Eusebius of Caesarea, Gospel Problems and Solutions Quaestiones ad Stephanum et Marinum (review)

This work edited by Roger Pearse fills a true gap. It makes readily available the subsisting traditions of the Questions and Answers on the Gospelsby Eusebius, publishing their original text together with their first English translation. This is a relatively unknown work by the famous bishop of Caesarea: it concerns the exegesis of the gospels and is probably the very first Christian book written in a questions-and-answers form. Eusebius briefly asks questions on problematic sections of the gospels and then gives ample and documented answers to solve such problems. The first part of this book deals mainly with the two genealogies of Jesus, which greatly differ between Matthew and Luke. The second part of the work discusses the contradictions among the four gospels in the narratives of Jesus' resurrection.

Although the original form of Questions and Answers as written by Eusebius is lost, we still have many textual remains of it. There is, first of all, a Greek "abridged selection" of this book. We have further some very important Greek fragments preserved in the catenaon Luke by Nicetas of Herakleia, containing many sections of the text otherwise lost. Finally, we have some other minor textual traditions, either in Greek or in other ancient languages. Before the publication of this book (which in fact appeared in June 2011), all these fragmentary traditions were published in several books or journals and were not easily available.

Roger Pearse has collected all the testimonies that exist in printed form, reprinting their original texts together with an English translation. For some of the testimonies here edited, this is even the first translation ever made in any modern language. This book tries also to do something more than merely collect and translate the known sources: it proposes dozens of corrections to the Greek texts (by David Miller) and identifies a possible new Greek fragment (Pearse actually proposes thirteen additional fragments, but they were already known [except p. 168 n. 23]). The corrections proposed to the Greek are always interesting, although they may represent a step back in the textual criticism of this text, as they sometimes adopt a lectio facilior(an example, p. 77 n. 56) or even mix different textual traditions (this goes in both senses between the "selection" and Nicetas, cf. p. 21 n. 6 or 147 n. 8). Concerning the fragments in other languages, this volume translates the well-known Latin allusions from Jerome and Ambrose (not a true textual tradition for me). It translates then three oriental versions of this text: Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic. The Syriac tradition is well known and has been reprinted here only in its major manuscript, an appendix to the Syriac catenaon the gospels by Severus of Antioch, which has also been vocalized by Adam McCollum. Furthermore, two new Syriac fragments have been published (n. 13-14, p. 344-48). The Coptic and Arabic fragments represent one of the more interesting contributions of this volume, as both of these textual traditions have not been taken into account up to now in studies devoted Eusebius's Questions(although Caubet Iturbe, the editor of the Arabic version, correctly indicated this source already in 1970). The Arabic is a thirteenth-century translation of the Coptic text, which is itself a translation from a Greek catenaor, perhaps more correctly, from a Monophysite dogmatic florilegium (on this point one can refer to the article by G. Dorival in Studia Patristica15 [1984]). All twenty-two new fragments attributed to Eusebius from these two versions are edited and translated here (Carol Downer and others for the Coptic, and Adam McCollum for the Arabic, here unvocalized), but only five of them are actually from the Questions: Coptic 1 (= Arabic 1), 4, and 6 (= Arabic 5).

This book is unfortunately not informative about all these different textual traditions, their status, and their historical development. It even...