A hundred twenty-five sermons in exile

Claim (verbatim)

Severus of Antioch is the largest Greek corpus the empire ever tried to delete - Justinian's edict of 536 made owning his books criminal and ordered them burned - and the completest demonstration that translation defeats jurisdiction. The 125 Cathedral Homilies survive as a complete numbered series in Syriac, in Paul of Callinicum's sixth-century version revised by Jacob of Edessa in 700/701, filling volume after volume of the Patrologia Orientalis (Brière, Graffin and collaborators); his hymn collection survives in Syriac (Brooks's edition); hundreds of letters survive through Athanasius of Nisibis' Syriac - and the surviving letter volume is self-documenting about the loss, since it announces itself as the SIXTH book of the select letters, its headings citing book-numbers of a lost larger collection; the dogmatic treatises against the Grammarian and Julian survive in Syriac in the CSCO. Continuous Greek: virtually nil - florilegium fragments, plus the exquisite exception of a homily or two surviving in Greek only because it circulated under SOMEONE ELSE'S name, the censor passing what the label hid. The numbers make the operation: a numbered series of 125 lets completeness be computed exactly, a book labeled six proves at least five siblings, and the repertorium's language notices turn the whole corpus into a census of where anathema could reach and where it could not.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: over the Severus section of the Clavis Patrum Graecorum, more than 85% of entries possessing a complete surviving text will have it only in a version, overwhelmingly Syriac; the Cathedral Homilies will stand complete at 125 of 125 in the Syriac line while at most 3 of the 125 have a complete Greek text surviving, any such Greek survivor transmitted under an attribution to another author and none under Severus' own name (primary clause: the conjunction of the >85% versio-only share with the 125/125 Syriac completeness and the <=3 disguised Greek survivals; the verdict follows it); secondarily, Brooks's Select Letters volume will carry the internal book-label entailing at least five lost sibling books; florilegium and catena fragments do not count as complete texts, and the test voids if the CPG Severus section cannot be enumerated to at least 50 entries.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Clavis Patrum Graecorum Severus entries' language notices, the Patrologia Orientalis edition series of the Cathedral Homilies, and Brooks's The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus - a versio-only share census, a numbered-series completeness check, and a title-arithmetic reading.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The primary conjunction is carried by printed instruments: the CPG Severus section's language notices mark the corpus versio-only apart from florilegium debris, the Patrologia Orientalis series with Briere's Introduction generale states the 125-homily Syriac completeness in Jacob of Edessa's revision, and the disguised-Greek exception is edited as such - Kugener-Triffaux print Cathedral Homily 77's complete Greek, transmitted under other names. The >85% share and <=3 disguised survivors are entry-counting on the CPG's own notices, and Brooks's title page itself announces the sixth book of the select letters; every leg of the primary clause is stated or repertorium-guaranteed.

• M. Geerard, Clavis Patrum Graecorum III (Turnhout, 1979), nos. 7022-7081
• M.-A. Kugener & E. Triffaux, Les Homiliae cathedrales de Severe d'Antioche: Homelie LXXVII (PO 16.5, Paris, 1922), with the Greek text
• M. Briere, Introduction generale aux homelies de Severe d'Antioche (PO 29.1, Paris, 1960)
• E.W. Brooks, The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus Patriarch of Antioch, 2 vols (London, 1902-1904)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.