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The Early Greek Commentators on the Gospel

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The Early Greek Commentators on the Gospel NOTES AND STUDIES 99 THE EARLY GREEK COMMENTA TORS ON THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST MATTHEW.1 THE number of early commentaries on St Matthew's Gospel, com­ pared with the number of the commentaries on the other three, is astonishingly large, and is one of several indications of the pre­ dominant position held by this Gospel from the earliest times. A summary enumeration of them, and the natural starting-point for any systematic account, is the list given by St J erome in the preface to his own Commentary on St Matthew, written in 387 : 'legisse me fateor ante annos plurimos in Mattheum Origenis viginti quinque Volumina, et totidem eius Homilias, Commaticumque interpretationis genus ; et Theophili Antiochenae urbis episcopi Commentarios, Hippolyti quoque martyris, et Theodori Heracleotae Apollinarisque Laodiceni ac Didymi Alexandrini, et latinorum Hilarii Victorini Fortunatiani, opuscula.' J erome, then, writing before the close of the fourth Christian century, had made personal acquaintance with the work of nine commentators on St Matthew, of whom six were Greek and three Latin. 1. Of the work of Theophilus of Antioch nothing is known outside Jerome's testimony. But J erome refers to it also in the de viris illu­ stribus 25, and in his 121st Epistle ad Algasiam § 6 quotes verbatim a curious exposition of the parable of the Unjust Steward, who is interpreted to be none other than St Paul. It was really, in fact, not a commentary on St Matthew alone, but on the Four Gospels put together, 'quattuor evangelistarum in unum opus dicta compingens'. This in itself hardly sounds like the second century ; and in view of Theophilus's remoteness from St Jerome's day-a gap of two centuries divides them-it is impossible not to suspect some flaw in the tradition. 2 But these very notices in Jerome gave a fictitious life to the supposed 1 The following study is a fragmentary commencement, written in 1903, of *hat was to have been a connected account of all patristic exegesis of the New Testament. The vastness of the subject soon made contraction of the project imperative, and all that ultimately took shape was an article on 'Greek patristic commentaries on St Paul' contributed to the supplementary volume of Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible. I have no hope of ever being able to return to the subject : and it seemed to me, as I sorted some old papers, that perhaps these pages, fragmentary and incomplete as they are, might be worth rescuing from one's rubbish·heap and transferring to the friendly shelter of the JouRNAL, Here and there a sentence will be found to repeat what I have already said in print in the Hastings Dictionary. 2 And J erome himself seems to have had his suspicions, for he expressly notes in the de viris that the commentary on 'the Gospel' was in his opinion incongruous, in language and refinement, with Theophilus's other works. H2 100 THE JOURNAL OF THEOLOGICAL STUDIES ' Commentaries of Theophilus' ; some ingenious author or scribe prefixed the name to a Latin compilation of a date not only later than St Jerome. but later also than the fifth-century writers Eucherius and Arnobius Junior, and the mediaeval fraud imposed on an illustrious scholar of our own generation, who bestowed on it a temporary patronage. It will be enough on this subject to refer to a paper by Dr Sanday in Studia Biblica i (r885) 89-ror. 2. In none of the ancient lists of the works of Hippolytus-neither in the inscription on the chair of his statue, nor in Eusebius H. E. vi 22, nor in Jerome de vin's illustn'bus 6r-is mention made of any com­ mentary on St Matthew. But the inscription is jejune about exegetical works altogether/ unless indeed the mysterious q)Sat ds 1rauas 'Tas ypacprfs conceals somehow the meaning 'exegesis on all the scriptures ' 2 ; Eusebius subjoins to his list the note that 'very many other works' of Hippolytus would be found on research to be extant ; and in J erome's case the negative evidence of the de vins is of little moment in view of the definite statement cited above from the prologue to the Comm. in gfatt. It is true that nothing like such a commentary is extant among the remains of Hippolytus : but he wrote in Greek, and Greek soon ceased to be familiar in Roman church circles, so that it is not wonderful that his books soon dropped out of sight. That would be in itself a sufficient explanation : but there is also, in the case of the work before us, the alternative possibility that it was not really a complete commentary in the later and stricter sense at all. At the beginning of the third century, when Hippolytus