The , Volume 1 questions on the Octateuch

Introduction to the Greek Text (J.F.P.)

INTRODUCTION TO THE GREEK TEXT J. F. P. .      The present edition of Theodoret’s Quaest. in oct. is only the fifth since the invention of movable type. The editio princeps appeared in , the first more-or-less complete edition in , and the first fully critical edition in . Our own editio minor improves upon this last. A. The Editio princeps The complete text of the Quaest. became available in print in several steps. The first was the editio princeps of the French scholar J. Picot (Ioannes Picus).1 In a note to the reader dated February , , Picot explained that he had made use of a single very defective manuscript, whose purveyor he vaguely named as Asulanus Venetus (Cum huius operis vnicum.......exemplar Graecum ab Asulano Veneto nactus essem).2 As F. Petit has shown, this manuscript must have lvii . Fernández Marcos and Sáenz-Badillos incorrectly refer to him (p. xxvii) as Pic. F. Petit reports (Catenae, vol. , p. xli, note ) that she found a notice regarding Picot in J.P. Nicéron, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des hommes illustres dans la république des lettres. This mentions that he was a priest who employed his free time in producing Latin and French translations of Greek patristic texts and lists nine titles, including other editions, that appeared between  and , the year of his death. I have not been able to verify this information from the  volumes of Nicéron’s work dated  and the single supplementary volume from  that are available at the Library of Congress. . Sirmond (v. sec. C below) reproduces Picot’s remarks on the fourteenth unnumbered page following the frontispiece. been brought to Paris by Giovanni Francesco d’Asola, the brotherin -law of the great Venetian printer of classical texts, Aldus Manutius . D’Asola’s manuscript, probably purchased with numerous other Greek and Latin codices by the royal library at Fontainebleau in , has not been recognized in any extant book.3 If, as seems likely, it was used as printer’s copy, it may well have been destroyed in the process of producing the printed edition. Nonetheless, in a piece of excellent philological detective work, Petit has been able to prove that the asulanus must have been a descendent of two other manuscripts , both still extant. For Qq. – on Gn, it must have reproduced the tradition preserved in Madrid, Bibl. Nac.  (th c.), and for the rest of the Qq. on Gn through Q.  on Jgs, that preserved in Vat., gr.  (th c. = c). Thus, the asulanus was a late and derivative witness to the text.4 Worse, it was incomplete in two ways. For most of its text an apograph of the defective c, and itself perhaps only a mangled copy of that, it lacked the general preface, Q.  on Gn, part of Q.  on Jgs, all of Qq. – on Jgs, and the two questions on Ruth.5 Second, this branch of the tradition contains a recension of the Qq. on Gn – that is characterized by frequent abbreviation of the text.6 Picot was able to restore the answer to the first Q. on Gn and the missing part of the twentieth on Jgs by reference to another royal manuscript containing a Greek exegetical chain.7 He must have suspected that, even so, the work remained incomplete, because he noted that, Introduction to the Greek Text lviii . V. Petit, Catenae, vol. , p. xlii, note . Thus asulanus venetus was Picot’s identification of the man who brought the manuscript to Fontainebleau, not his denomination of the manuscript itself, as Fernández Marcos and Sáenz-Badillos imply (p. xxvii): [Picus] “alude al ‘asulano veneto,’ no conocido, del que saca el texto .” Nonetheless, I shall follow these editors and Petit (e.g., the stemma, p. li), in applying this convenient label to Picot’s manuscript. . Petit, Catenae, vol. , pp. xli–xlv, xlviiif., li, liii. . Ibid., pp. xxxiii–xxxvii. . v. Petit, Catenae, vol. , pp. xxxi, lviii, note , and xcviiif. . Picot drew his supplements from the present Paris, Bibl. Nat. gr. –, in which Theodoret’s first question has been replaced by a citation of Gn .; v. ib., pp. xlii–xlv. though entitled Questions on the Octateuch, in its present form, it offered comment only on the first seven books of the Old Testament. Though shorter than it should have been, Picot’s edition also contained interpolated passages belonging to fathers other than Theodoret . These, twelve...