Period

Before proceeding to speak of the Patristic commentaries separately, it will be con- venient to say something of those more general and miscellaneous collections of later date which are often the oniy source from which we can now recover any fragments of the older writers. The subject of Catenze was till quite lately an almost unexplored one; and no great advance can be made in the study of them until more of the material that exists abundantly in MSS has made its way into print.

With regard to the Pauline epistles in particular, we need to know with more precision than is now attainable what material exists an- terior to the two great compilers of the end of the 11th cent., Theophylact of Bulgaria and Euthymius Zigabenus. ‘The scope of the brief sketch which now follows is limited to an enumeration of the matter in this department that has been either published or at least described in print: but some- thing more will be said later on (see pp.

521-524) about the manuscript material. 4.

The first: Catena printed on the epistles is that known by the name of Oecumenius, pub- lished at Verona in 1532 under the following title: "HEnyijoers madaial cal Alay wPéAtwor Bpaxvdroyiav re Kal capjveav Tod Ndyou éxovoat Oavpacrny éx diaddpwr Te dylwv marépwv srouvnudrwv vm’ Olkouperlov kal’ Apéda ovdNexOetoar els Tas THs véas ScaOyKys mpayyarelas Tdade rob pev Olxoueviou eis ras Ipdies tov ’Amoorodwy, els Tas émrd KadoXixas Neyouevas érigronds, els Tas ILavdov mdcas rod dé ’ApéOa eis rhv "Iwdvvov ’Aroxdhupu.

The edition appeared under the same auspices as the slightly earlier (1529) edition of Chrysostom on the Epistles (see below, p. 505%); the patron, who bore the expenses of both editor and printers, * He means, of course, Apollinaris of Laodicea. PATRISTIC COMMENTARIES § 485 was the illustrious Gian Matteo Giberti, bishop of Verona ; the scholar entrusted with the work was Bernardino Donato; the type (and finer Greek type has never been produced) was set up ‘ apud Stephanum et fratres Sabios.

” The whole con- tents of the volume were drawn from a single Ms, presented to the bishop by John Lascaris, ‘miro librarii artificio sumptuque descriptum ap- primeque vetustum’ ;* for the Epistles this MS gave in the text a continuous exposition as though by a single author, in the margin the names of the authors from whom the text was drawn: but use was also made of other MSS of a different class, which gave the quotations separately in the text, each under the name of its author.

The work was attributed (quite rightly) to Oecumenius, on the ground that his name appears in the margin attached to the final comment on the Colossian epistle: é« rod avriypddov wh ebpdv Kadds Tas Tapa- ypagpas Tod paxaplov "Iwdvvov tis mpos Kodoccaets emioToAys, ouvéypaya airas brws jodvvdunv: édv obdv evpeOn re év avrais ) Koddov 7) émidjyiuor, torw 6 dvaywookwy éuov elvat Td To.ovTov mratcua.

t The editor concluded, on the strength of the one MS which was known to him, that the main and anony- mous portion of the work is taken from Chrysostom, not indeed word for word,—for when that is done the name ‘John’ or ‘ Chrysostom’ appears like any other in the margin,—but with much abbreviation and omission; that where Oecumenius takes an individual line he puts his own name in the margin, so that the reader may not be deceived as to the authority claimed for it; that the rest depends on various ancient authors, whose names are likewise given in the margin, and of whom Photius is far and away the most frequently cited.

Theodoret—for the sign Qcodwp, refers to him and not to Theodore of Mopsuestia—comes next, and after him Severian, Cyril of Alexandria, and Gen- nadius. But the important point to bear in mind is that the sum-total of the rest of the quota- tions bears only an infinitesimal proportion to the bulk of the matter supplied by Chrysostom, Photius, and Oecumenius himself; in the nine epistles from Ephesians to Philemon there are only thirteen marginal references outside these three writers.

This disproportion would, no doubt, be inodified, though it is impossible to say how seri- ously, if we could estimate to what extent either Oecumenius in his original compilation, or the scribes who copied him down to the exemplar of John Lascaris, fell short of exactitude in inserting or reproducing the marginal ascriptions of author- ship; for all such information as has accrued to us about Oecumenian MSS (see below, p.

488) points to the conclusion that the ‘anonymous’ portion of the printed text ought to suffer at least some reduction in favour of the rest. It should also be noted that the printed text of Oecumenius prefixes to the exegesis a good deal of ‘Euthalian’ matter: (i.) Acijynows mepl rod aylou dmooré\ouv Ilatiov, Ev@adtov Siaxdvou mpddoyos: (ii.) dmodnular IatAov tod daocrddov: (iil.) paprvproy IlavAov rod dmocrddov: (iv.) vbrdfeots Ths mpds ‘Pwualous émiotoAfs, [inc. tavryny émic7é\Ner]: (V.)

Kepddaa Tis mpds ‘Pwpalous émorodjs, [inc. a eday- yertkh Ovdackadla]: (vi.) oxdd\cov mplv émidnunoas TladAov . .3 similar matter to Nos. iv.-vi. is, given with the other Pauline epistles. See below, on Euthalius, pp. 526, 527. The edition of Donatus was repeated—without alteration of the Greek, so far as appears, but with the addition of the preface and Latin version * Perhaps identical with Paris gr. 219 (=Medic. Reg. 1886), sec. xi.

, a copy of Oecumenius-Arethas which certainly at one time belonged to John Lascaris. + So, too, on Eph 416 the name Oecumenius is attached in the margin to the sentence dpa ti xaya tveuirn’ ours yap iXdpnow Ta Tov waxapiov (sc. Chrysostom] voyocs of the text. 486 PATRISTIC COMMENTARIES of F. Morel, Paris ‘sumptibus Cl. Sonnii,’ 1631 ; and the edition of Morel is incorporated in Migne’s Patrologia Greca, vols. 118,119.

Thus we are still using Oecumenius on the authority of the MS of John Lascaris, modified, as Donatus’ preface tells us, by other (apparently non-Oecumenian) MSS. Who Oecumenius was—beyond the fact that he is said to have been bishop of Tricca in Thessaly— we do not know; as to his date, if the editions were right in making him use Photius (on which, however, see below, p.

488), he must be later than the middle of the 9th: but, if once the name Photius is removed, no obstacle remains to a much earlier period. See, further, p. 523. 2. Next of the great compilers to Oecumenius, both in order of history and in order of publica- tion, comes Theophylact, archbishop of Bulgaria ce. 1075 A.D. His commentary on the Pauline epistles was first published at London in 1636 as a posthumous work of Dr. Augustine Lindsell, bishop of Hereford, who died at the end of 1634.

From the preface, addressed by T. Baily to archbishop than: it appears that the commentaries were copied out from a ‘codex vetustus’ of the earl of Arundel, and that the copy was compared with two Oxford MSS;+ at Lindsell’s death the edition was almost complete. The Greek text is accom- panied by a Latin translation, based on that of hilippus Montanus, Antwerp, 1564. As vol. ii.

of a complete issue of the writings of Theophylact, the commentary on the Epistles was reprinted at Venice in 1755; the Greek was simply repeated from the edition—‘ satis nitidam et accuratam,’ as the new preface calls it—of Lindsell, some ‘manifest errors’ only of the Latin being removed. The Venetian editor’s contribu- tion to the criticism of the text is, in fact, confined to the list on pp. 771-776 of readings from a Venice