And it seems to follow, with scarcely less certainty----
5. That Caius accepted the Fourth Gospel as St. John's.
6. As a further result, we may add, that the theory of Lipsius concerning the relation between the Panarion of Epiphanius and the lost Refutation of the Thirty-two Heresies of Hippolytus, has received independent and strong confirmation from our fourth extract.
But the farther question, whether Caius went to such |409 lengths in his condemnation of the Apocalypse as to assign it to Cerinthus, is not decided by any of these extracts. It is, at least, a possible hypothesis that Cerinthus may have written a pseudo-Apocalypse, containing previsions of a millennium of carnal pleasures; and that Caius, in his anti-millennarian over-zeal, may have rejected both Apocalypses, the genuine and the spurious alike,----the former for
the reasons assigned in the Barsalibaean extracts, namely, that it contravened those Books of the New Testament which he accepted asbeyond question genuine----the latter on the ground stated in his Dialogue, as cited by Eusebius, that its promises were addressed to the baser part of man. It is unfortunate that the introduction prefixed by Barsalibi to this work has reached us in such a mutilated state that little light is thrown by it on the points which are in doubt. The fragment that remains of it merely exhibits a brief notice of the opinions for and against the Johannine authorship, the writers mentioned being Eusebius, Dionysius of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus. It breaks off in the middle of a sentence in which 'John the Presbyter' is suggested as the possible author.
The MS. whence I have derived the Syriac text which I print at the end of this article was acquired by the British Museum, in 1830, as part of the Rich collection, and is classed as 'Rich 7185.' It is a small quarto, written on cotton paper, apparently of the fourteenth century. It |410 contains a series of brief commentaries on the Apocalypse, the Acts, the Catholic Epistles, and the Epistles of St. Paul, ending with Hebrews. The second and third leaves only are missing, but of the first leaf nearly half has been torn away, vertically. Its recto is blank, and its verso exhibits the superscription of the book, and the fragment above mentioned of the introduction. The fourth leaf (now numbered 2) begins in the middle of the comment on Rev. iv. 3. The first three chapters, including the Epistles to the Seven Churches, must therefore have been very briefly noticed, or (more probably) passed over without comment. In the Bodleian there is another, and perhaps earlier, copy of the same Commentary, in the MS. Bodl. Or. 560 (small folio, on cotton paper), which, however, has suffered far more severely from the effects of decay or injury. Several leaves are missing at the beginning, so that more than half the Commentary on the Apocalypse (which in this MS. likewise stands first ) has perished, and of our five passages, the last only survives----that relating to Rev. xx. 2, 3. I have collated it, and find that its variations from the text of Rich 7185 are very minute. I have recorded them, so far as they are of any value, in the notes on that passage.
Except in the cases indicated in the notes, I have been content, in printing these extracts, to follow the MSS., without attempting to correct inconsistencies in the use of the diacritical and other points. |411
[pp.411-416 containing Syriac text, and 417 (textual notes) are omitted]
[I have not thought it worth while to record the variations of Rich in transliterating the name Hippolytus. ]
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE.
A few points of affinity between the foregoing extracts and the known writings of Hippolytus may be here noted.
(1). The replies to Caius, in I. and II., are paralleled by the discussion of Genesis xlix. 6, in the treatise De Consummatione Mundi, c. 19 ; where the argument turns similarly on the distinction between τὸ μερικὸν and τὸ καθ' ὅλου . (Lagarde, p. 103.)
(2). In V., the explanation of the "thousand years" harmonizes with (in fact, is implied in) the signification given to the "seventh day," in cc. 4-6 of the Chisian fragment of the Comm. in Danielem, and in both places the saying, "one day is as a thousand years," is adduced (with slight variation) ( ib. p. 153.)
(3). In V., again, we find the same remarkable application of Isai. xxvi. 10 as in De Antichristo, c. 63 ( ib. p. 33.)
(4). But on the other hand the interpretation of the binding of the "strong man" (St. Matth. xii. 29), in this same extract, does not well agree with the use of that text in Comm. in Dan., c. 18 ( ib. p. 158.)
JOHN GWYNN.
July, 1888.
END OF VOL. VI.
Printed by P ONSONBY and W ELDRICK , Dublin.
HIPPOLYTUS ON ST. MATTHEW XXIV. 15-22.
IN a Paper which appeared in the last number of Hermathena (Vol. VI, pp. 397-418) I gave some extracts from the unpublished Commentary of Dionysius Barsalibi on the Apocalypse, being controversial passages which that writer professes to have derived from a treatise of Hippolytus----no doubt, his lost Heads against Caius. As a sequel to that Paper, I now offer another extract: from the same Commentary, purporting to contain a summary of the interpretation of the passage, St. Matth. xxiv. 15-22, given by Hippolytus, apparently in some other of his writings which has not reached us.
VI. It is as follows : ----
[ Rev. xi. 2:
And the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months ]
(Ms. Rich. 7185, f. 5v, line 10)