Jerome kept the tables and dropped the receipts

Claim (verbatim)

Eusebius built his Chronicle in two books: the Chronographia, a critical dossier quoting his pagan sources at length - Berossus on Babylon, Abydenus, Manetho's dynasties, Alexander Polyhistor, Castor - and the Canons, the synchronized tables of world chronology. The Greek original of both is lost, quarried by George Syncellus around 810. The two translation streams then each took the half their market wanted. Jerome translated ONLY the Canons into Latin, extending them to 378: the West got the product without the evidence. The Armenian translation kept BOTH books, and its manuscript tradition (edited by Aucher, 1818; German translation by Karst, GCS 20, 1911) is today the sole continuous carrier of Book I in any language. The consequence cascades into modern scholarship: the fragment collections of the lost Mesopotamian historians must print pieces of Berossus and Abydenus from Karst's German of an Armenian translation of a lost Greek compilation quoting lost Greek originals - a four-deep stack with the Armenian as the only load-bearing floor. The mechanism is translator selection as bottleneck: a translation movement transmits a work's parts in proportion to their perceived use, and scholarly apparatus is the first thing dropped; only where a church adopted the whole book as heritage (the Armenian case) did the receipts survive. Chronology-as-product went west; chronology-with-receipts went east; and the east's copy is now the world's only one.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the per-fragment carrier apparatus of Brill's New Jacoby for Berossos (BNJ 680) and Abydenos (BNJ 685), more than one third of Abydenus' printed fragments and a nonzero set of Berossus' will have the Armenian Chronicle Book I as their only full carrier, with Syncellus supplying parallels for under half of the Armenian's Berossus-Abydenus material (moderate clause); and as a floor clause certain to resolve: Book I as a continuous work will show exactly one carrier language (Armenian) while Book II shows two independent translation carriers (Latin and Armenian) and zero continuous Greek (primary clause: the one-carrier/two-carrier/zero-Greek book table; the verdict follows it); full carrier means continuous transmission of the fragment's whole extent, Syncellus parallels are read from Mosshammer's Teubner edition, and the fragment-share clause voids (leaving the floor clause decisive) if BNJ's apparatus does not distinguish Armenian from Syncellus extents.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: BNJ 680 and 685 carrier apparatus, Karst's GCS 20 Armenian Chronicle, Mosshammer's Syncellus, and Helm's GCS Jerome - a per-fragment carrier census plus the two-book carrier table.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The floor clause that carries the verdict is stated everywhere in the Chronicle literature: Book I's sole continuous carrier is the Armenian (Aucher 1818; Karst's GCS 20), Book II survives through Jerome's Latin and the Armenian, and the Greek original is lost, quarried by Syncellus - Mosshammer and Burgess state the carrier table in so many words. The BNJ per-fragment carrier census is the only un-run element, and the item itself demotes it to a moderate clause that voids harmlessly; as posed, the primary clause is already in print.

• J. Karst, Die Chronik aus dem Armenischen uebersetzt (Eusebius Werke V, GCS 20, Leipzig, 1911)
• A.A. Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebius and Greek Chronographic Tradition (Lewisburg, 1979)
• R.W. Burgess, Studies in Eusebian and Post-Eusebian Chronography (Stuttgart, 1999)
• R. Helm, Die Chronik des Hieronymus (Eusebius Werke VII, GCS, 3rd ed., Berlin, 1984)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.