Bibliotheca divina: Filologia e storia dei testi cristiani (review)

The present volume is a history of the transmission and interpretation of ancient Christian texts. It is written at the introductory level, and Vian presents it as something of an equivalent for the field of patristic philology of the classic work of Leighton Reynolds and Nigel Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, first published in 1968. But what precisely does Vian mean by what he calls "filologia patristica" and "filologia dei testi cristiani," expressions which, so he states in his preface (11-12), he regards as synonymous? The first chapter of the book is dedicated to this question, and it allows us to appreciate better Vian's conception of the discipline of patristic philology, which certainly differs from the one current in North America. He views this discipline more broadly as the "philology of Christian texts," and, accordingly, he includes within the latter category both the Old and the New Testaments and the corpus of Judeo-Hellenistic literature (19–20). Vian justifies this by pointing to the first "patrology," namely, Jerome's De viris illustribus, in which biblical and Judeo-Hellenistic authors were included together with the later ecclesiastical writers. As he sees it, a clear and meaningful distinction between the study of biblical texts and the study of patristic literature is a post medieval development, and disregarding that distinction will allow for a better understanding of Christian philology, at least as practiced in the early period.

More generally, a comparison of the subject matter of Scribes and Scholars with that of the present work may help us to gain insight into the special perspective that Vian brings to the topic. In the subtitle of that work, "A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature," one, of course, needs to supply mentally an additional adjective, such as "profane" or, as we say now, "pagan," before the word "Literature." Conversely, in Vian's subtitle, one should best supply the words "greci e latini" after "testi cristiani." For although he does provide some brief discussions related to the transmission of the Hebrew Bible and patristic texts composed in oriental languages, the primary focus of the book is Christian texts in Greek and Latin. In other words, Vian envisions in the first instance the entire corpus of Greek and Latin literature as it has actually come down to us in manuscript form rather than as separately edited texts.

From this perspective of the history of transmission, and, one might add, of interpretation, the Greek and Latin biblical texts are understood not so much as translations of a Hebrew Old Testament, or as its New sequel that happens to be written in Greek, but as part of the greater Greco-Latin corpus. And in this sense they clearly belong with the patristic texts rather than with the pagan texts treated by Reynolds and Wilson. Indeed, this same vision of the material emerges from Vian's source for the book's title (see p. 11), viz., Jerome's Ep. 34.1 (2 Macc. 2.13 may have been Jerome's inspiration in this passage). Here the Dalmatian scholar refers to the library of Caesarea as parallel to that of Alexandria under Demetrius of Phalerum with the implicit notion of a dichotomy of the Greek literary corpus into Christian and "profane." Similarly, the scholarly accomplishments of the person who emerges as the "hero" of this volume, Giovanni Mercati, reflect this same comprehensive vision of the discipline Vian terms "philology of Christian texts."

The book is structured as a historical narrative in a fashion similar to that of Scribes and Scholars. After the introductory chapter on the nature of patristic philology, Vian provides a general survey of the formation of the Christian biblical corpus (ch. 2) and a treatment of Christian literary culture before Origen (ch. 3). The following three chapters (4-6) are dedicated to Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome, respectively, and...