In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Die neuen Psalmenhomilien: Eine kritische Edition des Codex Monacensis Graecus 314 ed. by Lorenzo Perrone
  • Peter W. Martens
Lorenzo Perrone, ed., with Marina Molin Pradel, Emanuela Prinzivalli and Antonio Cacciari
Die neuen Psalmenhomilien: Eine kritische Edition des Codex Monacensis Graecus 314
Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte, Neue Folge 19 (Origenes Werke XIII)
Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015
Pp. IX + 641. $196.00.

In the spring of 2012, Marina Molin Pradel made a remarkable discovery in the Staatsbibliothek in Munich. Pradel was tasked with producing a new catalog of some of its Greek manuscripts—a long undertaking, in which a team of scholars will ultimately replace the catalog produced over two hundred years ago by Ignatio Hardt (a digitized version of this older catalog is available on the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek website). When Pradel’s research took her to Codex [End Page 628] Graecus 314, a twelfth-century manuscript that contains 29 anonymous Greek homilies on the Psalms, her attention was piqued by the fact that this collection included the text of four of the five Origenian homilies on Psalm 36 that Rufinus had translated into Latin (and which we still possess today). Moreover, she noticed that the other homilies transmitted by Codex Graecus 314 corresponded to a large extent to the catalog of Origen’s sermons on the Psalms that Jerome listed in his Epistula 33. With the help of a team of scholars, Lorenzo Perrone set himself the task of editing this manuscript. The critical edition here under review, the editio princeps of Codex Graecus 314, was published less than three years after the discovery of these homilies. Joseph Trigg is preparing an English translation for the Fathers of the Church series.

The edition is prefaced with four introductory chapters. The first by Perrone briefly describes the circumstances under which Codex Graecus 314 was discovered and identifies a series of external and internal criteria that point to Origenian authorship and what we can learn about Origen from these new homilies. There are some interesting discoveries. For instance, Origen admits that he has become more circumspect about his “flight to the tropological meaning” of passages, now holding himself more closely to the wording of passages (Hom. 76 in Ps. III.2); he acknowledges a bishop who has heard him preach and praised his words (Hom. 67 in Ps. I.1); there is also a reference to his youth in Alexandria, where he remarks about the lack of qualified ecclesiastical teachers and the schools of “heretics” who flourished there (Hom. 77 in Ps. II.4). The next chapter by Pradel offers an abbreviated catalog entry of Codex Graecus 314, describing its contents, physical description, scribal characteristics, provenance, and binding. Next, Emanuela Prinzivalli analyzes Rufinus’s method of translation, which can now be fruitfully compared against his Greek original. (The appendix of this edition prints in parallel columns Rufinus’s four Latin homilies that now have a corresponding Greek text.) In the final section of the introduction Perrone lays out the principles of the current edition. A few points are worth drawing to the reader’s attention: text is printed in bold where it coincides with material attributed to Origen in the catenae on the Psalms (the apparatus identifies the editions or manuscripts from which these catenae fragments are drawn); the apparatus also identifies passages in other Origenian works that parallel what we find in these homilies; finally, the apparatus signals some of Origen’s sources, mainly Philo, and a few later authors who drew inspiration from his work on the Psalms, chiefly Eusebius, Didymus, and Jerome. The volume closes with black-and-white images of three folios, and a number of indices of passages: scriptural, Origenian, and those from other ancient authors.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this manuscript discovery. For a discovery of similar magnitude for the study of Greek early Christianity we are required to look back over seventy years to the Tura papyrus find, where a number of Origen and Didymus’s previously lost works were uncovered. Prior to the discovery of the 29 homilies in Munich, all that survived of Origen’s enormous work on the Psalms were Rufinus’s translation of...

pdf

Share