ACTS OF THE APOSTLES,
translated, WITH NOTES AND INDICES, by
rev. J. WALKER, m.a.,
of BRASENOSE college;
rev. J. sheppard, m.a.,
of oriel college, oxford; and
rev. h. browne, m.a.,
of corpus christi college, cambridge.
revised, with notes, by
rev. GEORGE B. STEVENS, Ph.D., d.d.,
professor IN YALE UNIVERSITY.
Preface to Part I. of the Oxford Edition.
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The present volume of St. Chrysostom on the Acts of the Apostles has been delayed for some time by the difficulty of fixing the Text. Some farther account of the grounds on which this has been done will be given in the Preface to Part II. (vid. infra.) It may suffice for the present to say, that these Homilies appear to have been less carefully reported than usual, and published without a revision by the Author. The printed text was formed for the most part (Erasmus's Latin Version entirely) from a manuscript, said to be of the tenth century, in which these Homilies are given in a very different form, evidently the work of a later hand, and intended to make them read more smoothly. The earlier text, shown to be such by internal evidence, and alone followed in the Catena and all other ancient extracts and compilations, is preserved in other mss. and appears to have been in general disregarded by former editors, from its difficulty. The Translation was originally made from Savile's Text, by the Rev. J. Walker, M.A. of Brasenose College, and the Rev. J. Sheppard, M.A. of Oriel College, Oxford. The Editors are much indebted to the Rev. H. Browne, M.A. of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, who has restored the Text and corrected the Translation accordingly, the difference being frequently so great as to require a passage to be translated anew. He has likewise undertaken to prepare the Greek Text for publication, and to supply the prefatory matter. Many passages will still be found imperfect and unsatisfactory, but it has been thought better to leave them evidently so, than to resort to uncertain conjectures. A few conjectural emendations, however, have been admitted into the Text, and many more suggested.
C. Marriott.
Oxford, Feast of St. James. 1851.
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Preface to Part II. of the Oxford Edition.
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The manifestly imperfect condition in which these Homilies have come to us may partly be accounted for by the circumstances of the times in which they were preached. It was in the Easter weeks of the third year of his residence at Constantinople as Archbishop, that St. Chrysostom began this course of Sermons; and during all the remaining part of that year (a.d. 400), the Capital of the East was kept in constant trouble and alarm by the revolt of Gainas and the Goths. Moreover, scarcely had the preaching commenced, when the complaints from the Churches of Asia Minor were brought (May, 400) before the Metropolitan See, which business during many months painfully occupied the Archbishop's thoughts, and eventually demanded his presence at Ephesus. Few of St. Chrysostom's Sermons were originally prepared in writing: certainly these were not: and as certainly the text, drawn up by no skilful hand from notes taken during the preaching, can never have been revised by the Preacher himself. This was a serious disadvantage: for these Homilies, if only from the novelty of the subject, stood especially in need of revision. The Acts of the Apostles, though read in the churches in the season between Easter and Pentecost, were seldom preached upon; and we find St. Chrysostom complaining in the opening of these Homilies, as also on an earlier occasion at Antioch, that this portion of the Scriptures was not so much read as it ought to be, nay, that there were "many to whom this Book was not even known." (p. 1 and note l). Hence it is not surprising, if the Preacher was not always understood; and, in fact, the attentive reader will not unfrequently see reason to suspect, that the scribe (or "reporter,") from whose notes the text was formed, did not rightly apprehend the sense of what he heard. Nor has the transcriber (or "redactor") remedied the defects, whatever they may have been, of the original report. On the contrary, in other ways, of which we shall have to speak presently, he has often perplexed the sense, and sometimes entirely misrepresented the Preacher's meaning.
