Severus of Antioch: A collection of letters from numerous Syriac manuscripts (1915) Introduction
A COLLECTION OF LETTERS
OF SEVERUS OF ANTIOCH
FROM NUMEROUS SYRIAC MANUSCRIPTS
EDITED AND TRANSLATED
BY
E. W. BROOKS
PATR. OR. ---- T. XII. ---- F. 2.
Nihil obstat,
R. GRAFFIN.
PERMIS D'IMPRIMER
P. FAGES,
Vic. gen.
Paris, le 14 Juin 1915.
Tous droits réservés.
INTRODUCTION
The letters of the great Monophysite patriarch Severus, who held the see of Antioch from 512 to 518 and died in exile in Egypt in 538, like the rest of his works, and indeed nearly all Greek Monophysite literature, have been lost in the original, except in so far as a large number of citations are preserved in catenae and a few in Acts of Councils; and of Syriac versions only one exists in a continuous form, the collection of 123 letters entitled «The Sixth Book of Select Letters ( e/klogai/ )», translated by Athanasius of Nisibis, which I edited with an English translation for the Text and Translation Society in 1902-4. Of the existence of other Syriac versions, either of all the letters or of selections, we have no direct evidence; but it may be inferred from the fact that citations in MSS. of different contents often agree verbally, and that, where the letter in question is included in the Athanasian collection, the text in the other MSS. differs from that of Athanasius. On the other hand the existence of different versions of particular passages (in one part of ep. 99 of the present edition there are four) does not prove the existence of different continuous translations, since the compilers of the catenae or other documents in which the citations are found may have translated the passages for themselves, and in many cases the citations are found in translations of Greek works such as those of Peter the patriarch and those against Probus and Paul of Beth Ukhame , where the translator naturally rendered them from the original.
The object of the present edition is to collect the letters and |iv fragments of letters outside the Athanasian collection which are found scattered in various MSS; but, in order to keep the edition within reasonable limits, I have excluded the great dogmatic letters «To Sergius the grammarian», «Against John the grammarian», and «Against Julian of Halicarnassus,» which rather require separate publication, as well as letters already published in the work of the so-called Zacharias Rhetor, and other versions of letters contained in the Athanasian collection. The heavy task of collecting the Greek fragments also seemed to lie outside the scope of the present work, and I have contented myself with referring to published extracts from letters to the same addressees as those of the present collection. Coptic and Arabic versions are also excluded.
The total number of manuscripts used is 28, of which 20 are in the British Museum, 6 in the Vatican, one at Paris, and one at Berlin. Of the Berlin extract M. Kugener kindly lent me a photograph which he had obtained for another purpose; for the Paris extract and most of the Vatican extracts I have, as usual, to thank the indefatigable photographic labours of M Graffin; of some of the Vatican extracts I have copies which I took in 1901; and for the few which remain I am indebted to the kindness of M. Tisserant, who verified the references and had the required photographs taken for me. - A list of MSS. is given after the Introduction; but for a full description of each I must refer to the catalogues of Wright, Assemani, Zotenberg, and Sachau, only noting that I seems to be a copy of V and is only useful where the photographs of V are defective or indistinct or the accuracy of my copy doubtful, and that, as part of F is identical with part of L (Wright p. 1007), and apparently a copy of it, I have not thought it necessary to collate this portion except where L is defective or illegible. Where more than one version of a passage exists, I have given the text of all, but in the translation I have tried to reproduce the original from the different versions, placing such variants as seemed worth preserving in the notes. Of the usual varieties of spelling in such words as [Syriac] I have taken no account in the apparatus, and I have in such cases generally placed the shorter spelling in the text, whatever the MS. reading may be. Words or letters inserted to fill illegible or defective places in the MSS. are |v enclosed in square brackets in the text and words depending on such supplements in the translation.
The letters in the original Greek existed in a collection divided into 23 books, of which 4 contained those written before episcopacy, 10 those written during episcopacy, and 9 those written after exile, and there were also some letters described as 'outside the 23 books' (S. L., iv, 7, 10). Of these the books which contain those written during episcopacy seem from the numerals of the letters preserved to have been much longer than the other books. In the Select Letters the place of each letter in the original collection is stated; but among the scattered letters contained in the present edition it is only in 26 cases that any such information is given, and there is still nothing to show on what principle the letters were arranged. That the order is not chronological I showed in the Introduction to the translation of the Select Letters (p. x). As however a list of the contents of the original collection, so far as they can be ascertained, may be useful for easy reference, I subjoin a catalogue of letters in the order of that collection with the names of the addressees and references to the Select Letters or to the present edition, the former being distinguished by the letters S. L.
Before episcopacy :
i, 7
About the Anthropomorphists
28
---- 250