placing Leon Palimpsest, Freisinger Fragment, Speculum et al as Old Latin, Vulgate, hybrid

Steven Avery

Administrator
In 1875/1876 Leo Ziegler published fragments from a manuscript that contained the Heavenly & EarthlyWitnesses. Ziegler dated the Latin of these fragments as before the time of Jerome (Old Latin : Itala). The factthat these verses existed in this complete form before Jerome’s Vulgate demonstrated again, that thedevelopment theory was completely wrong and the age of these verses was earlier than any of the critics hadimagined. Ziegler’s find and publication was reviewed and celebrated


at Freising, in Bavaria. The editor, Dr. Ziegler, calls them Fragments of the Versio Itala, by which
he means ’’antehieronymian", or anterior to the Vulgate of Jerome. What gives special interest
to the discovery of the Freisinger Fragment is that it contains, after the Pauline Epistles and that
to the Hebrews, a portion of the First Epistle of John, chap. iii. 8 to verse 9, just including the
text of the Heavenly Witnesses. In the days when the contest among critics over this famous text still
 
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