Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 1.djvu/650

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himself was the author. The book was printed in Latin in 1552, and in Greek in 1563 by Michael Neander in the first collection ever made of Christian Apocrypha. Grynaeus1 Orthodoxographa of 1569, and Glaser's Apocrypha of 1614 are the only subsequent collections of texts which deserve mention before 1703. In that year appeared the Codex Apocryphus of John Albert Fabricius, eclipsing all previous attempts, and still an indispensable authority on the subject of the spurious Christian literature.

The next group of writings to be considered are those conventionally classed as the Apostolic Fathers; that is, the Epistles of Barnabas, Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp, and The Shepherd of Hermas. Occupying a place midway between them and the Apocryphal literature are the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and Homilies, the Apostolic Constitutions, and the Liturgies current under the names of various Apostles. We will notice them in order.

It was long before the two first-named authors made their appearance at all: Barnabas, at Paris in 1645, in a posthumous publication of Hugues Menard superintended by Dachery; Clement, in 1633 at Oxford, edited by Patrick Young.

The letters of Ignatius-extant, as is well known, in two recensions, one copiously interpolated-were known in Latin versions in medieval times: and the Letter of Polycarp was preserved with them. The longer Latin version was first printed at Paris in 1498 along with the pseudo-Dionysian works. The editor was Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples. They did not appear in Greek until 1557, when Valentine Frid (Paceus) edited them at Dillingen. About a century later (in 1644) the first great critical exposition of the vexed Ignatian question was made by Archbishop Ussher.

The bulky allegory called the Shepherd of Hermas was current, like the last-named documents, in Latin versions. The Greek original, indeed, was only discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Latin appeared first in 1513 at Paris. Lefevre d'Etaples was in this instance again the editor. He rather obscured the true character of his text by discarding its old name of Pastor, and substituting one apparently of his own devising: Liber trium virorum et trium spiritu-alium virginum.

Last come the important pseudonymous works associated with the name of Clement of Rome: the two romances, called the Recognitions, and the Homilies of Clement: and the manual of ecclesiastical usages known as the Apostolic Constitutions. The first of these had been early popularised in the Latin version of Rufinus, in which form alone it has survived complete. Lefevre d'Etaples printed it first at Paris in 1504: the Homilies, which we only have in Greek, were not given to the world until 1672. Bovius and Turrianus in 1563 produced editions of the Constitutions, the former in Latin, the latter in the original Greek. The