After in fact we finished the exposition of the gospels, o our brother, on a grand scale and very clearly, we were prepared to attempt an explication of the Apocalypse of John the Evangelist. However you, dear readers, with those who incite spiritual petitions, please utter prayers on behalf of Dionysius the pilgrim, so that you also may be saved.
In the beginning of the text, we say that many masters have doubted concerning the Apocalpyse of John and said that it is not his. And this Eusebius of Caesarea expounds in the book The Church or The Church History . For Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria says: The Apocalypse is not by the apostle John, but by another John, a presbyter, who used to live in Asia; for they are not of the same type, that is species of text, in the Gospel and the Apocalypse. And John nowhere in the Gospel mentions his name; but here, at the start and end of the Apocalypse he gives his name. And we declare that we have received from our Lord his revelation, who wrote it. Bishop Irenaeus and Hippolytus of Bosra say that the Apocalypse is by John the Evangelist and was revealed to him at the end of the reign of Domitian. Also Eusebius of Caesarea assents to these things and immediately says: If anyone does not admit that the Apocalypse is by John the apostle, the evangelist, we say: therefore it is by John the presbyter, who lived in the time of John the apostle. And there are two sepulchers in Asia, one of the evangelist and the other of the presbyter John.
Hippolytus of Rome said : A man appeared, by name Caius, who used to assert that the Gospel was not by John, nor the Apocalypse, but that they are by the heretic Cerinthus. And against this Caius the blessed Hippolytus rose up and demonstrated that the teaching of John, in the Gospel and in the Apocalypse, was one thing, and that of Cerinthus another.
This Cerinthus indeed used to teach circumcision, and was angry against Paul, because he did not circumcise Titus, and he calls the apostle and his disciples in some of his letters "false apostles and workers-for-hire". He also used to teach that the world was created by angels; and that our Lord was not born from a virgin, and the importance (?) of food and drink, and many blasphemies.
The Gospel and Apocalypse of John [both?] follow the plan of the Scriptures ; therefore they are liars who say that the Apocalypse is not by John the apostle. However we agree with Hippolytus. Also there testify that the Apocalypse is by John the evangelist: St.Cyril, and Mar Severus, and all the Doctors [of the church], who adduce witnesses in their books, but also [Gregory] Theologus in the valedictory oration adduces an argument from this and says: "In the way that John teaches me by his revelation: 'take away the way from my people and these stones'...", where he calls heretics and their doctrine "stones".
(Cyril=Cyril of Alexandria, Mar Severus = Severus of Antioch, Theologus = Gregory Nazianzen).
Bar-Salibi, Commentary on the Four Gospels
Charles E. Hill mentioned that further information about Gaius was available from a further work of Dionysius, although his comments were rather too compressed:
Another advance, however, came in 1895, when Rendel Harris reported the existence of another fragment from bar Salibi, this one in a Latin translation made by Dudley Loftus in the seventeenth century ( Bodleian Fell 6 and 7) from a now lost Syriac manuscript of bar Salibi's Commentary on the Gospel of John . In this work Gaius is recorded as criticizing the author of the Fourth Gospel with one of the same objections which Epiphanius had attributed to the Alogi.[22] 'A certain heretic Gaius criticized John because he did not agree with his fellow evangelists who say [emend to: in that he says] that after the baptism he went to Galilee and performed the miracle of the wine at Cana' (John 2:1-11).[23]
This, at last, appeared to establish that Gaius had also opposed the Fourth Gospel—though doubts were still possible for the sceptic, for Loftus's translation of the name of Gaius was evidently based on a Syriac text which included it only as 'added in the margin by a later hand'![24] Another Syriac copy of the text discovered later ( British Museum Add. 12,143) in fact did not include the name of the heretic.[25] The objection is followed in the commentary, however, by a reply from Hippolytus, as in the extracts from the Commentary on Revelation . In any case, Harris's discovery was corroborated when T. H. Robinson in 1906 discovered and published a manuscript of bar Salibi's Commentary on Revelation which contained its prologue (missing in the manuscript used by Gwynn), in which bar Salibi explicitly named Gaius as one who attributed both Johannine works to Cerinthus.[26] 'Hippolytus of Rome states that a man named Gaius had appeared, who said that neither the Gospel nor yet the Revelation was John's; but that they were the work of Cerinthus the heretic. And the blessed Hippolytus opposed this Gaius, and showed that the teaching of John in the Gospel and Revelation was different from that of Cerinthus.'[27]
[22] J. R. Harris, Hermas in Arcadia and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1896), 48-9.
[23] Text from an unpublished Syriac MS, Cod. Paris. syr. 67, fol. 270, r°, col. 2, contained in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, tr. by Smith, 'Gaius', 200-1, 591.
