Der Römerbriefkommentar des Origenes: Kritische Ausgabe der Übersetzung des Rufins. Buch 1-3 (review)

Already preceded by the necessary prolegomena in Der Römerbrieftext des Rufin und seine Origenes-Übersetzung (Freiburg: Herder, 1985), this volume is the first portion of the full critical edition of the text itself. To follow are volumes containing books 4-6 and 7-10 of Rufinus of Aquileia's translation and abridgement of Origen's original Greek commentary on Romans in 15 books. A fourth volume will contain the Greek fragments as well as indices to the entire edition. Further, the editor has announced that she is preparing a separate English translation of the commentary. This combination of prolegomena, critical text and translation will be the result of many years of work in a project which goes back at least to her 1965 Cambridge dissertation on the manuscript-tradition of Origen-Rufinus on Romans. A series of JTS articles has marked her progress in the intervening years. The present volume is a handsome first-fruits of this labor and an impressive testimony to meticulous scholarship on a complex text.

Indeed, until the present, the existing editions of Origen-Rufinus on Romans have been a classic example of the gross inadequacy of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century printings of patristic texts. The standard editions of the Maurists Charles and Charles Vincent Delarue (1759, reprinted in Migne, PG 14) and of C. H. E. Lommatzsch (1832) are based on a small number of late, heavily contaminated manuscripts and exhibited little in the way of scientific acumen in the selection of readings (cf. Bammel's discussion in JTS 16 [1965] 338-357). At the same time, it has been known for a long while that a much larger stock of sources was available for collation and use in a critical edition. The discovery of the Tura papyrus with its large fragment of the Greek text, along with some enrichment of the long-known Greek catena-fragments, helped pave the way, as has, I believe, the much increased interest in patristic exegesis since the second world war. Further help in purifying the lemmata has come from the work of A. Souter and H.-J. Vogel on the Old Latin and Vulgate texts of the NT. The appearance in recent years of many more critical editions of the work of both Origen and Rufinus has contributed as well to the "fullness of time" for the present edition.

The archetype for books 1-5 is a ninth-century semi-uncial manuscript, now found in the city library of Lyons. Bammel describes the manuscript families, both descended from and independent of the archetype. Her printed text is the archetype as it has been corrected from the independent tradition, from the Greek fragments and from the emendations introduced by medieval copyists. Each page of printed text has the following features: section and subsection numbers of Rufinus' capitulation, indication of the section of Romans being commented upon, the text itself with marginal notations of the corresponding page numbers in Migne and Lommatzsch, a list of the witnesses with note of any omissions or dislocations in specific witnesses, a full primary apparatus of the Latin tradition, a listing of any Greek fragments that seem relevant to the section, and a secondary apparatus with scripture-references, references to others of Origen's works, references to the "indirect tradition" of using Origen-Rufinus in later commentaries, and references to a rich selection of other patristic, late-Roman and rabbinic texts. The sheer volume of critical (and potentially exegetical) information contained on each page of this edition is enormous and is sure to serve as an inducement to further scholarship. A random comparison of this edition with that of Lommatzsch detected from six to twelve differences in the text for each page, many minor but a number of substantive value.

One particular complexity in the production of a critical text of a patristic commentary is the matter of constructing...