Roger Pearse's Pages

Thanks for visiting this site. There's no theme to the subjects discussed below, except that I'm interested in them and think maybe someone else might be too, or for some reason I have some information to hand which might be useful to someone.

ABOUT ME

Personal Details - if you know me, you may want to read this. Or not, as the case may be... Contains my email address.

How to get more out of life Getting on for 40? Tired of running on the hamster-wheel? Here are some tentative personal ideas on how to avoid doing nothing with your life.

NOTES ABOUT THE ANCIENT WORLD

"A Lost Gospel" - A manuscript find in Berlin in 1997 of a gnostic gospel, similar to the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. All the real information I can find, and an evaluation of it.

Did Christian writers of the Second Century believe in the Incarnation? - A question I was asked.
How well did the pre-Eusebian Fathers know Josephus? - Not very well, seems to be the answer, contrary to common report. I researched it, so here it is.
Did the ancients believe in a flat earth? - An extract from Pliny the Elder

The Old Slavonic Josephus - some notes from the Russian
The Council of Nicaea and the Bible - Did the Council of Nicaea lay down the canon of scripture? With some otherwise unavailable excerpts from:
Reviews - Some book reviews I posted on Amazon.

Photius' Review of the history of Justus of Tiberias - because most people haven't got access to it.
Lucian of Samosata: Introduction - and MS tradition.
Lucian of Samosata: The Passing of Peregrinus - English only.
Lucian of Samosata: Alexander the False Prophet - English only
Lupus of Ferrières - Letter 5 (To Einhard) - Mentions Uncial letters.
Hoffmann's Porphyry - a review of a recent translation.
Hoffmann's Celsus - some errors in translation.
The Donation of Constantine and the critique of Lorenzo Valla - just why is it a forgery? (It is!)
The Loeb Classical Library - an introduction from 1912 by James Loeb, explaining the genesis of the collection.
Joseph Wheless: Forgery in Christianity - How accurate are the quotations in this oft-quoted book?
George Syncellus: Some excerpts from the Chronography - Much referenced, but little read, so I've put some quotes online.
Mithras in Ancient texts - a collection of all the mentions I could find.
An old account of the Strauss controversy - anatomy of a rogue.
The Notovitch Hoax - contemporary articles on it.
Implications of P52 for NT dating - some thoughts.
Barnabas and the Jews - minutes of a meeting
Sol Invictus - in progress
Old Paths in Perilous Times - the manifesto of the CICCU (Cambridge Inter-collegiate Christian Union) in 1932.

PROJECTS

The Tertullian Project - A personal perspective on this ancient Latin writer. Manuscripts, Latin, Rare Books, Lost Works, and other things about one of the funniest writers of antiquity.

QuickLatin. A Latin-to-English Translation Assistant program I've produced to ease the Latin-to-English gap.
QuickAccents for New Testament Greek -- Something to make sure the accents and breathings on NT Greek are correct.
Early Church Fathers - Additional - English translations of the fathers which aren't available elsewhere online, collected. Also a mirror of the now unavailable CCEL Early Church Fathers in the v2 form.
The Syriac Library - Syriac public domain texts.
Manuscripts of ancient authors - How did these texts get to us? Here are some notes on what physical remains there are of various authors. Just what manuscripts actually exist, and of what date?

Eusebius of Caesarea - various pages which I've written or scanned more or less ad hoc. Including:
- Eusebius the Liar? - An analysis of some common slanders.
- J.B. Lightfoot on Eusebius' sincerity, often doubted online without much reason.

The Oriental Fathers - some notes on Syriac, Armenian, Arabic Georgian, Coptic and Ethiopian literature.
The Library - Things I've scanned which don't belong with Tertullian or the Fathers.
The Classical Library - A collection of English translations of the classics on a bit of spare webspace, since no-one else seems to want to collect them!
The Song of the Gnostic Slave - Some verses I posted to usenet, which I place here, now that the Deja archive is no more, because I didn't want to lose them.
Some PDFs - PDF's of public domain journal articles and books.

PRACTICAL TIPS ON HOUSEHOLD THINGS

Bookcases - How to alter MFI chipboard bookcases, and indeed make your own. DIY for the tired office worker.
Gas Central Heating: Is your central heating doing its job? How to calculate this.
Gas Central Heating: Pump overruns. What does it mean if the pump keeps running on and on.
An Ipswich shopper - a blog about firms that have given particularly good or bad service.

COMPUTER-RELATED TIPS

FrontPage 2000 Locks Up! - and some ideas to unlock it again.
FrontPage 2000 and Office Proofing Tools - Want to spell-check foreign-language web pages? Fat chance! But here's a way to do it.
FrontPage 2000 Macros - How to get started.
FrontPage 2000 Macros - How to make a toolbar icon and a keyboard short-cut.
Dreamweaver Macros - How to get started.
Scanning for OCR - How I do my OCR for the Tertullian Project.
Scanning black-and-white text, not for OCR - settings needed for small images.
Using unicode in webpages for ancient Greek and Syriac - how I now write my webpages.
Upgrading the Compaq Armada 1130T - what happened when my old laptop got a flat CMOS battery (and needed a bigger hard disk).
Visual Basic and Real Basic - some notes, until I stopped working on this.
Using ADA code with Visual Basic - creating an Ada DLL. The story until I abandoned the idea... More info now.
Getting Subversion and Subclipse running on Windows XP - working on your PC with subclipse and subversion.
Getting Java working - basic compilation stuff.
C++ Notes - links etc
Coding for Right-To-Left text in DotNet (using VB.NET and Syriac) - pretty awful if you come to it for the first time.
Syriac Peshitta resources - a fully vocalised text
Using VB.NET with nUnit - getting setup
Custom SOAP headers in VB.NET - for web services
CXXTest with Visual C++ (VC6 and VC7) - makefiles etc
Technical Notes on Windows Vista &c. - copy pro. etc.

MISCELLANEOUS

How to copy Rare Books and Manuscripts - Some initial notes for those who have to do it but don't know how.
How to find out about copyrights - if you want to scan something, is it in the public domain?
A Ramshackle Room - a 1910 poem from Punch.
Graham Kendrick - some old pages I didn't want to disappear from the web.
An old account of the Strauss controversy -- an article I thought interesting in the 1864 Journal of Sacred Literature.
Yeznik of Kolb, Refutation of the Sects -- translated and retold by Thomas Samuelian.
Greek verbs and principal parts -- how to work out the stem for an irregular verb
Carlson's The Gospel Hoax - a review of this book about Secret Mark.
Bede, on 'Eostre' -- all that is known about this anglo-saxon goddess.

Like most things on the 'net, these pages are the product of amateur interest (and so is the 'net, come to think of it). This means there may be unintentional errors of fact or interpretation in them. I would welcome constructive comment, and corrections of matters of fact.