Steven Avery
Administrator
Was it Pamphilus or the much later scribe who copied his subscriptions into Sinaiticus who wrote: “And if it is not bumptious to say so, it would not be easy to find a copy that comes close to this copy”? Learned opinion differs.24
more standard
“It was copied and corrected after the Hexapla of Origen, which had been corrected by him. Antoninus, a confessor, collated it; I, Pamphilus, corrected the volume in the prison, through the great favour and enlargement of God. And indeed it is not hard to say that it would not he easy to find a copy comparable to this copy. Now the same most ancient book differed from this volume as to the [a corrector makes it ‘certain '] proper names.”
Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (2009)
Anthony Grafton, Megan Williams
https://books.google.com/books?id=JbcuqZVJzlEC&pg=PR10
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4 Eusebius at Caesarea: A Christian Impresario of the Codex
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t wa s in Caesarea that Eusebius learned to be a scholar; in Caesarea, too, that he created new literary forms and institutions. In this chapter we follow the complex interplay between the man and his environment. Our concern will be to tease out the ways in which each shaped, and was shaped by, the other. As we will see, Eusebius built a unique institution, and worked out genuinely new ways to organize scribal labor. But the methods that he forged for correcting the text of the Bible and for wielding documents to create new forms of historical and polemical text—methods central to his achievement as a scholar—rested in important ways on precedents that Eusebius knew, as he knew the Hexapla, from the start of his career. The Caesarea in which Eusebius read the Hexapla and created the Chronicle was a major center for the production, as well as the consumption, of Jewish and Christian books. Many of the former, as well as the latter, were written and studied in Greek.1
a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex Late in the third century, a wealthy Christian presbyter, Pamphilus, settled in the city and began to accumulate a library of sacred works. The collection that he built, and that his protégé Eusebius, the eventual bishop of the city, presumably continued to expand, became so famous in later antiquity that it was described, with some exaggeration, as the Christian equivalent of the library of Alexandria.2 A native of Berytus, Pamphilus studied with the Alexandrian Christian philosopher Pierius, himself a follower of Origen. Eusebius, Pamphilus’s disciple, informs us that his mentor devoted not only his fortune, but also his own labor as a copyist, to building his rich library of Christian books. In 310, under the reign of Maximinus, and only fourteen years before Constantine took control of the entire empire, Pamphilus died in one of the final waves of the persecutions initiated by Diocletian.3 His books survived him, however, and Eusebius used both some of these texts and the methods he had learned from Pamphilus to transform Caesarea into a new center of Christian scholarship. It is not easy to reconstruct Pamphilus’s library, or his working methods, in detail. Some scholars have held that he simply continued an enterprise begun by Origen, and that Eusebius in turn took up the reins when Pamphilus met his martyr’s death by decapitation on 16 February 310.4 Others—most recently René Amacker and Eric Junod, the editors of the Apology for Origen that Pamphilus wrote in collaboration with Eusebius— have argued that the library at Caesarea probably did not have a continuous institutional history. We agree with them.5 Certain facts seem clear. Origen left the Hexapla and other works behind in Caesarea. Pamphilus created a basically Christian collection, which centered on Origen but may also have contained
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e u s ebiu s at caes area pagan texts. Eusebius in his turn built up a massive library, including some of what Origen and Pamphilus left behind, which seems eventually to have become part of the episcopal library of Caesarea. Beyond that the scanty evidence does not allow us to go, though it has provided plentiful nourishment for speculation in the past.6 The sources for Pamphilus’s life and work fall into several quite discrete categories, each requiring an analysis of its own, and they offer no information on such elementary points as his year of birth. Taken together, the various pieces of evidence support a number of inferences: that Pamphilus had a solid classical education and built a substantial Christian library; that he trained a number of other young men in disciplines of the book, in ways that did much to form his star pupil, Eusebius; and that his enterprises, though organically connected to those that flourished before and after him in Caesarea, also differed from them in vital ways. The full life of Pamphilus that Eusebius wrote, in three books, is almost entirely lost.7 But fragmentary evidence from and about it, and two other major ancient accounts of his life and work, survive. Eusebius, in The Martyrs of Palestine, identifies Pamphilus as the descendant of a noble family, and emphasizes both his mastery of Greek culture and the Bible and the charismatic charm that attracted young men to work and suffer with him. Jerome, in De viris illustribus, emphasizes the passion for Origen that led Pamphilus to copy out the greater part of Origen’s works in his own hand.8 One well-known quotation from Eusebius’s biography, preserved in Jerome’s polemical work against Rufinus, offers a vivid sketch of Pamphilus’s central activities. Eusebius, in this con-
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a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex text, ascribed to him a very particular view of scholarship, as an enterprise that was not only collective, but also literally selfless: Pamphilus was a friend to all who studied. If he saw that some lacked the basic necessities of life, he generously gave as much as he could. He also eagerly distributed copies of the sacred scriptures, not only to be read, but also to be kept, and not only to men, but also to those women who had shown him that they were devoted to reading. Accordingly, he prepared many codices, so that he could give them out to those who wanted them whenever the need arose. So deep was his humility, however, that he wrote nothing of his own composition, except the letters that he now and then sent to friends. But he was most zealous in reading the treatises of the ancient writers and devoted himself to intensive meditation about them.9 The portrait is affecting, and much further evidence, as we will see, confirms Eusebius’s emphasis on the Christian core of his teacher’s scholarly activities—just as recent work confirms that Christian women read and exchanged biblical and other texts.10 Yet the supernaturally humble figure Eusebius depicts is distorted in at least one vital respect. The statement that Pamphilus “wrote nothing of his own” is false, at least in its literal sense. No one knew this better, moreover, than Eusebius himself, since the two men collaborated, during Pamphilus’s last years, in composing the first five books of a defense of Origen. They were driven to write this “because of the fault-finders,” as Eusebius himself noted—that is, by the many clerics who attacked the two men’s hero, Origen.11 Part of their defense of
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e u s ebiu s at caes area Origen survives, in a Latin translation by Rufinus. Even Jerome, who in the heat of controversy tried to expose the work in question as a forgery, eventually admitted that Pamphilus had written it.12 We will see below that the methods used in this book are highly relevant to those Eusebius applied in his own scholarly enterprises.13 And this was not the only case in which Pamphilus engaged in scholarly activities of a more varied and technical kind than reading homilies and copying manuscripts. On one point, all the evidence agrees: Pamphilus collected books. He did more than amass them, moreover; he also set them into order and drew up some sort of catalogue. Both Eusebius and Jerome used the library Pamphilus assembled, and their statements on its contents match better than those on the authorship of the Apology. In book 6 of his Church History, which deals with Origen, Eusebius noted that he did not need to give a catalogue of Origen’s works. It would take too much space, he argued. Moreover, “I recorded it in full in my account of the life of our contemporary, the holy martyr Pamphilus. There, in order to show how zealous he was for holy things, I offered as evidence the catalogues of the library that he assembled of the works of Origen and other Christian writers. From these, anyone who wishes can gain the fullest possible knowledge of the works of Origen that have come down to us.”14 This passage suggests that Pamphilus both collected Origen’s works and drew up formal catalogues of them in the Alexandrian fashion. Jerome confirms that interpretation, and expands somewhat on it. True, he wrote the letter in which he remarked that Pamphilus “found a great many” of Origen’s works “and left us a catalogue [indicem] of his discoveries” before he came to Pales-
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a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex tine. At this point Jerome depended on Eusebius for his knowledge of Pamphilus.15 But Jerome’s brief note on Pamphilus in De viris illustribus, written when he knew the library of Caesarea at first hand, records that “the presbyter Pamphilus burned with so much love of the divine library [Scripture], that he copied the greater part of Origen’s works, as preserved down to the present in the library at Caesarea, in his own hand.”16 Presumably, too, it was from Pamphilus that Eusebius derived his habit of collecting Origen’s letters, arranging them “in separate roll containers” to protect them, and listing them.17 It also seems clear that this collection was Pamphilus’s own project. Origen may well have brought a substantial working collection of books to Caesarea, and the Hexapla certainly formed part of it there. He also had stocks of texts by Philo and others that he, like Eusebius, knew at first hand. Origen’s letter to Pope Fabian, which we have already examined, shows how much time he and his benefactor Ambrose dedicated to the preeminently bookish task of correcting manuscripts. But no evidence suggests that Origen set special store by copying his own or anyone else’s books, or that he compiled formal catalogues of his holdings. Pamphilus had to chase down and collect Origen’s writings—clear evidence that they had not been systematically collected and preserved by their author. To this extent at least, Pamphilus emerges as a distinct figure—an eager intellectual disciple who spent much of his capital and his immense energies on preserving the works of an earlier Christian writer. The wider boundaries of Pamphilus’s activities as collector and copyist remain somewhat indistinct. Jerome, for example, owned twenty-five manuscripts (volumina) with Origen’s commentary on the Minor Prophets, “written in Pamphilus’s hand.”
