F.C. Conybeare slaps the Christianity on the table hard, and the Christian bias in his introduction screams like a demon-possessed baby on a sugar high. Oh? You want an example? How about this:
Towards the end of the third century when the struggle between Christianity and decadent Paganism had reached its last and bitterest stage, it occurred to some of the enemies of the new religion [Christianity] to set up Apollonius, to whom temples and shrines had been erected in various parts of Asia Minor, as a rival to the founder of Christianity. The many miracles which were recorded of Apollonius, and in particular his eminent power over evil spirits or demons, made him a formidable rival in the minds of Pagans to Jesus Christ. (Lines 105-11)*The translator’s pride forces him to assume that any polytheistic development following the birth of Jesus Christ was made as a conscious reaction to Christianity. His point of view is that of the insecure teenager who views everyone else’s behavior as a reaction to his or her own—every glance, every whispered word. The modern eye views antiquity differently from people living back then; we can point to the parallelisms between polytheistic and monotheistic figures. Kindle books are searchable, and I can’t find one location where Philostratus mentions Jesus, the Nazarene, Christ, the Galileans, or Christianity. There is some discussion of the Jewish people, but I am not sure of the context.
He continues by pointing out that Apollonius’s tour throughout the sacred temenoi “prepared the ground for Christianity” because he pointed out the flaw of blood sacrifice in the everyday cults. (Apparently, this would have made people susceptible to believing Christians?) According to Conybeare, the “neo-Pythagorean propaganda did much to discredit ancient paganism, and Apollonius and its other missionaries were all unwittingly working for that ideal of bloodless sacrifice which, after the destruction of the Jewish temple, by an inexorable logic imposed itself on the Christian church” (lines 125-32). I think that Conybeare’s pompous attitude and unquestionable religious fervor is difficult to stomach. It diminishes his credibility as a scholar, and I am very happy that this man is no longer in a position to comment on any text.
The translation itself uses nice language so far, even if the English is a century old. Academic English doesn’t change much across generations, I find—except, of course, the length of phrases and number of dependent clauses that are allowed before we think the writer is a long-winded ass. As far as bias goes, I think we all can tell where Conybeare is coming from. This can go in one of two ways: either Conybeare will accentuate the “decadent Paganism” of Apollonius using word nuances, or he will use vocabulary to make the reader agree that Apollonius’s greatness is simply a reaction to Christianity—perhaps both.
This is the first paragraph of Conybeare’s text:
The votaries of Pythagoras of Samos have this story to tell of him, that he was not an Ionian at all, but that, once on a time in Troy, he had been Euphorbus, and that he had come to life after death, but had died as the songs of Homer relate. And they say that he declined to wear apparel made from dead animal products and, to guard his purity, abstained from all flesh diet, and from the offering of animals in sacrifice. For that he would not stain the altars with blood; nay, rather the honey-cake and frankincense and the hymn of praise, these they say were the offerings made to the Gods by this man, who realized that they welcome such tribute more than they do the hecatombs and the knife laid upon the sacrificial basket. (Book I, Paragraph 1)As you see, it doesn’t look that bad. Perhaps translators with obvious biases against polytheism are easier to handle than some modern texts—the ones where the deeply religious writers keep Christian religion out of their commentaries but still use it to create their translations. In all cases, research into the writer perhaps should be done to determine whether they are unbiased or not.
* Due to having this book in Kindle edition, you must be lenient with me. Kindle measures books by static line numbers that may or may not correspond to the actual number of lines the viewer sees, as one can change the text size. I think this is kind of cool, but it’s a shame that E-Readers can’t pinpoint the text copy’s equivalent page.
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