Pauline epistles

The subject will be dealt with in this article nnder the following heads :— {. The original bulk of the literature, p. 484. fi. Catenss and compilers of the later period, p. 485. iii. Patristic commentators on St, Paul, p. 489. iv. Summary of MS material for ii. and iii., p. 521. v. Patristic editors of St. Paul, p. 524. Index, p. 529. i.

THE ORIGINAL BULK OF THE LITERATURE,— There is a sense in which nearly the whole of the writings of the early Christian Fathers may be said, and truly said, to be expositions of Holy Scripture. The controversy with the Jews turned on the interpretation of the Old Testament, the controversy with Valentinus and Marcion on the interpretation of the New: the theologians who dealt with these topics, which filled so large a space of the horizon of the Church in the 2nd and 3rd cents.

, like the theologians who dealt with the equally pressing danger of Arianism in the 4th, were all contributing their share to the explana- tion of the Prophetic and Apostolic writings.

A book like the adversus Hereses of Irenzeus contains a mass of exegetical material ; and few tasks in the domain of early Christian literature would be better worth doing than the collection and co- ordination of the fragmentary comments on pas- sages of the NT which are scattered up and down the writings of the period anterior to the develop- ment of formal exegesis.

; All this, and much more, would form part of a complete history of Patristic exegesis ; but, since such a history cannot be written in these pages, it has seemed wisest to attempt only a limited and experimental treatment of one corner of the vast field, and to confine the scope of the present article to such Patristic writings as stand in direct connexion with the Pauline epistles.

* Books which range over the whole of Scripture are there- fore in the main excluded; and this affects two important departments of ancient Biblical litera- ture: collections of Scripture proofs, of which the most famous instance is the Testimonia of St. Cyprian; and discussions of Scripture difficulties, such as the ‘Mixed Questions’ of Acacius (the successor of Eusebius at Czsarea), or the Ques- tiones Veteris et Novi Testamenti of Ambrosiaster.

It is not, indeed, easy to draw a quite consistent line of demarcation: it has seemed worth while to note the occasional use of the great dogmatic theologians of the 4th cent. in the Catenz (p. 498°, below), and a place has been found in the list for one or two writings—such as the letters of Isidore of Pelusium, and the Euthalian ‘ edition’ of the epistles (pp. 512°, 524)—-which perhaps cannot strictly be ranked as exegesis of St. Paul.

More serious objection might be taken to the absence of any notice of Latin commentaries (except in so far as they are translated from the Greek); and’no doubt Ambrosiaster, Jerome, and Pelagius would have formed a natural pendant to Origen, Chrysostom, and Theodore.

Yet, after all, it remains true that the lines of exegetical develop- meat were laid down in the East ; the rival systems of allegorical and literal interpretation had been *In order further to limit the ground, the Epistle to the Hebrews has been excluded from detailed or special treatment ; though, as nearly all the writers who will be enumerated accepted it without difficulty as a genuine work of St. Paul, some summary reference to it has occasionally been made.

PATRISTIC COMMENTARIES elaborated, the one at Alexandria, the other at Antioch, and both schools had produced exposi- tions of the Epistles in imposing bulk, before a single Pauline commentary had seen the light in the Latin West.

It may be hoped, therefore, that even in this inchoate form the following con- spectus may prove of service to those who would know, with more detail than has hitherto been easily accessible, what was the measure of the devotion of the early Christian centuries to the special study of St. Paul. No general or systematic list of the early Greek commentators on ‘the Apostle’ * as a whole, com- arable to the Latin list of Cassiodorus, Inst. Div. itt. 8, has survived.

But in partial explanation of this fact it must be borne in mind that the continuous and uniform exposition of the whole series of the 13 or 14 epistles was unknown, or at any rate infrequent, in primitive times. The first extant commentary on the Epistles as a whole is that of the Latin Ambrosiaster (c. 375 A.D.); and though some of those commentators whose work is lost—such, e.g.

, as Theodore of Heraclea—may have anticipated him, they can neither have been many in number nor much anterior in time. The work of the earliest interpreters of St. Paul was done, as a rule, on single epistles, or if on more than one, as in the case of Origen, yet still inde- pendently on the different epistles and unsystema- tically. Our estimate of the total mass of early exposition must be formed on such generalizations as can be drawn from the chance enumeration, by St.

Jerome, of the books that were accessible about the end of the 4th cent. on three or four particular epistles. ; ; (1) 1 Corinthians.—Jerome, Ep. xlix. 3 ad Pam- machium [A.D. 393; Vallarsi, i. 233]: ‘ Origenvs, Dionysius, Pierius, Eusebius Czesariensis, Didy- mus, Apollinaris, latissime hance epistolam inter- pretati sunt ... revolve omnium quos supra memoravi commentarios et ecclesiarum biblio- thecis fruere.’ . In Ep. exix. 2-6 ad Minervium et Alexandrum [A.D. 406; i.