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e u s ebiu s at caes area He described these books as a possession that filled him with as much joy as if he had the wealth of Croesus.18 We have no way of knowing whether they were duplicates, produced by Pamphilus for some friend or benefactor, or strays from the collection at Caesarea. One bit of evidence, moreover, hints both that Pamphilus did not limit himself to collecting Origen, and that at least some of his manuscripts of other texts came from the collection of his favorite author. The acts of a supposed council held by the apostles in Antioch bear the title: “The holy martyr Pamphilus’s copy of the acts of the synod of the apostles in Antioch, that is, part of the canons of the synod, as found in the library of Origen.”19 It is at least possible that other prizes and pyrites in Pamphilus’s collection came to Caesarea in Origen’s time, passed through his hands, and inspired forgers and librarians to claim this exalted provenance for their books. In one vital respect at least, Pamphilus followed Origen’s lead as a scholar. As collector and scribe, he occupied himself intensively with the Bible. Ancient scholars who corrected manuscripts regularly entered notes, normally at the end of books or sections, in which they identified themselves and briefly—all too briefly—described what they had done to them. Normally these survive only in copies, often made hundreds of years after the activities they describe. Many manuscripts of the Greek Old and New Testaments, as well as copies of the Syro-Hexaplar, have subscriptions, and a fair number of these short and sometimes cryptic texts mention Pamphilus and his associates.20 Two of the most informative appear in one of the three great fourthcentury manuscripts of the Greek Bible, the Codex Sinaiticus. Both derive from earlier manuscripts that no longer exist, and describe the steps that Pamphilus and others took to correct
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a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex them. The shorter one, copied at the end of II Esdras in Sinaiticus sometime between the fifth and the seventh century, reads: “Collated against a very old copy corrected by the hand of the holy martyr Pamphilus. At the end of his copy appears an autograph attestation, which reads as follows: ‘Copied and corrected from the Hexapla of Origen. Antoninus collated; I, Pamphilus, corrected.’”21 The longer one, added by the same hand at the end of Esther, offers even more information: “Copied and corrected from the Hexapla of Origen, as corrected by his own hand. Antoninus, the confessor, collated; I, Pamphilus, corrected the volume in prison. . . . And if it is not bumptious to say so, it would not be easy to find a copy that comes close to this copy.”22 Several other colophons, some in manuscripts of the Greek Bible and others in manuscripts of the SyroHexaplaric text, record that Pamphilus and Eusebius worked together on the correction of texts of IV Kingdoms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Minor Prophets, Isaiah, and Ezekiel.23 These texts, of course, do not yield their secrets lightly. They were entered in the manuscripts centuries after Pamphilus, by scholars trying to emend their own copies of the biblical text, and it is not always clear which parts of the subscriptions come from the lost manuscripts of Pamphilus and which were added by their readers. Was it Pamphilus or the much later scribe who copied his subscriptions into Sinaiticus who wrote: “And if it is not bumptious to say so, it would not be easy to find a copy that comes close to this copy”? Learned opinion differs.24 When subscriptions report a given scholar’s statement that “I corrected” (Latin emendavi) a text, moreover, they indicate a process normally limited to one occasion and one book. In most cases, classical subscriptions record one or more particular schol-
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
A subscription by Pamphilus as entered in the Codex Sinaiticus, reproduced from the facsimile, Codex sinaiticvs petropolitanvs et Friderico-Avgvstanvs lipsiensis. The Old Testament preserved in the public library of Petrograd, in the library of the society of ancient literature in Petrograd, and in the library of the University of Leipzig, now reproduced in facsimile from photographs by Helen and Kirsopp Lake, with a description and introduction to the history of the Codex by Kirsopp Lake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922).
a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex ars’ effort to improve a given manuscript, by checking it against the original from which it was copied, by collating it against another manuscript, or by conjecture. In some cases Christian scholars, bent on preserving the integrity of a sacred text, went further, identifying the particular text that they had used as a standard. By doing so they claimed that they had carried out their work as Irenaeus—in a famous subscription preserved by Eusebius, and thus known in Caesarea—demanded Christian literati should: “I call upon you, who will copy this book, to swear by our lord Jesus Christ, and by his glorious advent, when he comes to judge the living and the dead, that you will collate what you transcribe and and correct it carefully against this exemplar from which you transcribe it. And in the same way you will also transcribe this oath and put it in the exemplar.”25 Eusebius cited this passage as exemplary. Modern readers, he said, would profit by seeing the “really zealous concern of the ancient, truly holy men”—the way, that is, in which they had blended piety and precision.26 This seems to have been more or less the way in which Pamphilus and his friends approached their textual work on the Bible. But the details remain a fruitful field for elaborate reconstructions that rest precariously, like inverted pyramids, on a very small basis of evidence. One standard interpretation holds that Pamphilus, or he and Eusebius, produced a recension of the Septuagint based on the fifth column of the Hexapla, which they used as a standard.27 A variation on this, which we proposed above, holds that Origen himself produced such a recension. Pamphilus and Eusebius might have taken this as their standard. One could conjecture, without too much strain, that when the two men claimed to have collated copies of the Old
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e u s ebiu s at caes area Testament books against the Hexapla, they actually meant that they had used a recension of the Septuagint derived from it. Or one could take the subscriptions literally and assume that Pamphilus and his helpers used the Hexapla itself as their standard.28 But exactly what Pamphilus did to the manuscripts of Ezra, IV Kingdoms, and other biblical books that he corrected remains unclear. Perhaps he drew individual corrections for particular, well-known controversial passages from Origen’s work. Or perhaps he actually collated each manuscript from beginning to end with the Hexapla, or with a single manuscript that contained the so-called Hexaplaric signs added by Origen to certain texts: obeli, or dashes, to identify words and phrases in the Septuagint that had no counterpart in the Hebrew, and asterisks to identify lacunae in the Septuagint that had been filled in from other sources. The terminology that Pamphilus and Eusebius used leaves vital details of their work in obscurity.29 Jerome remarked in his preface to Chronicles that three versions of the Septuagint were especially influential in the Christian world: that of Hesychius, which was popular in Egypt; that of Lucian the martyr, which found approval from Constantinople to Antioch, and a third, Palestinian text, “drawn up by Origen and disseminated by Eusebius and Pamphilus.”30 Modern scholars have modified this neat picture of three recensions, each created by a third-century martyr. Instead of a Hesychian recension, they identify a group of manuscripts as “Alexandrian” or “Egyptian.” They refer to the “Lucianic” text, more generally, as “Antiochene.” True, contemporary textual critics still see the work of Origen, Pamphilus, and Eusebius as “an unambigu-
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a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex ous work of planned revision.”31 But we may never know what precise impact the activities of Pamphilus and Eusebius had on this third family of manuscripts. Over time, a recension based on the Hexapla “dominated the field.” But as scribes omitted or mistranscribed the critical marks, the distinctions that Origen—and, presumably, Eusebius and Pamphilus—tried to preserve between the Septuagint and other versions “became blurred so that what now passed for ‘the LXX’ was in fact a badly corrupted text.”32 In these circumstances, it makes little sense to try to describe the way in which Pamphilus and Eusebius worked with a level of vividness and precision that the sources by their nature render spurious. If Pamphilus’s methods of collation and philological goals remain obscure, the flavor and texture of his everyday practices as a scholar emerge clearly from the subscriptions. It was a collaborative and specialized enterprise. Normally, Pamphilus and one other man worked together. The subscriptions in Sinaiticus, for example, say, in the voice of Pamphilus, that one Antoninus antebalen, while Pamphilus diÃrthÃsa. Antiballein, in this context, is a technical term for collation, and diorthoun for correction. In each case, Antoninus examined the Hexapla (or another base text), while Pamphilus corrected the new manuscript. As a number of scholars have shown, moreover, this process must have been oral—like most collaboration between scholars or writers and their secretaries in the ancient world.33 In a process that reversed the normal methods of authorship—in which the author spoke while a secretary wrote down what he said—Antoninus read the base text aloud, while Pamphilus followed and entered corrections in the new text. It
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e u s ebiu s at caes area seems likely that the young men who worked with Pamphilus began by reading aloud and only later, if ever, actually corrected manuscripts on their own. It is all the more suggestive, then, that when it came to IV Kingdoms, according to the Syro-Hexaplar, Pamphilus did the collating, while Eusebius corrected the text and wrote the colophon.34 Perhaps the older man chose the humbler task out of humility and respect for a specially gifted pupil. More likely he did so in order to oversee the younger man’s first efforts to prepare a new manuscript for sacred reading. If so, the collaborative work recorded in the colophons amounted to an apprenticeship in textual criticism. Over time, Pamphilus acknowledged Eusebius as a full colleague. A number of the colophons record that “Pamphilus and Eusebius corrected” or “accurately corrected” a given book or section of the Bible. Eusebius must have had this painstaking collaborative effort to control and improve the sources of religious truth in mind when he quoted the Little Labyrinth. This pamphlet denounced the Theodotians, the followers of Theodotus the Tanner, who had “critically revised” the Septuagint and the New Testament. The biblical texts that these heretics used varied so much as to condemn them: “If anyone wishes to gather the texts of each of them and to compare them with one another, he would find great discrepancies among them. For the copies of Asclepiades [i.e., those with his subscription] do not agree with those of Theodotus.”35 The critic went on to say that the clearest evidence of the Theodotians’ crime lay in the carelessness with which they had produced their biblical texts. The fact that the Theodotians could not identify, much less produce, the sources from which they worked proved that they
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a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex had arbitrarily changed their texts: “they cannot deny that they committed this crime, since the copies are written in their own hand. And they did not receive the Scriptures in this form from those by whom they were instructed, and they cannot produce any exemplars from which they made their copies.”36 The true Christian scholar should make clear in a colophon just what he had done to the sacred texts, and in whose company— or so at least Eusebius demanded in this polemical context, though his practices rarely if ever lived up to so high a standard.37 A range of evidence shows that Pamphilus collected and corrected manuscripts of the New Testament as well as the Old. Jerome thought, as many others have, that the original text of the Gospel of Matthew was in Hebrew, and that the Greek text in circulation was a translation by someone unknown. He noted that “the Hebrew itself has been preserved until the present day in the library at Caesarea, which Pamphilus the martyr so diligently created.”38 Eusebius made elaborate efforts to establish the canon of New Testament books, which he laid out in the Church History. These attempts to pigeonhole the sacred texts may well have rested on precedents set by Pamphilus, who must certainly have reflected at some point about the contents of the Christian segments of the “sacred Scriptures” that he gave away.39 The mysterious Euthalius, who edited the book of Acts and the Pauline Epistles, dividing them into chapters and equipping them with a biography and bibliography of Paul and a list of Old Testament quotations, claimed to have done some of his work in Caesarea, where he collated his text of Paul against a manuscript written by Pamphilus himself.40 Though it is anything but clear whether Pamphilus contributed much to
