Friday, March 06, 2009

No End in Sight for Misquotation of Athanasius

After posting some updates to my original article (link), I stopped by Mr. Albrecht's video page, hoping against hope that Mr. Albrecht might have had the sense to apologize for his own (and his fellow apologists') misquotation of Pseudo-Athanasius as Athanasius. My hopes were dashed. Instead, I found a new video in which:
  • He repeats the same "King of Athanasius' quotes" nonsense.
  • He repeats the same infallible canon of Athanasius' quotes nonsense.
  • He repeats the same irrelevant argument about Athanasius knowing Coptic.
  • He repeats the same nonsense about there being no standard lists of Athanasian works.
  • He repeats the same confusion over the difference between a "Marianite" and a "Mariologist" with respect to Mr. Gambero's bias.
  • He repeats the same confusion regarding my presentation of the charitable option that the error in Gambero's English book may be simply an error of translation from the Italian original to English.

He makes further blunders as well:
  • He claims that the work is "anonymous." It is not "anonymous" - it is pseudographic. If Mr. Albrecht had read the article in Le Muséon he would have known this.
  • He claims that standard lists of the works of Athanasius (as contrasted to the dubious and spurious works attributed to him) are a "fairy tale." Ironically, I had just provided entries from two such lists in updating my original article.

Finally, and most tragically, Mr. Albrecht misses the point of the article. Aside from the English translation of Gambero, Mr. Albrecht cannot find any scholar who views this work as authentic. In other words, Mr. Albrecht has found absolutely no one to back Mr. Gambero up. Virtually all the scholarly references to this work identify it as Pseudo-Athanasius - and even the few that do not use that designation call it a "homily attributed to Athanasius" rather than trying to pass off the work as authentically Athanasian.

Mr. Albrecht has not found out why scholars don't consider the work to be authentic, and frankly he doesn't seem to be interested in finding out. Mr. Albrecht has not, as far as anyone can tell from his videos, actually tried to track down the reasons why scholars do not consider this work authentic.

Despite this, Albrecht continues to try to justify his own and his colleagues' use of this work with the attribution "Athanasius" instead of "Pseudo-Athanasius." It's absolutely amazing. It's almost as though Mr. Albrecht cannot admit he's wrong about anything. In fact, his video doesn't admit any of the mistakes already highlighted in his previous videos, and I have no hope (any more) that his future videos will apologize for the repeated mistakes of his current video.

Still, I invite Mr. Albrecht to do his homework, and when he has satisfied himself that the work is (at best) dubious, that he do what most scholars do, and cite the work as "Pseudo-Athanasius" rather than "Athanasius."

-TurretinFan

2 comments:

Lockheed said...

Dood... http://images7.cafepress.com/product/77150477v1_240x240_Front.jpg

Turretinfan said...

LOL Lockheed.