The earliest mention of our Homilies is by Cassiodorus (a.d. 514), who relates, that with the assistance of friends he caused "the fifty-five Homilies on the Acts, by St. John, Bishop of Constantinople," to be translated into Latin, Opp. t. ii. p. 544. This version unfortunately is lost. [1] In the Canons of the Fifth and Sixth General Councils, St. Chrysostom's view of the Seven Deacons in the Acts is cited at length from Hom. xiv. (p. 91). John of Damascus, de Fid. Orthod. iii. 15, (a.d. 730), cites as from the second of these Homilies a passage which appears in the first, being the comment on i. 9. Photius has an entry in the Bibliotheca relating to them, but by some mistake the number is given as fifty. Of the Catena on the Acts, compiled by a certain Andreas Presbyter of unknown age and country, but not later than the tenth century (for there is a manuscript of that age), a large proportion is taken from St. Chrysostom: and the Commentaries of OEcumenius (990) and Theophylact (1077) are in many places formed from the Catena: as also are the Scholia in mss. of the Acts. To these may be added the Florilegium or Eclogæ, a compilation the date of which is unknown, but certainly not later than the first half of the eleventh century. The Author of this work seems to have resorted to our Homilies once only (Hom. xix. p 139): but there, he, as all the rest who have been mentioned, used the text which in the notes we call the old text, and from which the present Translation is made.
For there is another and a widely different text, by which alone, unfortunately, these Homilies have been known in modern times, except by the few who have had access to Manuscripts. In the National Library at Paris there is (No. 729) a manuscript (in our notes marked E, in Par. Ben. 2, D), which the Parisian Editor describes thus: Quorum (of six mss. on the Acts) antiquissimus, olim Colb. nunc Reg. 729, sæc. X., nitide et accurate scriptus, desinit in hom. quinquagesima. (This is a mistake; it reaches to the end of the 55th.) Of the other mss. he assigns A. B. C (No. 725, 6, 7), to the twelfth, fourteenth and thirteenth centuries respectively. These, and a copy in the Library of New College (N), contain the old text. Two others D, F, (728, and 73 suppl.) exhibit a text compiled from old and new, and with alterations peculiar to itself. Of the six Parisian mss. a full collation was made for "the Library of the Fathers:" of N we have at present but a partial collation.
The ms. E. came into the hands of Erasmus, and from it he made his Latin version, down to the end of Hom. liii. and there for some reason which is not explained he goes off to the other text, of which he has nowhere taken notice in the preceding Homilies. Of this work he says in an Epistle to Tonstal, Bishop of Durham: Ex Chrysostomo in Acta verteram homilias tres; cujus operæ me poenituit, cum nihil hic viderem Chrysostomi. Tuo tamen hortatu recepi codicem in manum; sed nihil unquam legi indoctius. Ebrius ac stertens scriberem meliora. Habet frigidos sensiculos nec eos satis commode potest explicare. In his Preface, however, he considerably abates the severity of this censure, and contents himself with hinting a doubt whether the work be St. Chrysostom's: quod stylus concisum quiddam et abruptum habeat, id quod a phrasi Chrysostomi videtur alienum: si docti tamen censebunt opus Chrysostomo dignum, libenter hoc ego quicquid est suspicionis ponam.
Of the Greek text, the editio princeps, that of Commelin, professes to be formed from manuscripts Biblioth. Palatinæ Bavaræ, Augustanæ, Pistorianæ, of which at present we are unable to give any account. Perhaps Commelin's leading ms. was of a composite order: such however is his text; for it occasionally deserts E, to which, as a general rule, it closely adheres. This was inconsistent, for the circumstances of the two texts are such, that one or other ought to be followed throughout. There can be no valid reason for alternating between the two: for they are not different reports of the same matter, such that between them one might hope to approximate to the truth: the one is a refashionment of the other, and where it differs, it does so, not because its framer had a more correct report of the Sermons, but because he wished to improve upon the materials which lay before him in the other text.
Commelin's text, in substance, is retained in all the subsequent editions. Savile, from the New College ms. has corrected words and phrases here and there, but in the main his text is still that of the editio princeps. (He describes it as composed from the New College ms., another belonging to J. A. de Thou (Thuanus), et tertio non ita pridem excuso in Germania.) The edition of Morel (which commonly goes under the name of Fronto Ducæus) repeats Commelin, but without Savile's emendations: and the Benedictines (here not Montfaucon), though they profess to have collated the Parisian mss., have reprinted with but slight improvements, and with not a few disimprovements, the text of Morel. In the Parisian reprint of the Benedictine Chrysostom (Par. Ben. 2), the Editor has occasionally, but not constantly, recurred to the manuscripts, rarely gives the preference to the text of A. B. C., and constantly assumes the inferiority of those copies, in contents and authenticity as well as in antiquity, to the manuscript (E), which furnished the Latin version of Erasmus, and in substance, as we have explained, the printed text of the original.