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the “Caesarean” recension of the New Testament reconstructed by modern critics, it seems certain that he applied his standard methods of collation and correction to the Gospels and other New Testament texts.41 Pamphilus, in other words, taught his younger associates to correct manuscripts of the Bible in the course of close and protracted periods of joint work. These went on not only throughout the Great Persecution, in what must have been difficult conditions, but also, famously, in confinement, during the period from 5 November 307, when Pamphilus was arrested and imprisoned, until his death in 310.42 The scholium to Esther reproduced in the Codex Sinaiticus states this explicitly: “Antoninus, the confessor, collated, and I, Pamphilus, corrected the volume in prison, by the favor and enlargement of God.” Pamphilus probably viewed this collaborative effort as far more than a set of lessons in the techniques of textual criticism. Correcting and copying central Christian texts was a religious act. Origen and Ambrose, as we have seen, treated their joint work of correction as a form of Christian asceticism, which they pursued with passion. Jerome described the texts of Origen that Pamphilus wrote as the relics of a holy martyr: “If it is happiness to possess one letter by a martyr, how much the more so to have thousands of lines, which he [Pamphilus] seems to me to have marked with the traces of his blood?”43 The young men whom Pamphilus chose for their mastery of Greek culture and initiated into the textual study of the Bible found that they had joined a sacred community. Antoninus, who helped Pamphilus correct biblical manuscripts in prison, was martyred before him. So were the brothers Apphianus and Aedesius.44 In Apphianus’s case, Eusebius describes what seems
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almost a natural transition from biblical study to martyrdom: “And after he had been with us and had been drilled in holy studies and had taken part in lessons on the sacred Scriptures by the great martyr Pamphilus, he attained a virtuous state that was far from ordinary. Once he had prepared himself in this way for the perfection of martyrdom [as the next part of the discourse will show], all who saw were amazed, all who heard were full of wonder at his boldness, his freedom of speech, his constancy, his self-control, his words to the judge, his replies, his prudence, and, beyond all these, his daring.”45 Study of the Bible with Pamphilus enabled Apphianus to lead the highest form of virtuous life—one characterized by the freedom of speech, prudence, and courage that had marked the wise man since Socrates, and that sometimes brought both pagan and Christian saints into conflict with political authority. Like Apphianus, whose studies at Berytus had given him a command of Greek culture without corrupting him, Aedesius mastered Greek learning before Pamphilus initiated him into Christian scholarship: “Even before his brother felt the love of God, his dedication to philosophy put him in the lead. For he studied all sorts of things, and mastered not only Greek paideia, but Roman as well. And he shared Pamphilus’s way of life for a long time.”46 Evidently, collaborative work on the Bible formed an organic part of a deeper and richer spiritual relationship, one in which Pamphilus offered his young disciples much more than training in the use of a set of technical tools. Late in life, at the Council of Tyre in 335, Eusebius would find himself under attack for having failed to become a martyr with Pamphilus and his friends. Pottamon, who had been in prison with Eusebius, had himself lost an eye there. He re-
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proached Eusebius for escaping “alive and without mutilation,” and accused him of having made sacrifice as Roman officials demanded.47 The criticism is harsh, and no further evidence supports it. Yet even Eusebius apparently felt a certain unworthiness as he contemplated the courage of another of Pamphilus’s helpers, Porphyry. Not yet eighteen, Porphyry appeared before the judge and demanded the bodies of Pamphilus and his fellows for burial. His reward was brutal and immediate. Porphyry died before his friends in a slow fire, after being tortured, torn, and abraded with haircloths. Eusebius—who made clear by calling himself “Pamphili” that he took his teacher as a spiritual father—showed how much he admired il miglior fabbro when he described Porphyry as “a true nursling of Pamphilus, not yet eighteen. He had become a master of the art of penmanship, and his moderation and manners were beyond praise, as was proper for the disciple of such a man.”48 The truest form of discipleship would have led Eusebius, like Porphyry, not to the episcopal throne but to the fire. Even after resisting the temptations of heroism, however, Eusebius followed in the scholarly path of his master. He applied the editorial techniques, explicit and tacit, that he learned from Pamphilus throughout his life. From the start of his career, however, Eusebius did more than ransack the materials and apply the methods that Pamphilus had used. Many of his earliest innovations had to do with the forms, as much as the content, of the books he created. Eusebius learned from the Hexapla, as we have seen, that a tabular presentation could make information take on radically new meanings. He applied this lesson to a number of problems. What first made Eusebius’s approach to
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book-making distinctively different from that of Pamphilus was the ingenuity with which he applied Origen’s provocative expedient—the use of tabular format to enable quick comparisons across the pages of a codex—to a variety of textual problems and tasks. He devised elegant new tools that made the most important texts accessible to readers. These texts brought his compilatory energy and imaginative sense of page design into play in highly creative ways, while at the same time engaging the precedents set by Origen and Pamphilus. Like Origen, Eusebius felt himself to be confronted by multiple sacred texts that somehow had to be studied together, and he found new ways to synchronize them—just as he synchronized histories in his Chronicle. Earlier Christian writers had tried to find ways to make it easier to compare the accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings in the four Gospels. Ammonius, for example, broke up the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and John and arranged extracts from them next to the parallel passages in Matthew. But this method, as Eusebius complained in a famous letter to one Carpianus, shattered the texts, making it impossible to read them in their integrity: “the continuous thread of the other three is necessarily broken, preventing a consecutive reading.” To avoid fragmenting the biblical texts, Eusebius devised a radically different approach. He divided the Gospels into numbered sections. Then he drew up ten tables, which listed parallel or related passages, first in all four Gospels, then in any three of them, then in any two, and finally set out those found in only one system. A simple, elegant system of numerical cues enabled the reader to move immediately from a passage to any parallel in any of the four Gospels:
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
A set of Eusebius’s canon tables, showing parallel passages from the Four Gospels, from a Byzantine manuscript. Princeton University Library, MS Garrett 2.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
A section of Gospel text, showing Eusebius’s canon numbers on the left margin. In the bottom three cases, the bottom number indicates the table to be consulted; the top one designates the section of text beside it. Princeton University Library, MS Garrett 2, fol. 127 recto.
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Before each section of the four Gospels stands a number in the margin, beginning with the first, then the second and third, and proceeding in order throughout until the end of the books. And underneath each number is marked a note in red, indicating in which of the ten canons the number occurs. (For example, if it is 1, it is clear that it is in the first canon; if 2, in the second; and so on as far as 10.) Hence, if you were to open any one of the four Gospels, and wish to light upon any chapter whatever, to know who else has said similar things and to find the relevant passages in which they treated of similar things, then find the number marked against the passage which you have before you, look for it in the canon which the note in red has suggested, and you will immediately learn from the headings at the start of the canon how many and which have said similar things. If you then find the numbers of the other Gospels parallel with the number which you have before you in the canon, and look for them in the appropriate places of each Gospel, you will find those passages which say similar things.49 Eusebius’s canon tables, often dazzlingly illuminated, became a standard feature of New Testament manuscripts in a number of languages and cultures.50 Another tabular device, his pinax of the Psalms, had the opposite effect. One of the techniques of classical grammatical scholarship that Origen regularly applied to the interpretation of the Bible involved identifying the prosÃpon, or persona, who was speaking in any given passage.51 Eusebius applied this principle systematically in his Psalm Tables, which dissected the Book of Psalms into the work of a series of individual speakers
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or authors, not all of whom Eusebius felt he could identify. This pinax proved considerably less popular than the Canon Tables, perhaps because he left it as a bare scholarly tool unaccompanied by clear instructions for users, unlike the Canon Tables.52 Perhaps, however, like book 1 of the Chronicle, this work marked so strenuous an effort to hold contrasting views in productive tension that it made some readers uncomfortable. But as a great specialist on early Christian books and scholarship, James O’Donnell, has pointed out, the triumphantly successful Canon Tables were extraordinarily original and effective information retrieval devices: the world’s first hot links. They enabled readers not simply to rely on memory or to use rearranged texts of the Bible, but to turn the four Gospels into a single web of cross-commentary—to move from text to text as easily as one could move from kingdom to kingdom in the Canon.53 When Eusebius modeled his Canon on the Hexapla, he was not carrying off an isolated feat of sophisticated mise-enpage. Rather, he was revealing what would become a persistent strain in his work on texts: an effort to configure them, using layout, colors of ink, and other visual clues to lead readers through them rapidly and effectively. In Eusebius’s introduction to his Canon, he proudly described how he had laid out parallel blocks of events in parallel columns for chronological clarity and easy reference. The same sensibility, the same concern for textual integrity and readers’ comfort, inspired his Canon Tables. One of Eusebius’s most intelligent and persistent students, Jerome, paid tribute to the master’s design sense in a prominent way. Eusebius had his scribes use red ink to mark the divisions of the Gospels. Jerome had the annals of the different kingdoms in the Canon written in different inks, a Eusebian trick designed
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to make the work even easier to consult.54 No early creator of codices understood more vividly than Eusebius the possibilities that the new form of the book created for effective display of texts and information. Eusebius’s ability to produce the Chronicle and the Canon and Psalm Tables—complex and demanding works, which required elaborate page layout, coordinated use of red and black ink, and continual attention to nontextual detail—reveal something vital about the culture of the library at Caesarea. The textual evidence about Pamphilus portrays him as carrying out his own scribal work, copying Origen and collating biblical manuscripts in his own hand. Evidently, however, the diocesan complex of buildings as it emerged under Eusebius’s episcopate housed something resembling a staff of scribes trained well enough to follow complex directions and produce nontraditional texts. This infrastructure played a central role in many of Eusebius’s projects. If Eusebius’s passionate interest in mise-en-page has largely escaped the attention of scholars, another central feature of his scholarly work in the next period of his life, the 310s and 320s, has fascinated them for decades. Long ago, Arnaldo Momigliano pointed out, drawing on Eduard Schwartz, that Eusebius made the direct quotation of documents, literary and archival, a central feature of his history of the church.55 This became a lasting characteristic, one that sharply distinguished ecclesiastical from civil history, which usually took the form of a narrative uninterrupted by direct quotations.56 More recently, Michael Hollerich has noted that many of Eusebius’s works—theological ones as well as historical—took the form of mosaics, fashioned
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
A leaf from the chronological table of Eusebius, as translated by Jerome, in a manuscript of the fifth century ce. Note the visible underscoring that enabled the scribe to enter the complex text evenly and legibly. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MS lat. 6400 B, fol. 289 recto.