794] he quotes on 1 Co 155! the views of four commentators, Theodore of Heraclea, Diodore of Tarsus, Apollinaris, and Didymus, besides the ‘ Mixed Questions’ of Acacius of Ceesarea. (2) Galatians.—Jerome, Pref. ad Comm. in Gal. [between A.D. 386 and 392; Vallarsi, vii. 369: repeated in Ep. exii., i. 733]: ‘ Aggrediar opus intentatum ante me lingue nostrée scriptoribus, et a grecis quoque ipsis vix paucis ut rei poscebat dignitas usurpatum : non quod ignorem G.

Marium Victorinum, qui Romz me puero rhetoricam docuit, edidisse commentarios in apostolum.. Origenis commentarios sum secutus : scripsit enim ille vir in epistolam Pauli ad Galatas quinque as volumina, et decimum Stromatum suorum ibrum commatico super explanatione eius sermone complevit ; tractatus quoque varios et excerpta, que vel sola possint sufficere, composuit.

przeter- mitto Didymum videntem meum, et Laodicenum *'O a&wcorodos is the regular phrase for the corms of Pauline epistles, and_dates back to the end of the 2nd century, If Eusebius (HE v, 27) tells us that Heraclitus (about a.p, 200) wrote eis tov ’ArcoroAoy, the form of the title may perhaps be the historian’s and not the commentator’s ; but in two other places (HE v.

17, 18), the phrase occurs in actual quotations from anti- Montanist writers of the same period : déiv yap dvas 7d xpogntixoy Kepiopene iv weon Ti txcdnolee min ps rhs rercios rapoucios 6" AworroAos eto; (Anonymus), and @suicwv . . pereoupesvos tov amorrodey xalorasmhy rive cvvrntcpsvos sxicroagy (Apollonius). So Clement of Alexandria, Strom. vii. 14: 76 vs Eiayyéasov xal 6 "Améorohos. So, too, the Latin Irensus, H@r. iv. xxvii. 4: ‘Dom'no quidem dicente [Lk 187]...

et Apostolo in ea que 44¢ ad Thes- salonicenses epistola ista predicante,’ and ofen elsewhere, especially in Book v.: in two cases the Greek also is extant— v. ix. 3, where it, too, has ’Awéarodes ; and vy. ii. 38, where the Sacra Parallela give 6 waxcépros Tlaitaos for ‘ beatus Apostolus’ ; but there can be no question that in such cases the Latin is our best guide.

Doubtless, the use of the phrase goes back furthes still into the 2nd century PATRISTIC COMMENTARIES de ecclesia nuper egressum,* et Alexandrum vete- rem hereticum, Eusebium quoque Emisenum, et Theodorum Heracleoten, qui et ipsi nonnullos super hac re commentariolos [v./. commentarios] reliquerunt .. legi hxc omnia.’ Again, in Zp. exii. ad Augustinum [a.D. 404; i.

734], § 6: ‘Primus Origenes in decimo Stromateon libro, ubi epistolam Pauli ad Galatas interpretatur, et ceteri deinceps interpretes . . quid divam de Joanne, qui duduin in pontificali gradu Constanti- nopolitanam rexit ecclesiam, et proprie super hoc capitulo latissimum exaravit librum, in quo Qri- genis et veterum sententiam est secutus?’ (3) Ephesians.—Jerome, Pref. ad Comm. in Eph. [same date as Cémm. in Gal. ; Vallarsi, vii.

543] : ‘Sciatis Origenem tria volumina in hance epistolam conscripsisse, quem et nos ex parte secuti sumus, Apollinarium etiam et Didymum quosdam com- mentariolos edidisse, e quibus... pauca decerp- simus.’ (4) 1 Thessalonians.—Jerome, Ep. cxix. (ut sup.) 8-10, discussing 1 Th 4%5-!?, gives quotations from two commentators, Origen and Diodore, and alludes to two others, Theodore [of Heraclea] and Apol- linaris.

The simple fact that of twenty or more Greek treatises on one or other of these four epistles which Jerome had (or had had) in his hands only one has survived to our day other than in Catena fragments, shows more eloquently than any argu- ment could do the wealth and variety of the lost exegetical literature of the 8rd and 4th centuries.

And if we further reflect that some of these twenty treatises would not, but for their casual mention by Jerome, have even been known by us to have existed at all, we shall realize what an imperfect picture the catalogue which we now proceed to draw up must give us of the labour which the ‘age of the Fathers’ devoted to the study of Holy Scripture. iii CATEN% AND COMPILERS OF THE LATER