Anathema is a slow fire

Claim (verbatim)

Photios in the 840s could still read shelves of formally condemned books: Philostorgius' Eunomian church history (cod. 40), works of Eunomius himself (codd. 137-138) - whose books an imperial law of 398 had ordered burned (Cod. Theod. 16.5.34) - the Manichaean Agapius (cod. 179), and dossiers from the Nestorian and miaphysite controversies. Four and a half centuries of anathema had not destroyed them; the patriarch read attentively, refuting as he went. Yet today nearly all of it is gone in Greek: Philostorgius survives only as Photios' own epitome, Nestorius' Greek corpus is lost (the Bazaar of Heracleides survives in Syriac), Theodore of Mopsuestia - condemned in the Three Chapters in 553 - is Greek fragments plus Syriac survivals, Agapius is nothing but the review. The mechanism: anathema was not an incinerator but a de-funding. Condemnation removed a work from every scriptorium's copying queue while existing copies aged in place, so banned books died not at the ban but one manuscript-lifetime after their last tolerated copying - a slow fire. The Bibliotheca lets us measure its completeness, because Photios records exactly which condemned works a superbly placed reader could still hold in 845, and Pinakes records what remains; the gap between the two lists is the burn rate of orthodoxy enforcement operating through the copying economy rather than the bonfire.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: partitioning the theological works reviewed in the Bibliotheca into (a) works by authors, or works, under formal conciliar anathema or imperial proscription at the time Photios wrote, versus (b) orthodox works, partition (a)'s independent Greek full-text survival rate will be at most one fifth in absolute terms, and at most half of partition (b)'s rate (primary clause: both bounds on the condemned partition; the verdict follows them); disambiguation: survival inside quoting refutations, in epitome, or only in Syriac or Latin translation counts as not independently surviving in Greek; condemnation status is pinned to ecumenical-council anathemas and attested imperial book-burning edicts; coverage guard: void if the condemned partition holds fewer than 10 works.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Bibliotheca codex list keyed to Clavis Patrum Graecorum numbers, joined to Pinakes and the TLG canon for per-work Greek survival status - a two-partition survival-rate ratio.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Settled by printed registers: the condemned works Photios could still read are, as independent Greek full texts, almost uniformly dead - Philostorgius epitome-only, Eunomius in fragments and quotation, Agapius nothing beyond the review, Nestorius in Syriac, Theodore of Mopsuestia fragments plus Syriac - against majority survival among the orthodox codices; the per-work statuses are CPG-level facts, and the slow-fire mechanism (condemnation as removal from the copying queue rather than incineration) is argued at monograph length by Speyer and Rohmann. The Bibliotheca partition re-labels a printed census; both pinned bounds are guaranteed.

• W. Speyer, Buechervernichtung und Zensur des Geistes bei Heiden, Juden und Christen (Stuttgart, 1981)
• D. Rohmann, Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity (Berlin, 2016)
• Philostorgius, Kirchengeschichte, ed. J. Bidez, 3rd ed. rev. F. Winkelmann (GCS, Berlin, 1981), on the epitome-only survival

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.