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from excerpts from earlier sources. He has portrayed Eusebius’s career, in fact, as one long adventure in systematic quotation.57 These judgments reflect Eusebius’s own statements about his methods. He emphasized more than once that the novelty of his approach to many subjects lay in his reliance on source research and his profuse citation of original texts. In the introduction to the Chronicle, for example, he emphasized that his work rested on systematic excerpting of a vast range of sources: I have gone through the varied historical works of the ancients, including the reports of the Chaldeans and Assyrians, the detailed accounts of the Egyptians, and the narratives that the Greeks present as certain—as if that were possible. These contained the dates of kings and Olympiads, that is, athletic games, and certain outstanding deeds done by barbarians and Greeks, brave men and cowards, as well as their marvelous armies, military leaders, wise men, heroes, poets, historians, and philosophers. I thought it would be proper to put all of this down in the briefest possible form, so far as it is really useful and relevant, and to add to the aforementioned the ancient history and chronology of the Hebrews, transmitted by the sacred scriptures.58 In his preface to the Church History, similarly, Eusebius claimed that his work was radically novel, and that it consisted in the creation of a particular kind of anthology: We are the first to attempt this enterprise, as if we were traveling on a deserted, unused road. We pray God to guide us and grant that we have the power of the Lord to help us, for we cannot find even the bare footprints of men 202
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who have gone down the same road before us, except some small indications, through which they have left us partial accounts of their times, each doing so in his own way. . . . Accordingly, we have gathered from the scattered records everything that we believe will be relevant to the present subject, and culled, so to speak from intellectual meadows, everything the ancient writers said that is appropriate to it. We will try by using a historical approach to make them into a coherent whole.59
Citing passages like these, scholars have long noted that Eusebius practiced an intensely book-based form of learning. Only in a major Christian collection like that of Pachomius’s monastery, partially represented by the Dishna papers, a varied collection found in Egypt, near Nag Hammadi, or that in Caesarea— a collection that included biblical texts, early Christian writings, and a fair number of pagan texts as well—could the Chronicle have been produced.60 That sufficiently explains why “the documentary and archival character” of Eusebius’s work, as it took shape in the bookish surroundings we have come to know, makes his writings “treasure troves for scholars on the trail of lost or fragmentary works.”61 In fact, Eusebius’s method, as well as his library, had particular, local roots in Caesarea. For Pamphilus did more than correct and meditate over the contents of his library. He thought hard about how to apply his books effectively in a polemic against Christian adversaries. Origen’s enemies, Pamphilus noted, told other Christians not even to read his writings, as if they lacked the good moneychanger’s knack for telling good specie from bad.62 In fact, however, their attacks missed virtually all their marks. These critics claimed that humble Christians were treat203
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23. In what follows, “Syh” designates texts translated from the subscriptions in the Syro-Hexaplar. The evidence is handily collected by Devreesse 1954, 123–124, and Nautin 1977, 322–324: III Reg. (Syh = Mercati 38–39): “Sumptus est hic liber . . . ex Hexa-
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n ot es to page 1 85 plo, h.e. sex columnis, bibliothecae Caesareae Palestinensis; et collatus est cum exemplari in quo subsignatum erat sic: EësÁbiov diórjwsa öv «kribøv Ãdun©mhn.” IV Reg. (Syh = Mercati 39–43): “Sumpta est haec quoque . . . ex libro Heptaplorum, h.e. septem columnarum bibliothecae Caesareae Palaestinae . . . Et collatus est accurate cum exemplari septem columnarum, cui subscripta erant haec: Quartus Regnorum secundum Septuaginta, isque accurate emendatus. Eusebius emendavi, Pamphilo collationem instituente.” “This book was also drawn . . . from the book of the Heptapla (that is, of the 7 columns) from the library of Caesarea in Palestine . . . And it was carefully collated with an exemplar in 7 columns with the following subscription: Fourth Book of Kingdoms according to the Seventy, corrrected with great care. I, Eusebius, corrected, Pamphilus having done the collation.” Proverbs (Syh = Mercati 43–44): MetelÔmfjhsau kaÊ «nteblÔjhsan aÌ ParoimÉai «pã «kriboív «ntigr©fou, Ãn Œ paretÁjhsan kaÊ Ãgr©fhsan Ãn toÍv metwpÉoiv sxâlia xeirÊ PamfÉlou kaÊ EësebÉou, Ãn Œ kajupetÁtakto taíta· MetelÔmfjhsan «f’ ún eÔromen ‘Ecapløn ’WrigÁnouv. KaÊ p©lin· aëtoxeirÊ PamfÉlou kaÊ EësebÉou diwrjósanto. “The Proverbs were copied and collated from an accurate copy, in which scholia were placed and written in the margins by the hand of Pamphilus and Eusebius, and in which were these words: ‘Copied from the Hexapla of Origen that we found.’ And, again, ‘corrected in their own hand by Pamphilus and Eusebius.’” Ecclesiastes (Syh = Mercati 44–45, at 45): “Adnotatum erat in libro graeco . . . ’EkklhsiastÕv åmoÉwv metelÔmfjh «pã toí aëtoí «ntigr©fou, Ãn Œ kaÊ oÌ loipoÊ [tfi loipfi] ÃfecÙv paretÁjhsan. kaÊ p©lin xeirÊ toí ®gÉou PamfÉlou taíta· P©mfilov kaÊ EësÁbiov diwrjósamen.” Cantica (Syh = Mercati 45–46): “Desumptus est ex Hexaplis, qualia ea reperimus, Origenis secundum versionem reliquorum et iterum manu nostra nosmet Pamphilus et Eusebius correximus.”
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not es to pages 1 85 –1 87 “‘Taken from the Hexapla or Origen, as we found them, according to the translation of the others,’ and again, in their own hand, ‘We, Pamphilus and Eusebius, corrected.’” Minor Prophets (Syh = Mercati, 46): MetelÔmfjhsan oÌ dódeka profÙtai Ãk tøn katfi tfiv Ãkdâseiv tetrapløn. P©mfilov kaÊ EësÁbiov «kribøv diórjwsan. “Copied from the Tetrapla according to the editions. Pamphilus and Eusebius corrected accurately.” Isaiah (Marchalianus = Mercati, 8): MetelÔmfjh å ÖsaÇav Ãk tøn katfi tfiv Ãkdâseiv Äcapløn: «nteblÔjh d kaÊ prãv Èteron Äcaploín. (Syh = Mercati, 10, 29): MetelÔmfjh kaÊ paretÁjh «pã «ntigr©fou ’EusebÉou kaÊ PamfÉlou, Ò kaÊ aëtoÊ diwrjósanto Ãk tÙv bibliojÔkhv ’WrigÁnouv. Ezechiel (Marchalianus = Nautin 1977, 323: MetelÔmfjh «pã tøn katfi tfiv Ãkdâseiv ‘Ecapløn kaÊ diwrjójh «pã tøn ’WrigÁnouv aëtoí Tetrapløn, Àtina kaÊ aëtoí xeirÊ diórjwto kaÊ Ãsxoliogr©fhto, èjen EësÁbiov Ãgô tfi sxâlia parÁjhka. P©mfilov kaÊ EësÁbiov diwrjósanto. “Copied from the Hexapla according to the editions and corrected from Origen’s own Tetrapla, which was corrected and annotated in his hand. I Eusebius added the scholia from this source. Pamphilus and Eusebius corrected.”
24. Mercati 1941, 19–20, denies that Pamphilus would have boasted of the quality of his work, and notes that a later scribe might more plausibly have marveled at the wonderful manuscript prepared by the martyr Pamphilus. Skeat 1956, 194, takes the sentence as by Pamphilus. Mercati’s reasoning seems more plausible—especially in the light of the fact that Pamphilus’s other colophons all end with the sentence that identifies him and his associates as the ones who did the actual work. On the other hand, the special circumstances involved in working in prison could have provoked Pamphilus to vary his usual practice. 25. Eusebius, HE 5.20.2. See the erudite and precise survey by Pecere 1986, 24–26. Irenaeus’s subscription reappears in Latin in
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not es to pages 1 87 –1 91 Jerome, De viris illustribus 35, with a slight alteration, and elsewhere. See also Gamble 1995, 114–116, 123–125. Further important studies, the results of which differ sharply, include Zetzel 1973, 1980, and 1981, Timpanaro 1986, and Cameron forthcoming. 26. Eusebius, HE 5.20.3. 27. See e.g. Soisalon-Soininen 1959. 28. Since we take it that the Septuagint text in the Hexapla was not itself the result of a new recension of the text, but part of the material Origen used for that recension. 29. As textual critics in modern times have regularly complained, their voices rising slightly as they explain the difficulties of working out how much of the Hexapla has entered the “Hexaplaric” form of the text that descends from Caesarea. For a manuscript with the Hexaplaric signs, see e.g. Leiden University Library Vossianus gr. Q 8; Metzger 1981, 38, 70. On the nature of the additions marked with asterisks see Soisalon-Soininen 1959. 30. Jerome, Praefatio in Paralipomena (PL 28, 1392A–1393A): “Alexandria et Aegyptus in Septuaginta suis Hesychium laudant auctorem; Constantinopolis usque ad Antiochiam Luciani martyris exemplaria probat; mediae inter has provinciae Palaestinos codices legunt, quos ab Origene elaboratos Eusebius et Pamphilus vulgaverunt, totusque orbis hac inter se trifaria varietate compugnat.” 31. Dines 2004, 95–96. 32. Dines 2004, 102. 33. See generally Small 1997 and Van den Hoek 1996, and for this particular case the superb studies of Skeat 1956 and Petitmengin and Flusin 1984. Cf. also Teitler 1985. 34. Petitmengin and Flusin 1984, 250 and n. 35: “Eusebius emendavi Pamphilo collationem instituente”; cf. Mercati 1941, 39. 35. Eusebius, HE 5.28.16. 36. Eusebius, HE 5.28.18. 37. See Schöne 1939; Metzger 1980, 196–197; Metzger 1992, 150– 151. 38. Jerome, De viris illustribus 3.2; 1999, 10: “Porro ipsum hebrai-
more standard
“It was copied and corrected after the Hexapla of Origen, which had been corrected by him. Antoninus, a confessor, collated it; I, Pamphilus, corrected the volume in the prison, through the great favour and enlargement of God. And indeed it is not hard to say that it would not he easy to find a copy comparable to this copy. Now the same most ancient book differed from this volume as to the [a corrector makes it ‘certain '] proper names.”
Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (2009)
Anthony Grafton, Megan Williams
https://books.google.com/books?id=JbcuqZVJzlEC&pg=PR10
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4 Eusebius at Caesarea: A Christian Impresario of the Codex
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t wa s in Caesarea that Eusebius learned to be a scholar; in Caesarea, too, that he created new literary forms and institutions. In this chapter we follow the complex interplay between the man and his environment. Our concern will be to tease out the ways in which each shaped, and was shaped by, the other. As we will see, Eusebius built a unique institution, and worked out genuinely new ways to organize scribal labor. But the methods that he forged for correcting the text of the Bible and for wielding documents to create new forms of historical and polemical text—methods central to his achievement as a scholar—rested in important ways on precedents that Eusebius knew, as he knew the Hexapla, from the start of his career. The Caesarea in which Eusebius read the Hexapla and created the Chronicle was a major center for the production, as well as the consumption, of Jewish and Christian books. Many of the former, as well as the latter, were written and studied in Greek.1
a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex Late in the third century, a wealthy Christian presbyter, Pamphilus, settled in the city and began to accumulate a library of sacred works. The collection that he built, and that his protégé Eusebius, the eventual bishop of the city, presumably continued to expand, became so famous in later antiquity that it was described, with some exaggeration, as the Christian equivalent of the library of Alexandria.2 A native of Berytus, Pamphilus studied with the Alexandrian Christian philosopher Pierius, himself a follower of Origen. Eusebius, Pamphilus’s disciple, informs us that his mentor devoted not only his fortune, but also his own labor as a copyist, to building his rich library of Christian books. In 310, under the reign of Maximinus, and only fourteen years before Constantine took control of the entire empire, Pamphilus died in one of the final waves of the persecutions initiated by Diocletian.3 His books survived him, however, and Eusebius used both some of these texts and the methods he had learned from Pamphilus to transform Caesarea into a new center of Christian scholarship. It is not easy to reconstruct Pamphilus’s library, or his working methods, in detail. Some scholars have held that he simply continued an enterprise begun by Origen, and that Eusebius in turn took up the reins when Pamphilus met his martyr’s death by decapitation on 16 February 310.4 Others—most recently René Amacker and Eric Junod, the editors of the Apology for Origen that Pamphilus wrote in collaboration with Eusebius— have argued that the library at Caesarea probably did not have a continuous institutional history. We agree with them.5 Certain facts seem clear. Origen left the Hexapla and other works behind in Caesarea. Pamphilus created a basically Christian collection, which centered on Origen but may also have contained
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e u s ebiu s at caes area pagan texts. Eusebius in his turn built up a massive library, including some of what Origen and Pamphilus left behind, which seems eventually to have become part of the episcopal library of Caesarea. Beyond that the scanty evidence does not allow us to go, though it has provided plentiful nourishment for speculation in the past.6 The sources for Pamphilus’s life and work fall into several quite discrete categories, each requiring an analysis of its own, and they offer no information on such elementary points as his year of birth. Taken together, the various pieces of evidence support a number of inferences: that Pamphilus had a solid classical education and built a substantial Christian library; that he trained a number of other young men in disciplines of the book, in ways that did much to form his star pupil, Eusebius; and that his enterprises, though organically connected to those that flourished before and after him in Caesarea, also differed from them in vital ways. The full life of Pamphilus that Eusebius wrote, in three books, is almost entirely lost.7 But fragmentary evidence from and about it, and two other major ancient accounts of his life and work, survive. Eusebius, in The Martyrs of Palestine, identifies Pamphilus as the descendant of a noble family, and emphasizes both his mastery of Greek culture and the Bible and the charismatic charm that attracted young men to work and suffer with him. Jerome, in De viris illustribus, emphasizes the passion for Origen that led Pamphilus to copy out the greater part of Origen’s works in his own hand.8 One well-known quotation from Eusebius’s biography, preserved in Jerome’s polemical work against Rufinus, offers a vivid sketch of Pamphilus’s central activities. Eusebius, in this con-
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a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex text, ascribed to him a very particular view of scholarship, as an enterprise that was not only collective, but also literally selfless: Pamphilus was a friend to all who studied. If he saw that some lacked the basic necessities of life, he generously gave as much as he could. He also eagerly distributed copies of the sacred scriptures, not only to be read, but also to be kept, and not only to men, but also to those women who had shown him that they were devoted to reading. Accordingly, he prepared many codices, so that he could give them out to those who wanted them whenever the need arose. So deep was his humility, however, that he wrote nothing of his own composition, except the letters that he now and then sent to friends. But he was most zealous in reading the treatises of the ancient writers and devoted himself to intensive meditation about them.9 The portrait is affecting, and much further evidence, as we will see, confirms Eusebius’s emphasis on the Christian core of his teacher’s scholarly activities—just as recent work confirms that Christian women read and exchanged biblical and other texts.10 Yet the supernaturally humble figure Eusebius depicts is distorted in at least one vital respect. The statement that Pamphilus “wrote nothing of his own” is false, at least in its literal sense. No one knew this better, moreover, than Eusebius himself, since the two men collaborated, during Pamphilus’s last years, in composing the first five books of a defense of Origen. They were driven to write this “because of the fault-finders,” as Eusebius himself noted—that is, by the many clerics who attacked the two men’s hero, Origen.11 Part of their defense of
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e u s ebiu s at caes area Origen survives, in a Latin translation by Rufinus. Even Jerome, who in the heat of controversy tried to expose the work in question as a forgery, eventually admitted that Pamphilus had written it.12 We will see below that the methods used in this book are highly relevant to those Eusebius applied in his own scholarly enterprises.13 And this was not the only case in which Pamphilus engaged in scholarly activities of a more varied and technical kind than reading homilies and copying manuscripts. On one point, all the evidence agrees: Pamphilus collected books. He did more than amass them, moreover; he also set them into order and drew up some sort of catalogue. Both Eusebius and Jerome used the library Pamphilus assembled, and their statements on its contents match better than those on the authorship of the Apology. In book 6 of his Church History, which deals with Origen, Eusebius noted that he did not need to give a catalogue of Origen’s works. It would take too much space, he argued. Moreover, “I recorded it in full in my account of the life of our contemporary, the holy martyr Pamphilus. There, in order to show how zealous he was for holy things, I offered as evidence the catalogues of the library that he assembled of the works of Origen and other Christian writers. From these, anyone who wishes can gain the fullest possible knowledge of the works of Origen that have come down to us.”14 This passage suggests that Pamphilus both collected Origen’s works and drew up formal catalogues of them in the Alexandrian fashion. Jerome confirms that interpretation, and expands somewhat on it. True, he wrote the letter in which he remarked that Pamphilus “found a great many” of Origen’s works “and left us a catalogue [indicem] of his discoveries” before he came to Pales-
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a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex tine. At this point Jerome depended on Eusebius for his knowledge of Pamphilus.15 But Jerome’s brief note on Pamphilus in De viris illustribus, written when he knew the library of Caesarea at first hand, records that “the presbyter Pamphilus burned with so much love of the divine library [Scripture], that he copied the greater part of Origen’s works, as preserved down to the present in the library at Caesarea, in his own hand.”16 Presumably, too, it was from Pamphilus that Eusebius derived his habit of collecting Origen’s letters, arranging them “in separate roll containers” to protect them, and listing them.17 It also seems clear that this collection was Pamphilus’s own project. Origen may well have brought a substantial working collection of books to Caesarea, and the Hexapla certainly formed part of it there. He also had stocks of texts by Philo and others that he, like Eusebius, knew at first hand. Origen’s letter to Pope Fabian, which we have already examined, shows how much time he and his benefactor Ambrose dedicated to the preeminently bookish task of correcting manuscripts. But no evidence suggests that Origen set special store by copying his own or anyone else’s books, or that he compiled formal catalogues of his holdings. Pamphilus had to chase down and collect Origen’s writings—clear evidence that they had not been systematically collected and preserved by their author. To this extent at least, Pamphilus emerges as a distinct figure—an eager intellectual disciple who spent much of his capital and his immense energies on preserving the works of an earlier Christian writer. The wider boundaries of Pamphilus’s activities as collector and copyist remain somewhat indistinct. Jerome, for example, owned twenty-five manuscripts (volumina) with Origen’s commentary on the Minor Prophets, “written in Pamphilus’s hand.”
