A missing chunk of Pope Vitalian’s Letter to King Oswiu about Easter?

In Bede’s Ecclesiastical History book 3 chapter 29, he quotes a letter from Pope Vitalian to the Anglo-Saxon King Oswiu, encouraging him to adopt the new simpler Roman calculation of the date of Easter instead of the Irish method using the 89-year cycle of Victorius. “To the most excellent lord, our son Oswiu, king of the Saxons, Bishop Vitalian, servant of the servants of God. “We have received your Highness’s welcome letter. … Therefore your Highness must, as a member of Christ, always follow…

There are two long encomia / eulogies on St Colluthus. The first of these exists in English already. The second, by Bishop Phoebammon or Phoibamon, acting as deputy in the 6th century for the exiled Patriarch Theodosius II, was included in CSCO 650, edited and translated into German by Gesa Schenke in 2010. It was preserved in a single parchment manuscript of the 9-10th century. Unfortunately the text is very incomplete. What we actually have is a single leaf, in Paris, which has the start of…

I’ve started to look at the modern critical edition of the texts around St Colluthus. This was printed a decade ago in 2013 in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO) volume 650, edited by Gesa Schenke.1 The texts were printed properly – in place of the half-assed hand-written texts in the editiones principales. The translation and commentary was in German, which nobody else can actually read, although some scholars pretend. Cough. Anyway I ran the preface through ChatGPT, just…

St Colluthus was a Coptic physician who was tried and executed in 314 AD. This was part of the great persecution of Christians ordered by the emperor Diocletian. The original court record survives, more or less, preserved as a martyrdom text, and this I posted a few days ago here. This has been referenced in the literature as “Colluthus 1”. But there is another Martyrdom of St Colluthus, derived from the first, and known as “Colluthus 2”. This has been sharpened up by an editor who felt that it…

An interesting email this morning from W. C. Muenchow IV of truetestament.org: I’m writing to let you know about … the first complete English translation of Adolf von Harnack’s textual reconstruction of Marcion’s Bible, built largely from close analysis of Tertullian’s five books against Marcion, together with Epiphanius and the Dialogue of Adamantius. Harnack’s reconstruction — the Apostolikon (Paul’s ten letters as Marcion had them) and the Evangelion (Marcion’s Luke) — comes from the…

I’ve written before about the discovery of a fascinating work by the 2nd century physician, Galen, describing the loss of libraries and his own research collection in a fire in Rome. Now an edition of it, with English translation, plus another work, has come online, open-access: Galen,, Polemis, Ioannis and Xenophontos, Sophia. ›On Avoiding Distress‹ and ›On My Own Opinions‹, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111320816 It’s online here in PDF form. This is how things…

In the Acts of St Colluthus, which record events in May 304 AD, the persecutor Arianus attempts to get Colluthus the physician to apostasise by sacrificing to the gods. Not that Arianus, nor the emperor Diocletian who set him to work, actually believed in the gods. The demand was made precisely because it was known to be one that a Christian could not accept, and would cease to be a Christian if he did. Once he had done so, his Christian identity was gone. This tactic is a standard one, even…

I’m still pottering around in the Coptic martyrology area, especially with regard to the Great Persecution of the church under Diocletian. I have a translation of another version of the Acts of St Colluthus to upload, although a valueless one. I’ve been looking for the other texts about the same saint – two encomiums – with limited success. But it is terribly difficult to just find stuff in Coptic. Today, by accident, I discovered that all the Coptic material about Colluthus has recently been…

St Colluthus was tried and executed in the Great Persecution ordered by the emperor Diocletian, in May 304. Unusually we have a near-exact transcript of his appearance before the Roman provincial governor. This was Satyrus Arianus, whose activity against the church is recorded in a number of papyri. The opening and closing paragraphs are clearly later additions, perhaps rubrics. Unlike the dreary fictional martyrdoms, in which the saint is insolent, gives long speeches full of bible quotes,…

A book arrived through the post yesterday: E.A.E. Reymond & J.W.B. Barns, Four Martyrdoms from the Pierpont Morgan Coptic Codices, Oxford (1973). This contains the martyrdom of St Colluthus, plus an English translation. I did try to order it by ILL, but something went wrong, and I gave up. Needless to say they have now actioned it, just as the book from Amazon arrived. Looking at it made me realise that I just do not read many – or any – physical paper books any more. It’s all electronic. My…