[24] Smith, 'Gaius', 201. That MS is Cod. Mus. Britt. Add. 7184, fo. 2432.
[25] Cf. Brent, Hippolytus , 145.
[26] T. H. Robinson, 'The Authorship of the Muratorian Canon', The Expositor , 7/1 (1906), 481-95.
[27] Ibid. 487. Dionysius' commentary was finally published in full in 1909 (I. Sedlacek).
Sedlacek = Dionysius bar Salibi In Apocalypsim, Actus et Epistulas Catholicas Part: [1]: [Syriac text] / edidit I. Sedlácek. Series: Corpus scriptorum Christianorum orientalium ; vol.53. Publisher: Parisiis : E Typographeo Reipublicae, 1909. Physical desc.: 170p ; 25cm. Note: Syriac text and Latin translation. Other Names: Sedlácek, Jaroslav, 1860-1925.
Brent = Alan Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century: Communities in Tension before the Emergence of a Monarch-Bishop , VCSuppl. 31 (Leiden, 1995).
Smith = Smith, Joseph Daniel. Title: Gaius and the Controversy Over the Johannine Literature [microform]. Notes: UMI80-11552 Dissertation: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, Department of Religious Studies, 1979.
Hill was mistaken in supposing that the manuscript used by Loftus was lost. In Harris, Hermas in Arcadia , it states that the manuscript is now in Trinity College Dublin. An email to their library revealed the existance of a Ms. 1512 containing the Commentarius in Quatuor Evangelia by Dionysius (Jacob) Barsalibi. According to their catalogue it was written by "Matthew, son of John, for his nephew Mathew, son of Bakhtitujar, A. Gr. 1509; A.D. 1198."
Hill's comments on the Commentary on the Gospel of John are also somewhat condensed. The work is in fact a Commentary on the Four Gospels . Fell translated a Syriac manuscript now in Trinity College Dublin (Ms. 1512) into Latin, creating the handwritten Bodleian Mss. Fell 6 and 7 (which I have seen: it is a large work, and so split in two volumes; 6 contains comments on Matthew and Mark, 7 the remainder, together with some material on the Pauline letters, and ends with a note that the manuscript didn't contain very much more, but was so corrupt he could not continue). Loftus published some extracts from Dionysius in English:
Loftus did publish an English translation of materials from the Commentary on the Gospels , and there is a copy in Cambridge University Library, since I saw it in the catalogue om Wednesday but was too rushed to look at it:
A clear and learned explication of the history of our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ: taken out of above thirty Greek, Syriack, and other oriental authors: by Dionysius Syrus, ... and faithfully translated by D. Loftus. / [by] DIONYSIUS BAR SALIBI, Bishop of Amadia ; Loftus, Dudley ; JESUS CHRIST. (1695)
In this he states his intention to publish the Latin translation of the Commentary , but in fact he never did so. However his manuscript was intended for a publisher, so is quite readable. I could only transcribe a small portion, which took around an hour (John is contained in folios 105-193); this is from f.124, where his commentary on chapter 2 of John starts. From the top of the page (underlinings by Loftus):
Et die tertio factum est convivium . Expositio Mosis Bar Capha, -- non conformendo hunc diem cum die baptismi, ita dixit, sed cum isto die quo rediit e deserto, cum vicisset Diabolum; si enim cum die baptismi eum contulisset, composisetur esse quartus dies, non tertius, quia antea dixit die postero, id est, post diem interrogationis sacerdotum vidit Johannes Jesum bonientem, alioque die stabat, & duo ex discipulis eius, alio etiam die voluit Jesus exire in Galileam; non refert igitur hunc diem ad diem baptismi sed ad ipsum quo rediit e deserto.-- Sanctus Hypolitus Romanus) dies primus, ipso fuit, quo interrogarunt Pharisei Johannem, Quis es? et secundus dies, fuit ipse, quo baptisavit Dominum nostrum, statimque abiit in desertum, ibique mansit quadraginta dies et postea rediit, primus dies fuit, quando vidit eum ambulantem & secuti sunt eum duo discipuli, secundus quando abiit in Galileam, tertius quando factum est convivium. Gaius haereticus reprehendebat Johannem quia non concors fuit cum sociis dicontibus, quod post baptismum abiit in Galileam. et fecit miraculum vini in Kaina). Santus Hippolytus e contrario , s?? dicit (?), Christus postquam baptizatus fuerat abiit in desertum, et quando inquisitio facta erat de illo per discipulos Johannis et per populum, quarebant eum & non inveniebant, quia in deserto erat, cum vero finita fuisset temptatio & rediisset, venit in partos habitatas non ut baptizaretur, baptizatus enim iam fuerat, sed ut monstraretur a Johanne qui dixit intuens eum, Ecce agnus Dei! [etc]