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e u s ebiu s at caes area He described these books as a possession that filled him with as much joy as if he had the wealth of Croesus.18 We have no way of knowing whether they were duplicates, produced by Pamphilus for some friend or benefactor, or strays from the collection at Caesarea. One bit of evidence, moreover, hints both that Pamphilus did not limit himself to collecting Origen, and that at least some of his manuscripts of other texts came from the collection of his favorite author. The acts of a supposed council held by the apostles in Antioch bear the title: “The holy martyr Pamphilus’s copy of the acts of the synod of the apostles in Antioch, that is, part of the canons of the synod, as found in the library of Origen.”19 It is at least possible that other prizes and pyrites in Pamphilus’s collection came to Caesarea in Origen’s time, passed through his hands, and inspired forgers and librarians to claim this exalted provenance for their books. In one vital respect at least, Pamphilus followed Origen’s lead as a scholar. As collector and scribe, he occupied himself intensively with the Bible. Ancient scholars who corrected manuscripts regularly entered notes, normally at the end of books or sections, in which they identified themselves and briefly—all too briefly—described what they had done to them. Normally these survive only in copies, often made hundreds of years after the activities they describe. Many manuscripts of the Greek Old and New Testaments, as well as copies of the Syro-Hexaplar, have subscriptions, and a fair number of these short and sometimes cryptic texts mention Pamphilus and his associates.20 Two of the most informative appear in one of the three great fourthcentury manuscripts of the Greek Bible, the Codex Sinaiticus. Both derive from earlier manuscripts that no longer exist, and describe the steps that Pamphilus and others took to correct
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a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex them. The shorter one, copied at the end of II Esdras in Sinaiticus sometime between the fifth and the seventh century, reads: “Collated against a very old copy corrected by the hand of the holy martyr Pamphilus. At the end of his copy appears an autograph attestation, which reads as follows: ‘Copied and corrected from the Hexapla of Origen. Antoninus collated; I, Pamphilus, corrected.’”21 The longer one, added by the same hand at the end of Esther, offers even more information: “Copied and corrected from the Hexapla of Origen, as corrected by his own hand. Antoninus, the confessor, collated; I, Pamphilus, corrected the volume in prison. . . . And if it is not bumptious to say so, it would not be easy to find a copy that comes close to this copy.”22 Several other colophons, some in manuscripts of the Greek Bible and others in manuscripts of the SyroHexaplaric text, record that Pamphilus and Eusebius worked together on the correction of texts of IV Kingdoms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Minor Prophets, Isaiah, and Ezekiel.23 These texts, of course, do not yield their secrets lightly. They were entered in the manuscripts centuries after Pamphilus, by scholars trying to emend their own copies of the biblical text, and it is not always clear which parts of the subscriptions come from the lost manuscripts of Pamphilus and which were added by their readers. Was it Pamphilus or the much later scribe who copied his subscriptions into Sinaiticus who wrote: “And if it is not bumptious to say so, it would not be easy to find a copy that comes close to this copy”? Learned opinion differs.24 When subscriptions report a given scholar’s statement that “I corrected” (Latin emendavi) a text, moreover, they indicate a process normally limited to one occasion and one book. In most cases, classical subscriptions record one or more particular schol-
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
A subscription by Pamphilus as entered in the Codex Sinaiticus, reproduced from the facsimile, Codex sinaiticvs petropolitanvs et Friderico-Avgvstanvs lipsiensis. The Old Testament preserved in the public library of Petrograd, in the library of the society of ancient literature in Petrograd, and in the library of the University of Leipzig, now reproduced in facsimile from photographs by Helen and Kirsopp Lake, with a description and introduction to the history of the Codex by Kirsopp Lake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922).
a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex ars’ effort to improve a given manuscript, by checking it against the original from which it was copied, by collating it against another manuscript, or by conjecture. In some cases Christian scholars, bent on preserving the integrity of a sacred text, went further, identifying the particular text that they had used as a standard. By doing so they claimed that they had carried out their work as Irenaeus—in a famous subscription preserved by Eusebius, and thus known in Caesarea—demanded Christian literati should: “I call upon you, who will copy this book, to swear by our lord Jesus Christ, and by his glorious advent, when he comes to judge the living and the dead, that you will collate what you transcribe and and correct it carefully against this exemplar from which you transcribe it. And in the same way you will also transcribe this oath and put it in the exemplar.”25 Eusebius cited this passage as exemplary. Modern readers, he said, would profit by seeing the “really zealous concern of the ancient, truly holy men”—the way, that is, in which they had blended piety and precision.26 This seems to have been more or less the way in which Pamphilus and his friends approached their textual work on the Bible. But the details remain a fruitful field for elaborate reconstructions that rest precariously, like inverted pyramids, on a very small basis of evidence. One standard interpretation holds that Pamphilus, or he and Eusebius, produced a recension of the Septuagint based on the fifth column of the Hexapla, which they used as a standard.27 A variation on this, which we proposed above, holds that Origen himself produced such a recension. Pamphilus and Eusebius might have taken this as their standard. One could conjecture, without too much strain, that when the two men claimed to have collated copies of the Old
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e u s ebiu s at caes area Testament books against the Hexapla, they actually meant that they had used a recension of the Septuagint derived from it. Or one could take the subscriptions literally and assume that Pamphilus and his helpers used the Hexapla itself as their standard.28 But exactly what Pamphilus did to the manuscripts of Ezra, IV Kingdoms, and other biblical books that he corrected remains unclear. Perhaps he drew individual corrections for particular, well-known controversial passages from Origen’s work. Or perhaps he actually collated each manuscript from beginning to end with the Hexapla, or with a single manuscript that contained the so-called Hexaplaric signs added by Origen to certain texts: obeli, or dashes, to identify words and phrases in the Septuagint that had no counterpart in the Hebrew, and asterisks to identify lacunae in the Septuagint that had been filled in from other sources. The terminology that Pamphilus and Eusebius used leaves vital details of their work in obscurity.29 Jerome remarked in his preface to Chronicles that three versions of the Septuagint were especially influential in the Christian world: that of Hesychius, which was popular in Egypt; that of Lucian the martyr, which found approval from Constantinople to Antioch, and a third, Palestinian text, “drawn up by Origen and disseminated by Eusebius and Pamphilus.”30 Modern scholars have modified this neat picture of three recensions, each created by a third-century martyr. Instead of a Hesychian recension, they identify a group of manuscripts as “Alexandrian” or “Egyptian.” They refer to the “Lucianic” text, more generally, as “Antiochene.” True, contemporary textual critics still see the work of Origen, Pamphilus, and Eusebius as “an unambigu-
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a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex ous work of planned revision.”31 But we may never know what precise impact the activities of Pamphilus and Eusebius had on this third family of manuscripts. Over time, a recension based on the Hexapla “dominated the field.” But as scribes omitted or mistranscribed the critical marks, the distinctions that Origen—and, presumably, Eusebius and Pamphilus—tried to preserve between the Septuagint and other versions “became blurred so that what now passed for ‘the LXX’ was in fact a badly corrupted text.”32 In these circumstances, it makes little sense to try to describe the way in which Pamphilus and Eusebius worked with a level of vividness and precision that the sources by their nature render spurious. If Pamphilus’s methods of collation and philological goals remain obscure, the flavor and texture of his everyday practices as a scholar emerge clearly from the subscriptions. It was a collaborative and specialized enterprise. Normally, Pamphilus and one other man worked together. The subscriptions in Sinaiticus, for example, say, in the voice of Pamphilus, that one Antoninus antebalen, while Pamphilus diÃrthÃsa. Antiballein, in this context, is a technical term for collation, and diorthoun for correction. In each case, Antoninus examined the Hexapla (or another base text), while Pamphilus corrected the new manuscript. As a number of scholars have shown, moreover, this process must have been oral—like most collaboration between scholars or writers and their secretaries in the ancient world.33 In a process that reversed the normal methods of authorship—in which the author spoke while a secretary wrote down what he said—Antoninus read the base text aloud, while Pamphilus followed and entered corrections in the new text. It
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e u s ebiu s at caes area seems likely that the young men who worked with Pamphilus began by reading aloud and only later, if ever, actually corrected manuscripts on their own. It is all the more suggestive, then, that when it came to IV Kingdoms, according to the Syro-Hexaplar, Pamphilus did the collating, while Eusebius corrected the text and wrote the colophon.34 Perhaps the older man chose the humbler task out of humility and respect for a specially gifted pupil. More likely he did so in order to oversee the younger man’s first efforts to prepare a new manuscript for sacred reading. If so, the collaborative work recorded in the colophons amounted to an apprenticeship in textual criticism. Over time, Pamphilus acknowledged Eusebius as a full colleague. A number of the colophons record that “Pamphilus and Eusebius corrected” or “accurately corrected” a given book or section of the Bible. Eusebius must have had this painstaking collaborative effort to control and improve the sources of religious truth in mind when he quoted the Little Labyrinth. This pamphlet denounced the Theodotians, the followers of Theodotus the Tanner, who had “critically revised” the Septuagint and the New Testament. The biblical texts that these heretics used varied so much as to condemn them: “If anyone wishes to gather the texts of each of them and to compare them with one another, he would find great discrepancies among them. For the copies of Asclepiades [i.e., those with his subscription] do not agree with those of Theodotus.”35 The critic went on to say that the clearest evidence of the Theodotians’ crime lay in the carelessness with which they had produced their biblical texts. The fact that the Theodotians could not identify, much less produce, the sources from which they worked proved that they
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a c h ris t ian impres ario of t he codex had arbitrarily changed their texts: “they cannot deny that they committed this crime, since the copies are written in their own hand. And they did not receive the Scriptures in this form from those by whom they were instructed, and they cannot produce any exemplars from which they made their copies.”36 The true Christian scholar should make clear in a colophon just what he had done to the sacred texts, and in whose company— or so at least Eusebius demanded in this polemical context, though his practices rarely if ever lived up to so high a standard.37 A range of evidence shows that Pamphilus collected and corrected manuscripts of the New Testament as well as the Old. Jerome thought, as many others have, that the original text of the Gospel of Matthew was in Hebrew, and that the Greek text in circulation was a translation by someone unknown. He noted that “the Hebrew itself has been preserved until the present day in the library at Caesarea, which Pamphilus the martyr so diligently created.”38 Eusebius made elaborate efforts to establish the canon of New Testament books, which he laid out in the Church History. These attempts to pigeonhole the sacred texts may well have rested on precedents set by Pamphilus, who must certainly have reflected at some point about the contents of the Christian segments of the “sacred Scriptures” that he gave away.39 The mysterious Euthalius, who edited the book of Acts and the Pauline Epistles, dividing them into chapters and equipping them with a biography and bibliography of Paul and a list of Old Testament quotations, claimed to have done some of his work in Caesarea, where he collated his text of Paul against a manuscript written by Pamphilus himself.40 Though it is anything but clear whether Pamphilus contributed much to
