60; Goldlust 2010, pp. 246–261; Flamant 1977, pp. 233–252; and the magisterial survey in Inglebert 2001).