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 TYestimonia of St. Cyprian ; and discussions of Scripture difficulties, such as the ‘Mixed Questions’ of Acacius (the successor of Eusebius at Czesarea), 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 Catene (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- ment 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.
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- parable to the Latin list of Cassiodorus, Jnst. Div. Litt. 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- machiwm [A.D. 393; Vallarsi, i. 233]: ‘Origenes, Dionysius, Pierius, Eusebius Czesariensis, Didy- mus, Apollinaris, latissime hane epistolam inter- pretati sunt .. . revolve omnium quos supra memoravi commentarios et ecclesiarum biblio- thecis fruere.’ In Ep. cxix. 2-6 ad Minervium et Alexandrum [A.D. 406 ; i. 794] he quotes on 1 Co 15°! the views of four commentators, Theodore of Heraclea, Diodore of Tarsus, Apollinaris, and Didymus, besides the ‘Mixed Questions’ of Acacius of Czesarea.
(2) Galatians.—Jerome, Pref. ad Comm. in Gal. [between A.D. 386 and 392; Vallarsi, vii. 369: repeated in Hp. exii., i. 733]: ‘Agegrediar opus intentatum ante me linguze nostre scriptoribus, et a greecis quoque ipsis vix paucis ut rei poscebat dignitas usurpatum : non quod ignorem G. Marium Victorinum, qui Rome me puero rhetoricam docuit, edidisse commentarios in apostolum. . . Origenis commentarios sum secutus : scripsit enim ille vir in epistolam Pauli ad Galatas quinque
roprie 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 dxcrronos is the regular phrase for the corpus of Pauline epistles, and dates back to the end of the 2nd century. If Eusebius (HE vy. 27) tells us that Heraclitus (about a.p. 200) wrote és roy ’Arérrodoy, 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 : dev yeep civas vd xpogyrixoy Kepropen tv hon +1 kxxrnoioe min ps Tis TeAElos tapouTins 6’ Arorrones &&io; (Anonymus), and Q@suicwy. . . uisotpevos cov earéarodoy xoborixny sivee cuvrakewevos txioroagy (Apollonius). So Clement of Alexandria, Strom. vii. 14: 76 re Ebayyéasov xe) 6 ?Arbaronos. So, too, the Latin Ireneus, Her. 1v. xxvii. 4: ‘Domino quidem dicente [Lk 187]... et Apostolo in ea que est ad Thes- salonicenses epistola ista predicante,’ and often elsewhere, especially in Book'v.: in two cases the Greek also is extant— v. ix. 3, where it, too, has ’Arérrod0s ; and vy. ii. 8, where the Sacra Parallela give 6 j.oxdépios Teiiros 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 further still into the 2nd century.