While my translation of Hippolytus’ Chronicon is being edited, I have decided to begin translating his Commentary on Daniel from Greek to English.  This is the oldest Christian commentary on scripture that we possess yet it has never been completely translated into English. Some fragments of it were published in the 19th century and can be found in the Ante-Nicene Church Father Library here. Another translation was also done in the 19th century on part of the commentary as well: Part of the commentary of S. Hippolytus on Daniel (lately discovered by Dr. Basilios Georgiaoles), with introductions, notes & translation by J.H. Kennedy, Dublin : Hodges, Figgis, & Co, 1888. The place holder can be found here on Google Books but it is not available to read.

For my translation I am using the GCS (Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller) series number NF 7 which supersedes the older SC (Source Christianes) Series 13 edition (published in 1947). The mostly complete Greek text was not made available until 2000 when the GCS edition came out, the SC edition made use of Old Slavonic manuscripts to fill in the gaps. I have asked around and it seems that there is no one who is currently translating this text into English, so it is a good choice.

In his Commentary Hippolytus frequently references the persecution Christians endured under the Roman empire and also discusses Daniel’s visions and dreams, the meanings of which are still, sometimes heatedly, discussed in our day. He includes the apocryphal parts of the book and does not shy away from difficulties in scripture (at least he hasn’t so far…). It’s a good read and an inspiring one too. I hope by doing this a little of Hippolytus’ world and faith may be shared with those who live today.

To keep up interest and also to keep me from being lazy, I plan to post interesting excerpts from my translation weekly. Keep in mind that these are rough draft translations and I am purposefully leaving out all footnotes and book/chapter references to simplify things. Today we will begin with a quote that sets the stage for the coming weeks:

And he, the King and those with him, were judged in spirit on account of the transgression of the oath of the Lord and the covenant, which were set before him. And taking his sons, Nebuchadnezzar slaughtered them before him and he blinded the eyes of Zedekiah who was also called Jeconiah, and shackled him in iron fetters and brought him into Babylon and he ground at the mill until the day in which he died. When he died they took his body and hurled it behind the wall of Nineveh. At this the prophecy of the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled…

Therefore after all of the people were deported and both the city was deserted and the holy place destroyed in order to fulfill the word of the Lord, which he spoke through the mouth of Jeremiah the prophet: “The holy place will be deserted seventy years.” Here we find the blessed Daniel in Babylon as a prophet and as an avenger of Susannah.

I have completed the rough draft of Hippolytus’ Chronicon and it is now being voluntarily corrected by the kind Yancy Smith.  I hope to have it online for you all in September.

I decided to take the plunge and try to link some of the city’s mentioned in the Hippolytus with those mentioned by Strabo and Ptolemy.  The online text for Strabo, both Greek and English, can be found at archive.org the missing volumes can be found at the Perseus Project, and at Bill Thayer’s very useful website which has a digital transcription of most of Strabo. Ptolemy is another matter, his Geographia has only been translated into English once and it was done very poorly.  The manuscripts also seem to be quite confused so the Greek editions that I have seen may be fairly useless (someone please correct me if I am wrong).  So I think I am just going to stick with Strabo.  I have found a good (latin) work of scholarship that discusses and translates the part of Hippolytus where he counts the stades around the Mediterranean.  Hippolytus apparantly took this section from a nautical dictionary, part of which has been discovered.  It can be found on page 427 of the pdf.

I have been at this for the better part of a year now and I am about ready to quit, hopefully I will finish soon.

Progress on Hippolytus’ Chronicon has been very good the past two weeks.  I am about 650 lines in and have completed the last section in Greek and have now begun the final section, which only survives in an ancient Latin and Armenian translation.  I am using the Latin and comparing it with a German translation of the Armenian.  My German is pretty terrible, but the Latin and Armenian seem quite similar.  My hope is to complete the rough draft of the translation before the end of june and then have a final copy ready by the end of summer.  I have not done any serious latin work for a couple years so I’ve been shaking off the rust as I go, but the Latin is fairly easy, so it is not difficult.  As I have mentioned before the hardest part is figuring out the proper names of individuals, in this case, or the names of people groups and countries in the case of the portion of the Chronicon which is in Greek.

The translation has been coming along well, I am about 360 ”verses” into it which is well over half way.  Once I am done I need to revise and correct it.  I have made the decision to only transliterate the names of the hundreds of cities and towns mentioned by Hippolytus in the second section of the “Chronicon” in which he enumerates the distances between various locations.  I did this for several reasons:

1. It would take an enormous amount of time to look up all the place names.
2. Many of the place names are either unique, and I would have to transliterate them anyway or only mentioned in one or two other ancient authors, meaning that by “looking them up” I would actually be looking at various translations of Strabo, Ptolemy, etc.  and not in a lexicon.
3. The different English editions of the ancient authors would likely have different ways of spelling the same place which would render “looking them up” fairly pointless, at least as far as finding an agreed upon spelling goes.
4. Transliterating the place names will give the reader a window into the Greek spelling, which may reduce the need to obtain a Greek text.

I hope to continue translating at a quicker pace this summer.  Once I am done I will post the final translation for you all to see.