Author: James A. Whittaker

The full title of this book is The Origins of Christianity with an Outline of Van Manen’s Analysis of The Pauline Literature. Willem Christiaan van Manen (1842-1905) was a Dutch theologian. The vast majority of van Manen’s radical criticism of the New Testament and Christian origins has never been translated into English.<br /><br /> In this book, Thomas Whittaker outlines the arguments of van Manen for an English-speaking audience. Van Manen’s work is not now generally known, but his views obtained notoriety by the articles and books that he wrote, in which he maintained that none of the Epistles that bear the Apostle Paul’s name were in fact written by him. From van Manen’s conclusions, Whittaker goes further and relegates the whole body of the New Testament to the second century, and even places the beginning of the Christian movement until after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70. Of Paul himself very little is certain, though Whittaker maintains that there may have been an itinerant preacher of that name. Whittaker comes to the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth is entirely a mythical personage, but holds that what afterwards became Christianity or Paulinism had its origin in a Jewish-Messianic movement. (Summary by JoeD)

In 1840 Louisa Stuart Costello published in Fraser’s Magazine an article on classic Persian poetry, which included a section on Omar Khayyam with translations of some verses. Interest in the poetry of Omar Khayyam received its first major boost in the English speaking world when Edward Fitzgerald published a translation of 75 quatrains in 1859. Fitzgerald’s mentor was Professor Edward Byles Cowell, who, in the previous year, had published an essay entitled “Omar Khayyam, the astronomer-poet of Persia” which included translations of thirty quatrains. In 1885 Whitley Stokes, a renowned Irish orientalist and linguist, published an English translation of eighteen quatrains in the journal 'Academy', nr. 663. In the National Review, December, 1890 Charles J. Pickering published a lengthy essay entitled “Umar of Nishapur”, in which he compared several notable translations including those in English by Fitzgerald and Edward Whinfield and that in German by Von Hammer. In 1896 Nathan Haskell Dole, acting as editor, published the following tome in two volumes: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam English, French, German, Italian, and Danish translations comparatively arranged in accordance with the text of Edward Fitzgerald’s version with further selections, notes, biographies, bibliographies and other material. Included in the “further selections” are translations of assorted quatrains by Henry George Keene and Frank Siller. In 1901 Dole and Belle Walker published two volumes of “Flowers from Persian Poets.” The first volume contains a short article about Omar Khayyam and translations of twenty two quatrains by an unknown translator. Omar Khayyám: some verses and an introduction by W.E.B. Whittaker & R. Löwenberg, which was published in 1907, contains a short commentary and a translation of fifty-three quatrains by the authors. This recording is a sequel to <a href="https://archive.org/details/rubaiyat_miscellany_1311_librivox">A Rubaiyat Miscellany</a>, published by Librivox on 28th November, 2013 - Summary by Algy Pug