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the “Caesarean” recension of the New Testament reconstructed by modern critics, it seems certain that he applied his standard methods of collation and correction to the Gospels and other New Testament texts.41 Pamphilus, in other words, taught his younger associates to correct manuscripts of the Bible in the course of close and protracted periods of joint work. These went on not only throughout the Great Persecution, in what must have been difficult conditions, but also, famously, in confinement, during the period from 5 November 307, when Pamphilus was arrested and imprisoned, until his death in 310.42 The scholium to Esther reproduced in the Codex Sinaiticus states this explicitly: “Antoninus, the confessor, collated, and I, Pamphilus, corrected the volume in prison, by the favor and enlargement of God.” Pamphilus probably viewed this collaborative effort as far more than a set of lessons in the techniques of textual criticism. Correcting and copying central Christian texts was a religious act. Origen and Ambrose, as we have seen, treated their joint work of correction as a form of Christian asceticism, which they pursued with passion. Jerome described the texts of Origen that Pamphilus wrote as the relics of a holy martyr: “If it is happiness to possess one letter by a martyr, how much the more so to have thousands of lines, which he [Pamphilus] seems to me to have marked with the traces of his blood?”43 The young men whom Pamphilus chose for their mastery of Greek culture and initiated into the textual study of the Bible found that they had joined a sacred community. Antoninus, who helped Pamphilus correct biblical manuscripts in prison, was martyred before him. So were the brothers Apphianus and Aedesius.44 In Apphianus’s case, Eusebius describes what seems
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almost a natural transition from biblical study to martyrdom: “And after he had been with us and had been drilled in holy studies and had taken part in lessons on the sacred Scriptures by the great martyr Pamphilus, he attained a virtuous state that was far from ordinary. Once he had prepared himself in this way for the perfection of martyrdom [as the next part of the discourse will show], all who saw were amazed, all who heard were full of wonder at his boldness, his freedom of speech, his constancy, his self-control, his words to the judge, his replies, his prudence, and, beyond all these, his daring.”45 Study of the Bible with Pamphilus enabled Apphianus to lead the highest form of virtuous life—one characterized by the freedom of speech, prudence, and courage that had marked the wise man since Socrates, and that sometimes brought both pagan and Christian saints into conflict with political authority. Like Apphianus, whose studies at Berytus had given him a command of Greek culture without corrupting him, Aedesius mastered Greek learning before Pamphilus initiated him into Christian scholarship: “Even before his brother felt the love of God, his dedication to philosophy put him in the lead. For he studied all sorts of things, and mastered not only Greek paideia, but Roman as well. And he shared Pamphilus’s way of life for a long time.”46 Evidently, collaborative work on the Bible formed an organic part of a deeper and richer spiritual relationship, one in which Pamphilus offered his young disciples much more than training in the use of a set of technical tools. Late in life, at the Council of Tyre in 335, Eusebius would find himself under attack for having failed to become a martyr with Pamphilus and his friends. Pottamon, who had been in prison with Eusebius, had himself lost an eye there. He re-
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proached Eusebius for escaping “alive and without mutilation,” and accused him of having made sacrifice as Roman officials demanded.47 The criticism is harsh, and no further evidence supports it. Yet even Eusebius apparently felt a certain unworthiness as he contemplated the courage of another of Pamphilus’s helpers, Porphyry. Not yet eighteen, Porphyry appeared before the judge and demanded the bodies of Pamphilus and his fellows for burial. His reward was brutal and immediate. Porphyry died before his friends in a slow fire, after being tortured, torn, and abraded with haircloths. Eusebius—who made clear by calling himself “Pamphili” that he took his teacher as a spiritual father—showed how much he admired il miglior fabbro when he described Porphyry as “a true nursling of Pamphilus, not yet eighteen. He had become a master of the art of penmanship, and his moderation and manners were beyond praise, as was proper for the disciple of such a man.”48 The truest form of discipleship would have led Eusebius, like Porphyry, not to the episcopal throne but to the fire. Even after resisting the temptations of heroism, however, Eusebius followed in the scholarly path of his master. He applied the editorial techniques, explicit and tacit, that he learned from Pamphilus throughout his life. From the start of his career, however, Eusebius did more than ransack the materials and apply the methods that Pamphilus had used. Many of his earliest innovations had to do with the forms, as much as the content, of the books he created. Eusebius learned from the Hexapla, as we have seen, that a tabular presentation could make information take on radically new meanings. He applied this lesson to a number of problems. What first made Eusebius’s approach to
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book-making distinctively different from that of Pamphilus was the ingenuity with which he applied Origen’s provocative expedient—the use of tabular format to enable quick comparisons across the pages of a codex—to a variety of textual problems and tasks. He devised elegant new tools that made the most important texts accessible to readers. These texts brought his compilatory energy and imaginative sense of page design into play in highly creative ways, while at the same time engaging the precedents set by Origen and Pamphilus. Like Origen, Eusebius felt himself to be confronted by multiple sacred texts that somehow had to be studied together, and he found new ways to synchronize them—just as he synchronized histories in his Chronicle. Earlier Christian writers had tried to find ways to make it easier to compare the accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings in the four Gospels. Ammonius, for example, broke up the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and John and arranged extracts from them next to the parallel passages in Matthew. But this method, as Eusebius complained in a famous letter to one Carpianus, shattered the texts, making it impossible to read them in their integrity: “the continuous thread of the other three is necessarily broken, preventing a consecutive reading.” To avoid fragmenting the biblical texts, Eusebius devised a radically different approach. He divided the Gospels into numbered sections. Then he drew up ten tables, which listed parallel or related passages, first in all four Gospels, then in any three of them, then in any two, and finally set out those found in only one system. A simple, elegant system of numerical cues enabled the reader to move immediately from a passage to any parallel in any of the four Gospels:
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
A set of Eusebius’s canon tables, showing parallel passages from the Four Gospels, from a Byzantine manuscript. Princeton University Library, MS Garrett 2.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
A section of Gospel text, showing Eusebius’s canon numbers on the left margin. In the bottom three cases, the bottom number indicates the table to be consulted; the top one designates the section of text beside it. Princeton University Library, MS Garrett 2, fol. 127 recto.
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Before each section of the four Gospels stands a number in the margin, beginning with the first, then the second and third, and proceeding in order throughout until the end of the books. And underneath each number is marked a note in red, indicating in which of the ten canons the number occurs. (For example, if it is 1, it is clear that it is in the first canon; if 2, in the second; and so on as far as 10.) Hence, if you were to open any one of the four Gospels, and wish to light upon any chapter whatever, to know who else has said similar things and to find the relevant passages in which they treated of similar things, then find the number marked against the passage which you have before you, look for it in the canon which the note in red has suggested, and you will immediately learn from the headings at the start of the canon how many and which have said similar things. If you then find the numbers of the other Gospels parallel with the number which you have before you in the canon, and look for them in the appropriate places of each Gospel, you will find those passages which say similar things.49 Eusebius’s canon tables, often dazzlingly illuminated, became a standard feature of New Testament manuscripts in a number of languages and cultures.50 Another tabular device, his pinax of the Psalms, had the opposite effect. One of the techniques of classical grammatical scholarship that Origen regularly applied to the interpretation of the Bible involved identifying the prosÃpon, or persona, who was speaking in any given passage.51 Eusebius applied this principle systematically in his Psalm Tables, which dissected the Book of Psalms into the work of a series of individual speakers
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or authors, not all of whom Eusebius felt he could identify. This pinax proved considerably less popular than the Canon Tables, perhaps because he left it as a bare scholarly tool unaccompanied by clear instructions for users, unlike the Canon Tables.52 Perhaps, however, like book 1 of the Chronicle, this work marked so strenuous an effort to hold contrasting views in productive tension that it made some readers uncomfortable. But as a great specialist on early Christian books and scholarship, James O’Donnell, has pointed out, the triumphantly successful Canon Tables were extraordinarily original and effective information retrieval devices: the world’s first hot links. They enabled readers not simply to rely on memory or to use rearranged texts of the Bible, but to turn the four Gospels into a single web of cross-commentary—to move from text to text as easily as one could move from kingdom to kingdom in the Canon.53 When Eusebius modeled his Canon on the Hexapla, he was not carrying off an isolated feat of sophisticated mise-enpage. Rather, he was revealing what would become a persistent strain in his work on texts: an effort to configure them, using layout, colors of ink, and other visual clues to lead readers through them rapidly and effectively. In Eusebius’s introduction to his Canon, he proudly described how he had laid out parallel blocks of events in parallel columns for chronological clarity and easy reference. The same sensibility, the same concern for textual integrity and readers’ comfort, inspired his Canon Tables. One of Eusebius’s most intelligent and persistent students, Jerome, paid tribute to the master’s design sense in a prominent way. Eusebius had his scribes use red ink to mark the divisions of the Gospels. Jerome had the annals of the different kingdoms in the Canon written in different inks, a Eusebian trick designed
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to make the work even easier to consult.54 No early creator of codices understood more vividly than Eusebius the possibilities that the new form of the book created for effective display of texts and information. Eusebius’s ability to produce the Chronicle and the Canon and Psalm Tables—complex and demanding works, which required elaborate page layout, coordinated use of red and black ink, and continual attention to nontextual detail—reveal something vital about the culture of the library at Caesarea. The textual evidence about Pamphilus portrays him as carrying out his own scribal work, copying Origen and collating biblical manuscripts in his own hand. Evidently, however, the diocesan complex of buildings as it emerged under Eusebius’s episcopate housed something resembling a staff of scribes trained well enough to follow complex directions and produce nontraditional texts. This infrastructure played a central role in many of Eusebius’s projects. If Eusebius’s passionate interest in mise-en-page has largely escaped the attention of scholars, another central feature of his scholarly work in the next period of his life, the 310s and 320s, has fascinated them for decades. Long ago, Arnaldo Momigliano pointed out, drawing on Eduard Schwartz, that Eusebius made the direct quotation of documents, literary and archival, a central feature of his history of the church.55 This became a lasting characteristic, one that sharply distinguished ecclesiastical from civil history, which usually took the form of a narrative uninterrupted by direct quotations.56 More recently, Michael Hollerich has noted that many of Eusebius’s works—theological ones as well as historical—took the form of mosaics, fashioned
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A leaf from the chronological table of Eusebius, as translated by Jerome, in a manuscript of the fifth century ce. Note the visible underscoring that enabled the scribe to enter the complex text evenly and legibly. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MS lat. 6400 B, fol. 289 recto.
