Chronicon Blog » Digitization

Dionysius Bar-Salibi

Tom — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:50:39 +0000

While doing some research on Papias, I encountered an excerpt from a 17th century English translation of Dionysius Bar-Salibi by Hugh Loftus. No other bibliographic information is given in the article. Perhaps this translation exists somewhere and can be put … Continue reading →

The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus

Tom — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:43:44 +0000

After some delay, I have finally finished the digitization of The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, which can be found here. It is a fascinating liturgical and ecclesiastical piece written at a time when the church still felt fierce persecution and the spiritual gifts were believed to still be active. It seems to have been, roughly, assembled into the form we have today around 200-230 AD by someone or a body of people associated with the Roman Church. It is disupuated about whether Hippolytus himself had a hand in creating it, but I believe he did. Much credit is due to Roger Pease whose own method of presenting digitization projects I have copied.

I learned some lessons through this project:

* Never digitize a document with old optical character recognition software
* Digitizing other languages is hard
* Digitizing other languages that are written in non-latin characters is even harder
* Digitizing footnotes is hard
* Digitizing sidenotes is even harder

Here is one of the many passages in The Apostolic Tradition that made me pause:

If a catechumen should be arrested for the name of the Lord, let him not hesitate about bearing his testimony; for if it should happen that they treat him shamefully and kill him, he will be justified, for he has been baptized in his own blood. -The Apostolic Tradition 19

Digitizing Hippolytus’ Apostolic Tradition Update

Tom — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:29:19 +0000

I’ve been very busy lately so digitizing Hippolytus’ Apostolic Tradition has gone slowly. However I finished digitizing it and have corrected 30% of it. I am debating about how carefully to correct it and format it, at this point I’m so behind in my schedule I would rather simply post it online with only brief corrections and formatting. However I am plagued by the idea that I am simply repeating the sins of scribes who hastily made translations or copies with errors that left future generations wondering what the text actually said. Practically speaking I will probably not have much choice in the matter as my tight schedule will make it impossible for me to spend much time correcting and formatting it. I’ll post it for you all once I am finished with it.

Digitizing Hippolytus' Apostolic Tradition

Tom — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:37:06 +0000

The Copy of B.S. Easton’s 1934 “Apostolic Tradition” by Hippolytus came in a few days ago! I have been slowly digitizing it and am about 70% complete. Once I finish that I will briefly reformat it and then post … Continue reading →

Hippolytus' "On Apostolic Tradition"

Tom — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 03:22:00 +0000

I have had a rather unpleasant experience attempting to find a copy of Hippolytus’ “On Apostolic Tradition” by Burton Scott Easton. I twice interlibrary loaned a copy and specifically requested only Easton’s edition, knowing that mistakes are frequent. However both times I received an edition other than Easton’s. Rather than anger the interlibrary loan librarians, by pestering them with another request, I am going to try and purhcase it. Roger Pearse pointed out where I can get an edition on Amazon.com (I can’t believe I neglected to look their myself). Hopefully I will receive the right one this time.

Digitizing Hippolytus

Tom — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:45:32 +0000

I have been trying to digitize Hippolytus’ “The Apostolic Tradition.” This beautiful document, to my knowledge, is not online. In this work Hippolytus presents a liturgy and a guidebook for church life. Some of what he says is still in use in the Catholic mass and Protestant services (and perhaps in the Orthodox church, though I am unfamiliar with its liturgy).

Quasten gives three older English translations of it. One by Gregory Dix is still in copyright and another by Hugh Connolly only translates a small part of the text. As of now I am trying to get a hold of Burton Scott Easton’s edition, which I believe is in the public domain. Hopefully it should get here before the end of September. Unfortunately, if Easton’s is still in copyright we may be out of luck. The original Greek text has been painstakingly (and fascinatingly) rebuilt from Greek, Latin, Coptic, Etheopian, and Arabic fragments, so translating it would be impossible for me.