As I wrote earlier, the first pages – parchment – to arrive in Europe from the library White Monastery at Sohag in Egypt were leaves of a life of the incredibly obscure St Colluthus (or Coluthus), containing two stories of miracles that took place at his shrine. These were published by Francesco Borgia in 1781; the Coptic text and a Latin translation. I thought that it might be interesting to translate these into English; as far as I know, no modern language version exists. Unfortunately I was…

Here is a truly fascinating item. It’s a leaf of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus. On it, someone has drawn out a table of the forms of the Greek verb γράφω (“I write”)! Here’s a splendid image of the verso: What is displayed here is the forms of the verb, and these are labelled, much as they would be in a modern text. How fascinating to see this! The first side of the papyrus, the recto, shows the perfect and pluperfect indicative active forms. This side of the papyrus, the verso, shows the…

I read that the first proper analysis of the Constantinople synaxarion – list of saints, quick details, and their saints’ day – is that in the Acta Sanctorum by H. Delahaye: Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanum e codice Sirmondiano nunc Berolinensi. This is online here. He’s printing a Berlin manuscript, but giving material from other manuscripts. Here’s the entry he gives for May 19th, column 695, line 35, with a ChatGPT output for it: 2. Τῇ αὐτῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἄθλησις τοῦ ἁγίου μάρτυρος…

In the 1781 publication of two Coptic fragments of the “Life” of St Colluthus, the preface begins by describing how the pages reached the hands of the owner, Francisco Borgia. It then continues by printing the entry for St Colluthus from volume 3, pages 105-6, of the “Menologium Graecorum”. Borgia prints only the Greek text and that full of ligatures. I was, indeed, unable to read it. The “Menologium Graecorum” was the title of the first edition of what is today referred to as the “Menologium…

In the 18th century, a chamber in the ruins of the White Monastery at Sohag in Egypt contained piles of loose leaves of a vast and ancient Coptic library. In previous posts I have noted how the first to learn of the existence of this material was Cardinal Stefano Borgia, secretary of the Papal missionary organisation, the Propaganda Fidei. In 1781 he published a Coptic text containing two miracles of the obscure Coptic saint Colluthus from some pages sent to him by a Franciscan missionary in…

Some much-needed and long-delayed holiday time with my girlfriend this week! I had booked two rooms in the Holiday Inn Express in Shrewsbury, England, mainly because it had air-conditioning. As is often the case with this chain, the air-conditioning proved to be excellent in the rooms, and it nicely tempered the searing heat. I was truly grateful that I had not booked a cottage! From the car park at the front of the hotel, the view was dominated by the mass of the Wrekin hill, which loomed over…

An interesting email has reached me, noticing that work seems to have resumed at Google Books: I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but Google Books has been adding new material this year from a number of university libraries that have entered their partnership program. As could be expected, the [most likely] reason is that they are desperate to get more printed material to train their LLMs, and libraries are happy if big corporations put up the money and resources to scan their collections.…

The 1597 edition of the Opera Omnia of Tertullian, edited by Franciscus Junius, is one of the rarer early editions. A few days ago, I learned that there was a copy at the Tresoar library in Frisia, in the Netherlands, shelf-mark “F 1532”. The volume has a clear stamp showing that at one point it belonged the library of the King’s Inns, in Dublin. The four Inns of Court in London are professional associations, which every barrister must join in order to practice, and which provide various…

Exciting news for those with rather more money than myself – a two foot (67 cms) tall statue of Cautes, one of the torch-bearers (“dadophores”), the attendants of Mithras, is up for sale at the Interencheres sale “From Caesar to Caesar” in Monte Carlo on the 8th August 2026. The lot is here on the auction house website. Here’s one of the images: The inscription is “Hymnus inbicto” (for “invicto”), “Hymnus (gives this) to the unconquered (god)”. The estimate is 30,000 euros – about $34,000 –…

A few days ago I wrote about locating the 18th century publication of an early Coptic fragments of the acts of St Coluthius. This was important, not for the content, but for the preface explaining how Cardinal Stefano Borgia came to own some parchment pages from the White Monastery at Sohag in Egypt; the first in Europe to do so. I’ve not had time to read this preface as yet. But by coincidence I learned today that those parchment pages have just been digitised and indeed uploaded to the…

