The earliest known prayer to the Blessed Virigin Mary, and Sappho's poetic style, too...

Since the political news is so dire, (war in Korea likely, Trump's bringing in General Kelly to manage the WH – he's putting together a war cabinet, as it were) here's a report on a fascinating article, especially for those interested in ancient languages, early prayers, verse styles, and famous literary personalities:

http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.hu/2017/07/sappho-of-lesbos-and-mater-misericordiae.html

In another life, I'd have spent my three-score and ten on such linguistic studies as Fr Hunwicke so lovingly describes here – and throughout his blog, actually. Of course, I'd have concentrated on the Celtic material, but still, Latin and Greek would have been of devoted interested, especially the poetry, and hence the importance of Sappho, the poet who inadvertently gave her name to "Sapphists" (a 19th century use) and now "Lesbians" after her home island of Lesbos. 

I remember her well, ha ha, a sort of Jodie Foster with darker hair. Actually, her main shtick (Sappho's, not Jodie's) was actually writing marriage poems, celebrating both bride and groom and their wedding. As with some (by no means all, mind you) of the Greeks, she had a reputation, as they say today, of being rather AC-DC (but then so was Julius Caesar, though with him it was all politics all the time, hence to further his political career, he was "every woman's husband and every man's wife" – which in a slightly less sexually deviant sense sums up the Democrats and RINO Republicans today, don't you think? :) and actually, according to legend, Sappho killed herself after being rejected by a young sailor. (Only men were sailors in Ancient Greece.) Having the entire female homosexual matrix named after her would have confused her no end, to put it mildly. 

But Sappho is important here as the venerable Fr. Hunwicke explains below, because her poetic verse form was used for something else, indeed. And in the process, Fr. H introduces us to one Edgar Lobel, a great linguistic scholar whose story itself is intensely interesting. (My favorite linguistic scholar, of course, was a philologist possessing the eccentric name of J.R.R. Tolkien, who would have remained no better known than Edgar Lobel had he, Tolkien, not been a writer and poet, as well. BTW, they're apparently making bio-pics about Ronald Tolkien; see:

http://www.cinemablend.com/news/1686750/the-x-men-star-who-may-play-jrr-tolkien )

An excerpt from the venerable Hunwicke:

So, for example, we now have extensive fragments of the great lyric poets of ancient Lesbos, Alcaeus and Sappho. Indeed, during the last five or so years big new additions have been made to the Corpus Sapphicum. Liturgists would be most interested in Sappho because she originated (or enhanced the profile of) the metre called the Sapphic, which is employed in a number of Office Hymns (especially those written in the Carolingian renaissence). The metre concerned is the one you may recognise as having stanzas composed of three metrically identical lines followed by a short one. (In the old Breviary, Iste Confessor was the one most frequently used). And Edgar Lobel was not only a skilled papyrologist, but a master of the rather strange and difficult Lesbian dialect. He was, quite simply, the foundation stone of Lesbian studies and a very great ornament of this University.

However, this post is not really about Lobel's work on Sappho. I just thought I'd like you to have a rounded picture of his greatness. Let us now, Zedwise, 'drill into' a most interesting Papyrus for us: an early Christian fragment with the earliest known prayer to our Lady. It is the brief formula we know as the Sub tuum praesidium, and is common to the Coptic, Byzantine, and Roman liturgies (pretty ecumenical, then, you might say). Edgar Lobel looked at it and gave his view (you go by 'palaeography', handwriting styles) that it was Third Century.

But when it was published, the Editor disregarded this judgement and dated it a hundred years later. Why? Was he an even greater papyrologist and palaeographer than Lobel? Not a bit of it. He just could not believe that such devotion to our Lady could have existed so early in the history of the Christian Church.

I am always preaching at you and the point of my sermon today is that a fair number of non-Catholic 'scholars', especially 'liberals', simply cannot be trusted to keep their own bias out of things. They are terrified that evidence might come to light subverting their liberal and semi-agnostic dogmas. So they are not above falsifying history. When I was an undergraduate in the School of Litterae Humaniores (Classics), I was surprised by the way that Ancient Historians with no theological axe to grind were so very much more respectful of New Testament evidence than were the old gents in dog-collars who lectured upon the New Testament.

Now back to that Marian Papyrus. You will be interested to read ...But no, I have already rambled too long. More tomorrow.

Part II

Edgar Lobel's early dating of the papyrus, of course, simply gives us the terminus ante quem of this prayer. It could come from much earlier than 250. As far as theotokos is concerned, Tertullian writes Dei ... Mater; and one would expect such talk earlier in the East than the West; and particularly in the Egyptian backyard of S Cyril's own Church. It would be no skin off my nose if it turned up in a very early second century context. While I do not (for cogent reasons I am prepared to explain) see the cultus of our Lady as having anything whatsoever to do with that of the Ptolemaic goddess Isis, I do suspect that the coinage of the verbal compound theotokos is very likely to come from the same inveterate habit of linguistic ingenuity which generated the Isiac aretalogies of Pap Oxy 1380 and the Kyme stele published by Salac in 1927. Perhaps Callimachus of Cyrene coined it .... oops, he died before the Christian era ... but you know what I mean. He would have done it if ... come to think of it, I wonder if anyone has ever done a study of what S Cyril owed to Callimachus .... Oh dear, rambling off at a tangent yet again ... I think I'll just mix myself another White Lady ... hand me the shaker ... now, which of the grandchildren has been at the gin ... what was I saying ...