wrote, the exegesis of Scripture, and perhaps especially of the New Testament, was in its infancy as a form of literature ; and doubtless some experiments were tried under this head which were far from amounting to a continuous exposition from first to last of the whole of some book of Scripture. Eis 'To Ka'Ta Ma88a£ov d;ayy£>..wv, for instance, is the sort of title which might cover exegetical work of very varying extent; and it is at least sigtlificant that all the considerable fragments of Hippolytus which can be referred with probability to the lost commentary on St Matthew attach themselves exclusively to the twenty-fourth chapter, an eschato­ logical passage which we know, from the titles of other writings of Hippolytus, would have formed a particularly congenial theme. (a) In Hermathena vii 137-rso (r89o) Dr J. Gwynn published m 1 See Lightfoot S. Clement of Romt2 ii 325 : only treatises 'on the Psalms' and ' on the Witch of Endor' are mentioned. 1 'All the scriptures' need not be too literally interpreted. Diodore and Theodore among the Antiochenes are both of them reported to have written roundly expositions or explanations of 'all' the books of scripture : among the Alexandrines Didymus is said to have interpreted Old and New Testament t<ara Afiw, 'phrase by phrase'. NOTES AND STUDIES 101 Syriac, with English translation, an extract from the commentary of Dionysius Bar Salibi on the Apocalypse (MS Brit Mus. Rich 7185) em­ bodying Hippolytus's explanation of Matt. xxiv 15-22. The margin of the MS attributes the quotation to 'the i_nterpretation of the Gospel', i.e. apparently a definite commentary, and Harnack, Altchn'stliche Litteratur i 641, accepts, as I gather, the attribution; but Gwynn, while defending the Hippolytean authorship, speaks with reserve as to its exact provenance, and Achelis in the Berlin edition of Hippolytus (I ii 243- 246: A. n. 1897) prints it as part of the' Capitula against Gaius '. (b) From Coptic, Ethiopic, and Arabic catenae, which are all derived from a single (doubtless Greek) original, Achelis, op. cit. 197-207, prints German renderings of ' interpretations ' ascribed to Hippolytus, covering Matt. xxiv 15-34. (c) Of much greater importance than either of the foregoing, if it could really be attributed to Hippolytus, is an anonymous Latin ex­ position of Matt. xxiv 30-44, which Mgr G. Mercati and I myself dis­ covered independently in the same MS of the Ambrosian Library which contains also the Muratorian Canon (I 101 sup., foll. 19-.29 : saec. vii­ viii: from Bobbio): see Studi e Tes# xi (Rome 1903) 'Anonymi Chiliastae in Matthaeum fragmenta', and J. T. S. v 218 (1904) 'An exegetical fragment of the third ceqtury '. That the original belonged to pagan times I argued in the JOURNAL both from the division of man­ kind into the three classes of iusti peccatores impii, and from the specific interpretation of the 'sign of the Beast on the forehead and the hand ' as the laurel crown worn on the head-compare Tertullian de corona militis-and the incense cast on the altar of abomination. That a crude and materializing eschatology was still largely prevalent in the circles with which the writer is familiar is shewn by the .care with which, though himself a millenarian, he sets himself to overthrow the superstition that the saints during the thousand years' reign would literally eat and drink the good things of earth at the Lord's table. That the Latin as we have it, whether it is original or a translation from the Greek, is not later than the third or fourth century, the character of its biblical text sufficiently guarantees. If the Latin of the Ambrosian MS is a trans­ lation, then the probability was great that its ultimate source is in Hip­ polytus. If on the other hand the Latin is original, then the claims of the earliest Latin writer on St Jerome's list, Victorious of Pettau, 1 1 Victorinus of Petavio or Pettap, martyred under Diocletian, was according to J erome, de viris 74, better acquainted with Greek than with Latin : but the commentary on St Matthew is enumerated by Jerome in the Latin section of his list. Nevertheless he deserves mention here, in connexion with the Greek commentators, just because it was the business of his Latin writings to put before the Latin Christian world, with however inadequate expression, the exegetical 102 THE JOURNAL OF THEOLOGICAL STUDIES were very strong. In either case we seemed to have a new contribution to patristic exegesis in its most ancient period. Another feature was, however, introduced into the discussion by Mr Souter's proof (J. T. S. v 6o8) of the intimate relation between the language of the fragment and the language of the author of the commentary on the Pauline Epistles and book of Biblical Questions known as Ambrosiaster.
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