Talk:Untitled Text

Version

You can add additional relevant info but the full summary is staying. TriplePowered (talk) 02:17, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

No, TriplePowered, you can't dictate what "is staying". Putting aside the history of the manuscript that your baseless reversion deleted, here are the problems:

1. The summary is totally incomprehensible. Some particulars:
   • "the king of unassailables" incomprehensible
   • "he gave form to the All" meaningless
   • "The indivisible one has three aspects and contains an only-begotten one with triple powers" borders on the absurd with meaninglessness
   • "three fatherhoods within the deep, including the covered one, the five trees and the only-begotten word, and the silence and source with the all-mother and ennead" fails to gloss or explain anything so totally meaningless
   • "The fruit of the All" meaningless
   • "the deep of Setheus" fails to articulate any meaning
   • "Each fatherhood has three aspects." poetic but meaningless
   • "monad has twelve monads making a crown upon its head" incomprehensible
   • "which is in Setheus like a concept" huh?
   • "The creative Word commands the All to work" huh?
   • "The indivisible one sent the light-spark out of the pleroma" huh?
   • "The indivisible one created the contest for the All" huh?
   • "the Paralemptores" who?
   • "There is a complex cosmology of multiple enneads and fatherhoods" - WP:OR
   • "This deep is where the triple-powered one received glory" and what does that mean?
   • "according to inner ordinance and places the light-spark within" ???
   • "purifying powers and a hidden all-womb" ???
   • "a power out of the aeon called Solmistos" ?
   • "There is power revealed in the same place as the light-spark" and what would the light-spark be? we're never told
2. This summary, even if it were somehow comprehensible to anyone reading the article, fails to concisely summarize the text, and instead gives a long, detailed, point-by-point recap of several of its elements. MOS:PLOT. The summary contains original research by calling the cosmology "complex", and it fails to clearly delineate between facts ("The text describes") and in-universe plot ("The monad came forth from him") -- while easily repaired, it is a disjointed presentation that serves only to confuse readers and privilege this text as if it were authentic or accurate
3. Your version privileges exceptionally old sources to support a late second century origin, when Crégheur, a more contemporary source, says it's later. Not only do sources disagree, and not only does Crégheur describe it as a rough scholarly consensus ("The Coptic copy is generally dated in the second half of the fourth century, while the Greek original could go back to, maybe, the end of the third century."), but Crégheur is giving a lower bound that is much higher than your old sources.
4. The agenda of your edit is fairly clear in adding useless praise like Schmidt described the content of the text as "a magnificently conceived work" by an author who is "imbued with the Greek spirit, with a full knowledge of Greek philosophy, full of the doctrine of the Platonic ideas." and second-rate sources like The Gnostic Society.
5. There is substantial textual overlap with this (see earwig), which is a translation you failed to properly attribute.

Urve (talk) 03:10, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Everything in the summary is from the work. Have you, perchance, read the Untitled Text? This work is not fiction—I'd like to see you go to the Nicomachean Ethics page and try deleting their "too detailed" summary. I did not fail to attribute—it is right there as reference #2. Schmidt is an important figure to this work (quite odd that you don't know that), so it makes sense to quote him. I don't really care whether he praises or criticizes it, he's just worth quoting.

You deleted the entire summary of the content so you can keep a few sentences about damaged leaves, which is obviously self-interested. This article is about the Untitled Text, not the Bruce Codex. Your version has little about the actual content of the text. Add the points that you think are important to the article. For example, you could write something like "estimates of the date range from Lamplugh's XXX to Crégheur's XXX." Reword things you think are problematic. But deleting an entire summary is just vandalism. TriplePowered (talk) 04:23, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Have you, perchance, read the Untitled Text? Sure, some of it, though not all. But the problem I'm having is that I shouldn't have to read it to understand a summary of the text, given that a summary is supposed to reasonably condense a text while preserving readability, not use the text's language without glossing or explanation. Gnostic cosmology is obviously complicated, technical, and diverse; we are told that best practice is to write not for scholars of gnosticism in this article, but "one level" below them -- probably students of religion who have familiarity with Christian history, but not the finer points of theology or gnosticism specifically.

As an aside, Nicomachean Ethics is a poor article that should be cleaned up.

Schmidt: Obviously he's important, but his praise for this antique text isn't very encyclopedic. If you read Schmidt's introduction to The Books of Jeu and the Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex, XVIII–XXI give a fairly good summary of the Untitled Text's contents. We don't, I don't think, need to get into the very fine details of how this text's cosmology is set up, or its account of history -- it suffices to say that it discusses several key gnostic concepts, it has a particularized view of God as being beyond human understanding, and it uses gnostic motifs like crowns. Perhaps you could write a two paragraph condensation of the text that you feel is faithful? Like I said in my revert, I think it's good to expand our summary of the text -- this specific presentation is not useful because of its length and opacity.

For attribution, which is sourced to this, there are two I should say:

1. If it's is from Schmidt's translation (as I think but haven't verified it all), then it may still be protected by copyright, and we can't directly copy its words. Actually we couldn't even link to gnosis.org's rendition of the text because of WP:COPYLINK.
2. If it's from Lamplugh's (which I think is improbable), then it is in the public domain, but that still requires attribution like {{Source-attribution}} according to WP:FREECOPY.

I think your proposed wording of "estimates of the date range from Lamplugh's XXX to Crégheur's XXX" is a form of false balance, which still manages to equate old hypotheses with academic consensus. But that's a finer point than the very long summary, which moved a lot of the text's history from the body into the lead, where it should instead be in separate sections. Urve (talk) 05:40, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Schmidt is public domain and the summary is written by me. The article has been updated with your minutiae, and the summary is half as long. A few sentences is not sufficient to explain a long philosophical work. Time to move on. TriplePowered (talk) 15:27, 26 February 2023 (UTC)