Sunday, April 03, 2011

Church Fathers quotations

I'm reading selections from the early Church Fathers for Lent. Some I'd read before (Justin Martyr, Didache, etc) and others I hadn't (Ignatius of Antioch, life of Anthony, etc).
Of course I'd read Penguin Island (UPDATE: and Thais) and something by Twain (?) that parodied the Life of Anthony... So far the stories about him are a bit strange but when his advice is quoted it is pretty solid. The stories talk about haunting of devils and apparitions, but Anthony said don't worry about the devil since he was already defeated, and so on.

The quotations from the Bible are in quotation marks, of course, because they are recognized easily, even if the translation differs rather strikingly from the commonly used versions today. The writers either quote the Bible or refer to the author of the quote.

So far they don't cite non-Biblical authors. There seems to be no "Tradition" at this time apart from the inspired writers that they can cite. This is consistent with the model of "Tradition" which holds that people did the obvious thing with a tradition: they wrote it down.

Or are there non-Biblical quotations that we just don't recognize? I am no linguist and don't think I can change careers this late in the game for the sake of a curiosity, but it might be possible to put all texts in a common language and do some pattern comparisons (not trivially, since the authors paraphrased freely) to see if there are common sentences that might represent quotations from each other or some common authority.

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