Archive for September, 2008

Translating "Books on Chronology"

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

I recently borrowed a copy of Hippolytus’ “Books of Chronology.” As far as I am aware, this has never been translated into a modern language, so I hope to do so.  Its fairly simple Greek and Latin, so as long as I can navigate the German notes and introduction I should be alright.   In it Hippolytus uses the Septuagint to prove the age of the world so that he can get people to stop looking for the return of Christ, which, according to Hippolytus, was not to happen until the world was 6,000 years old.  He believed that the end was still a couple hundred years off.

Ancient Christians commonly believed that the world would last 6,000 years.  I’ll try and gather some quotations from the fathers about this later.

Digitizing Hippolytus

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

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.