‘epistolam quoque ad Romanos ad Eusebium
exposuit. ‘ binas ad Corinthios epistolas tomis duobus dilucidavit et illustravit rogatu Theodori. Eustratius postulavit expositionem quattuor epistolarum quas sum commemoraturus : epistole ad Galatas et ad Ephesios et ad Philippenses et ad Colossenses.
binas autem ad Thessalonicenses Iacobo efflagi- tante exposuit.
epistolam ad Timotheum utramque explicavit ad Petrum.
Cyrino etiam deprecante exposuit epistolam ad
_ Titum et ad Philemonem.
item epistolam ad Hebraeos ad eundem Cyrinum dilucidavit.
quinque autem tomis finem imposuit commen- tarlis suis in totum Apostolum.’
If we may assume, as appears probable, that the words pelga (‘division’) and pengiata (rag, ‘volume’) are, for the purpose of the catalogue, identical,—Assemani translates both by ‘tomus’ —then, of the five parts into which the commentary on St. Paul was distributed, the Ist, 2nd, and 3rd must have contained respectively Romans, 1 Co- rinthians, and 2 Corinthians ; the 4th, Galatians— Colossians, with perhaps 1 and 2 Thessalonians ; the 5th, the Pastoral Epistles, Philemon, and He- brews. This, however, was probably no more than a mere library arrangement of the Syriac volumes : what takes us back nearer to the original com- position of the commentaries is the grouping according to their various addressees—Kusebius, Theodore, Eustratius, James, Peter, Cyrinus. Theodore’s exposition of St. Paul was therefore not a book carried through continuously and pub- lished as a single whole, but a series of at least six
arts, which, so far, may or may not have be- onged to the same period of his long literary activity, and may or may not have been written after the same method and on the same scale. Like Chrysostom’s homilies on the Epistles, Theo- dore’s commentaries must have been too bulky to be compressed within a single binding; and they must therefore have circulated separately or in | groups, with the result that one writer would naturally have acquaintance only with some of them, another only with others; exactly as the evidence now to be described shows to have been the case.
(ii.) Earliest isolated references.—Ebed-jesu bears witness to the knowledge of Theodore’s commen- taries on the epistles, and the position held by them, among the Nestorians of the Middle Ages: we have now to turn back to the earlier but more fragmentary references which can be picked out from the controversial writings of the reign of Justinian.
a. The first specific mention of any of Theo- dore’s commentaries on the Epistles is in Leontius of Byzantium, contra Nestorvanos et Eutychianos, between 529 and 544 (see above, p. 504"). T'o each of the three books into which that work is divided a Catena is appended of xpicets or pieces justificatives, those of Book iii. beimg taken from Theodore, Diodore, and Paul of Samosata. Mai (Script. Vet. Nov. Coll. vi. 299-312) has printed the Theodore passages, with the prologue to them: Leontius there complains bitterly that Theodore’s followers were so carefully on their guard against commit- ting any of his writings to the uninitiated, that his own selections had been perforce restricted to the single work ep (he intentionally miscalls it kara) Ths evavOpwrjcews. From the exegetical books he consequently quotes nothing beyond a single passage on the Psalms; but he gives a list of those which were known to him by name, and compounds for ignorance of their contents by ingeniously vituperative mis-statements of their titles. In this list he includes (besides the books on Genesis, Job, Psalms, St. Matthew, St. John, St. Luke) ‘the false interpretation’ (rijv mapegq- ynow) of the Epistles to the Hebrews, Corinthians, and Galatians. :
B. The Acts of the Council of Constantinople in 553, which anathematized Theodore, are extant in
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510 PATRISTIC COMMENTARIES
Latin. The 32nd of the series of quotations from his works, which were read at the fourth ‘collatio’ or session, is taken ‘ex commento epistole ad Hebreeos’ (Labbe-Coleti, Concilia, vi. 55; Mansi, Concilia, ix. 216); Theodore there deduces from Ac 10% and Ps 44 (45)8 that the unction or Messiahship of Jesus was a ‘reward.’ The Con- stitutum ad Imperatorem of pope Vigilius in the same year examines the Council’s quotations one by one, and condemns, under the same heading ‘ex commento epistole ad Hebreos,’ the passage just mentioned (Labbe-Coleti, y. 1336; Mansi, ix. 82): the Latin of the quotation is identical (save for transcriptional errors) in the Acts and in the Constitutum, so that probably an official Latin version was ordered by the Council and supplied to the pope. A later pope, Pelagius 11., writing to the bishops of Istria in 585,* quotes (from one or other of the above sources) the same passage under the same title (Labbe-Coleti, vi. 269 ; Mansi, ix. 443).
y. Facundus of Hermiana (iii. 6; ed. Sirmond, p- 127) quotes in defence of Theodore a passage on Ro 1§ ‘in commento epistole ad Romanos,’ as showing that he admitted both Messianic pro- phecy and the unity of Person in the two natures : ‘et prophetas de domino Christo locutos et ipsum dominum Christum hominem confitetur et Deum.’
(iii.) Printed collections of Sragments on the epistles from Catene.—a. The first considerable contribution was that of Mai’s Spicilegium Ro- manum, iv. (1840) pp. 499-573, consisting of pas- sages from a Vatican Catena on Romans: the number of the MS is not there given, but it is supplied in Nov. Patr. Bibl. vii. 407 as Vat. gr. 762 (on which see Karo and Lietzmann’s list of Catenz above, p. 488, ¢). In his Nova Patrum Bibliotheca, vii, (1854) 1, pp. 407-408, Mai adds (i.) one more fragment from the same MS on Ro 18 3 (05) 14 or 15 fragments from the same MS on 2 Cor. 3 (iii.) two small fragments from Vat. gr. 765 (sec. x.) on Gal 3° **—which, however, as Lightfoot (Galatians*®, p, 229n.) points out, really belong to Theodoret.