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from excerpts from earlier sources. He has portrayed Eusebius’s career, in fact, as one long adventure in systematic quotation.57 These judgments reflect Eusebius’s own statements about his methods. He emphasized more than once that the novelty of his approach to many subjects lay in his reliance on source research and his profuse citation of original texts. In the introduction to the Chronicle, for example, he emphasized that his work rested on systematic excerpting of a vast range of sources: I have gone through the varied historical works of the ancients, including the reports of the Chaldeans and Assyrians, the detailed accounts of the Egyptians, and the narratives that the Greeks present as certain—as if that were possible. These contained the dates of kings and Olympiads, that is, athletic games, and certain outstanding deeds done by barbarians and Greeks, brave men and cowards, as well as their marvelous armies, military leaders, wise men, heroes, poets, historians, and philosophers. I thought it would be proper to put all of this down in the briefest possible form, so far as it is really useful and relevant, and to add to the aforementioned the ancient history and chronology of the Hebrews, transmitted by the sacred scriptures.58 In his preface to the Church History, similarly, Eusebius claimed that his work was radically novel, and that it consisted in the creation of a particular kind of anthology: We are the first to attempt this enterprise, as if we were traveling on a deserted, unused road. We pray God to guide us and grant that we have the power of the Lord to help us, for we cannot find even the bare footprints of men 202
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who have gone down the same road before us, except some small indications, through which they have left us partial accounts of their times, each doing so in his own way. . . . Accordingly, we have gathered from the scattered records everything that we believe will be relevant to the present subject, and culled, so to speak from intellectual meadows, everything the ancient writers said that is appropriate to it. We will try by using a historical approach to make them into a coherent whole.59
Citing passages like these, scholars have long noted that Eusebius practiced an intensely book-based form of learning. Only in a major Christian collection like that of Pachomius’s monastery, partially represented by the Dishna papers, a varied collection found in Egypt, near Nag Hammadi, or that in Caesarea— a collection that included biblical texts, early Christian writings, and a fair number of pagan texts as well—could the Chronicle have been produced.60 That sufficiently explains why “the documentary and archival character” of Eusebius’s work, as it took shape in the bookish surroundings we have come to know, makes his writings “treasure troves for scholars on the trail of lost or fragmentary works.”61 In fact, Eusebius’s method, as well as his library, had particular, local roots in Caesarea. For Pamphilus did more than correct and meditate over the contents of his library. He thought hard about how to apply his books effectively in a polemic against Christian adversaries. Origen’s enemies, Pamphilus noted, told other Christians not even to read his writings, as if they lacked the good moneychanger’s knack for telling good specie from bad.62 In fact, however, their attacks missed virtually all their marks. These critics claimed that humble Christians were treat203
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23. In what follows, “Syh” designates texts translated from the subscriptions in the Syro-Hexaplar. The evidence is handily collected by Devreesse 1954, 123–124, and Nautin 1977, 322–324: III Reg. (Syh = Mercati 38–39): “Sumptus est hic liber . . . ex Hexa-
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n ot es to page 1 85 plo, h.e. sex columnis, bibliothecae Caesareae Palestinensis; et collatus est cum exemplari in quo subsignatum erat sic: EësÁbiov diórjwsa öv «kribøv Ãdun©mhn.” IV Reg. (Syh = Mercati 39–43): “Sumpta est haec quoque . . . ex libro Heptaplorum, h.e. septem columnarum bibliothecae Caesareae Palaestinae . . . Et collatus est accurate cum exemplari septem columnarum, cui subscripta erant haec: Quartus Regnorum secundum Septuaginta, isque accurate emendatus. Eusebius emendavi, Pamphilo collationem instituente.” “This book was also drawn . . . from the book of the Heptapla (that is, of the 7 columns) from the library of Caesarea in Palestine . . . And it was carefully collated with an exemplar in 7 columns with the following subscription: Fourth Book of Kingdoms according to the Seventy, corrrected with great care. I, Eusebius, corrected, Pamphilus having done the collation.” Proverbs (Syh = Mercati 43–44): MetelÔmfjhsau kaÊ «nteblÔjhsan aÌ ParoimÉai «pã «kriboív «ntigr©fou, Ãn Œ paretÁjhsan kaÊ Ãgr©fhsan Ãn toÍv metwpÉoiv sxâlia xeirÊ PamfÉlou kaÊ EësebÉou, Ãn Œ kajupetÁtakto taíta· MetelÔmfjhsan «f’ ún eÔromen ‘Ecapløn ’WrigÁnouv. KaÊ p©lin· aëtoxeirÊ PamfÉlou kaÊ EësebÉou diwrjósanto. “The Proverbs were copied and collated from an accurate copy, in which scholia were placed and written in the margins by the hand of Pamphilus and Eusebius, and in which were these words: ‘Copied from the Hexapla of Origen that we found.’ And, again, ‘corrected in their own hand by Pamphilus and Eusebius.’” Ecclesiastes (Syh = Mercati 44–45, at 45): “Adnotatum erat in libro graeco . . . ’EkklhsiastÕv åmoÉwv metelÔmfjh «pã toí aëtoí «ntigr©fou, Ãn Œ kaÊ oÌ loipoÊ [tfi loipfi] ÃfecÙv paretÁjhsan. kaÊ p©lin xeirÊ toí ®gÉou PamfÉlou taíta· P©mfilov kaÊ EësÁbiov diwrjósamen.” Cantica (Syh = Mercati 45–46): “Desumptus est ex Hexaplis, qualia ea reperimus, Origenis secundum versionem reliquorum et iterum manu nostra nosmet Pamphilus et Eusebius correximus.”
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not es to pages 1 85 –1 87 “‘Taken from the Hexapla or Origen, as we found them, according to the translation of the others,’ and again, in their own hand, ‘We, Pamphilus and Eusebius, corrected.’” Minor Prophets (Syh = Mercati, 46): MetelÔmfjhsan oÌ dódeka profÙtai Ãk tøn katfi tfiv Ãkdâseiv tetrapløn. P©mfilov kaÊ EësÁbiov «kribøv diórjwsan. “Copied from the Tetrapla according to the editions. Pamphilus and Eusebius corrected accurately.” Isaiah (Marchalianus = Mercati, 8): MetelÔmfjh å ÖsaÇav Ãk tøn katfi tfiv Ãkdâseiv Äcapløn: «nteblÔjh d kaÊ prãv Èteron Äcaploín. (Syh = Mercati, 10, 29): MetelÔmfjh kaÊ paretÁjh «pã «ntigr©fou ’EusebÉou kaÊ PamfÉlou, Ò kaÊ aëtoÊ diwrjósanto Ãk tÙv bibliojÔkhv ’WrigÁnouv. Ezechiel (Marchalianus = Nautin 1977, 323: MetelÔmfjh «pã tøn katfi tfiv Ãkdâseiv ‘Ecapløn kaÊ diwrjójh «pã tøn ’WrigÁnouv aëtoí Tetrapløn, Àtina kaÊ aëtoí xeirÊ diórjwto kaÊ Ãsxoliogr©fhto, èjen EësÁbiov Ãgô tfi sxâlia parÁjhka. P©mfilov kaÊ EësÁbiov diwrjósanto. “Copied from the Hexapla according to the editions and corrected from Origen’s own Tetrapla, which was corrected and annotated in his hand. I Eusebius added the scholia from this source. Pamphilus and Eusebius corrected.”
24. Mercati 1941, 19–20, denies that Pamphilus would have boasted of the quality of his work, and notes that a later scribe might more plausibly have marveled at the wonderful manuscript prepared by the martyr Pamphilus. Skeat 1956, 194, takes the sentence as by Pamphilus. Mercati’s reasoning seems more plausible—especially in the light of the fact that Pamphilus’s other colophons all end with the sentence that identifies him and his associates as the ones who did the actual work. On the other hand, the special circumstances involved in working in prison could have provoked Pamphilus to vary his usual practice. 25. Eusebius, HE 5.20.2. See the erudite and precise survey by Pecere 1986, 24–26. Irenaeus’s subscription reappears in Latin in
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not es to pages 1 87 –1 91 Jerome, De viris illustribus 35, with a slight alteration, and elsewhere. See also Gamble 1995, 114–116, 123–125. Further important studies, the results of which differ sharply, include Zetzel 1973, 1980, and 1981, Timpanaro 1986, and Cameron forthcoming. 26. Eusebius, HE 5.20.3. 27. See e.g. Soisalon-Soininen 1959. 28. Since we take it that the Septuagint text in the Hexapla was not itself the result of a new recension of the text, but part of the material Origen used for that recension. 29. As textual critics in modern times have regularly complained, their voices rising slightly as they explain the difficulties of working out how much of the Hexapla has entered the “Hexaplaric” form of the text that descends from Caesarea. For a manuscript with the Hexaplaric signs, see e.g. Leiden University Library Vossianus gr. Q 8; Metzger 1981, 38, 70. On the nature of the additions marked with asterisks see Soisalon-Soininen 1959. 30. Jerome, Praefatio in Paralipomena (PL 28, 1392A–1393A): “Alexandria et Aegyptus in Septuaginta suis Hesychium laudant auctorem; Constantinopolis usque ad Antiochiam Luciani martyris exemplaria probat; mediae inter has provinciae Palaestinos codices legunt, quos ab Origene elaboratos Eusebius et Pamphilus vulgaverunt, totusque orbis hac inter se trifaria varietate compugnat.” 31. Dines 2004, 95–96. 32. Dines 2004, 102. 33. See generally Small 1997 and Van den Hoek 1996, and for this particular case the superb studies of Skeat 1956 and Petitmengin and Flusin 1984. Cf. also Teitler 1985. 34. Petitmengin and Flusin 1984, 250 and n. 35: “Eusebius emendavi Pamphilo collationem instituente”; cf. Mercati 1941, 39. 35. Eusebius, HE 5.28.16. 36. Eusebius, HE 5.28.18. 37. See Schöne 1939; Metzger 1980, 196–197; Metzger 1992, 150– 151. 38. Jerome, De viris illustribus 3.2; 1999, 10: “Porro ipsum hebrai-
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