Csaba Szabo, one of the most active current Mithras scholars, has a new book out from Cambridge Scholars Publishing on Mithras in Dacia. His blog, with details, is here. Details: Csaba Szabó, Mithras in Roman Dacia: Local Appropriations of a Universal God. Cambridge Scholars (2026). ISBN13: 978-1-0364-7770-7. Blurb: The Roman cult of Mithras ranks among the ancient religious traditions that have left some of the most striking archaeological remains in Central and Eastern Europe. This volume…

I learn today that Brepols have published some new English translations of two works by Tertullian: the Ad Martyras and the De Fuga in Persecutione. Both are translated by Thomas J. Heffernan for the Brepols Library of Christian Sources. The publisher page is here. I’ve added this to the Tertullian Project pages also. That makes the first update since 2023. Another interesting email reached me from Anne Popkema, at a library of which I had never heard – Tresoar in Frisia, in the Netherlands. It…

One of the earliest enthusiasts for Coptic literature was Cardinal Stefano Borgia (1731-1804), a Papal bureaucrat who created a museum in the Borgia Palace in his home town of Velletri. He spent considerable sums acquiring material for it, and especially material from Egypt. There is a 1781 publication which describes how he obtained some Coptic fragments which we now know to come from the White Monastery in Sohag in middle Egypt. The publication is referenced by Stephen Emmel in his…

I reported yesterday on the discovery of two new sermons by St Augustine in a Latin manuscript in a monastery in Poland. One statement in the press release is also of great interest. The discoverer, Prof. Christian Tornau, of the University of Würzburg, stated: “An old catalogue from the monastery mentions a text that bears the same headings and has the same sequence of content as our manuscript. It could have served as a model,” the researcher explains. Tornau cannot confirm this assumption…

Excellent news from the University of Würzburg, where a researcher has discovered two unknown sermons by St Augustine in a Latin manuscript in Poland! The reporting (by Martin Brandstätter) is unusually good: One day in 2024, the phone rang for Professor Christian Tornau, a Latinist at the University of Würzburg: An employee of the Bad Doberan Monastery Association in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania asked him to decipher a 12th-century manuscript that originally belonged to Bad Doberan Abbey but…

Today I received an email asking me about a letter of St Shenouda of Atripe, the 4th century Coptic abbot. The letter in question was apparently written to a nun, saying “I knew you long ago.” The email asked if I knew the source. Well, I have almost no familiarity with the works of Shenouda (or Shenoute), so I thought that I would poke around a bit. The email author was French, so I wondered what existed in French. Interestingly Emile Amelineau translated some material by Shenouda into French…

The letters of the 6th century sophist Aeneas of Gaza have been sitting in a folder on my desktop for a month or two now, and I want to make some progress with making a translation into English. It’s not a big text. Each letter is only a short paragraph, and there are only twenty-five letters. So the whole text would fill less than a dozen pages perhaps. I have the 1962 edition with Italian translation by Lidia Massa Positano, which is more than a hundred pages. There seems to be a rule that…

Easily the most important monument in Istanbul is one that few visitors look at. Located today in the Hippodrome is an ancient bronze column missing its head. This is, in fact, the monument erected by the Greek states to commemorate the victory over the Persians at Marathon, and moved here later. It is extraordinary that it still exists. Originally it had a golden disk at the top, supported by three serpent headed brackets, but the latter were broken off during the Ottoman period. However there…

As I mentioned a day or two ago, Alin Suciu has proposed that a Coptic text in a papyrus in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow is in fact the remains of a lost work by the 2nd century writer Melito of Sardis. His article will appear in Adamantius sometime later this year or early next. But the first page of it is on Academia.edu here, and begins as follows: In the early 1990s, Alla Elanskaya published a fragmentary Sahidic papyrus codex housed at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow[1]. The manuscript…

A rather charming twitter post from here, about a saint unknown to me: In Wales, the 27th of May is the feast day of St Melangell, the patron saint of hares. St Melangell’s patronage of hares is attributed to a story of how she protected a hare (under her dress) from a pack of snarling hunting dogs belonging to a Welsh prince, named Brochwel. After hearing how she came to be in Wales (she was an Irish princess who had fled an arranged marriage in Ireland) Prince Brochwel granted her the land on…