Had the Editors collated the manuscript copies of these Homilies--a labor from which they, or those whom they employed, seem to have shrunk--they would probably have reversed their estimate of the relative value of the two recensions. The general superiority of the other text in point of sense and coherence, notwithstanding its frequent abruptness and uncouthness, is too evident to be called in question. Had they also collated the Catena, OEcumenius, Theophylact, and the Scholia, they would have found the external testimony to be coincident with the internal evidence to the higher antiquity as well as greater authenticity of the text which (for the most part unknown) they rejected. It would have been seen that this, besides being, with all its faults, incomparably better, was the older of the two; and that the other could claim no higher antiquity than that of the manuscript (said to be of the tenth century) in which it appears: that it is the work of some scribe, who, offended by the manifest abruptness and ruggedness of the earlier text, set himself to smooth out the difficulties, and to make it read more easily. For this is clearly the true state of the case. With this view, the scribe sometimes alters words and phrases, sometimes transposes: often omits, where he found something that he did not understand, oftener still amplifies, or rather dilutes: and interpolates matter which sometimes is demonstrably borrowed with little disguise from the Catena (see p. 113, note 1; 279, note 3; 280, note 2); or which, when it is his own, is little worth. In short, he has thought more of sound than of sense, and if he could make a passage run smoothly to the ear, has given himself little concern whether St. Chrysostom was likely to have so thought, or so expressed himself. The notes appended to our Translation will abundantly substantiate this censure. To have noted all the variations, either of the printed text, or of E alone, would have been a task as unprofitable as it was wearisome: perhaps as it is, we have given more than enough to vindicate the claims of the older text. If any one desires larger materials for comparison, Erasmus' Latin version, which, except in the two last Homilies, keeps close to E, will show that the text which we represent in our Translation is, with all its imperfections, incomparably the better of the two. Even if it were otherwise and were the alterations not, as they mostly are, disfigurements, but, considered in themselves, decided improvements, still our duty was plain: the text which came to us accredited by all the testimony known to be extant, we were not at liberty to reject in favor of an alien recension, unknown to the Ancients, and, as far as our evidence goes, unheard of before the tenth century. Therefore, in forming the text for this Translation we have entirely dismissed E, except where it has preserved readings which came strictly under the description of "various readings."
But while confining ourselves to that older text, we were not to leave unnoticed its more patent defects and errors. We could not but perceive, that we had before us an unrevised report of St. Chrysostom's Sermons, which, especially in the Expositions, was frequently imperfect--sometimes, indeed, little more than a set of rough notes thrown together, with, apparently, little or no attempt at arrangement. So far as this imperfection was caused by the reporter's negligence or incapacity, there was no remedy: and leaving the matter as we found it, or, at most, inserting in the text the marks of a lacuna, we have only ventured, in the notes, to surmise what may have been the general purport of St. Chrysostom's remarks. In other places, where the defects of our sources seemed to be rather chargeable upon the redactor, we have sought to apply a remedy, sometimes, but rarely, by conjectural emendation; very often by inserting portions of sacred text or other connecting matter in [], and also by transposing parts which had fallen out of their true order. For it seems that the original transcript from the reporter's notes was defective in these two regards. (1) The reporter would frequently omit to note in his tablets the keimenon or some other text of Scripture, or would indicate it in the shortest possible way by a word or two at the beginning and ending of the passage, intending to insert it afterwards at his leisure. It appears, however, that in many places this was either not done at all, or done in the wrong place. Hence where the text seemed incurably defective or perplexed, we have often been able to restore coherency by the simple expedient of inserting texts which were omitted, or else, by removing the texts altogether, and redistributing them among the comments. Almost any page of the Translation, especially in the Recapitulations, will illustrate this remark.