Page:Nestorius and his place in the history of Christian doctrine.djvu/51

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OF NESTORIUS' LIFE
39

the question arises as to when the "supplement-letter," so to speak, was written, and this question must be answered by the assertion that it was earlier than the letter to the agents as the conclusion of which it is found in the Greek manuscripts[1]. For in the supplement-letter, Cyril, even writing to his own agents, is not yet sure whether he shall call Nestorius a brother or not, and he will not yet give Nestorius cause for the reproach that his agents denounced him as a heretic. The supplement-letter is written, therefore, at least as early as the first letter of Cyril to Nestorius, dating from about late summer 429. Nestorius in his Treatise of Heraclides seems to regard it as still earlier, for his

  1. About these manuscripts comp. Nestoriana, p. 8 ff. In the manuscripts used by Peltan in his translation (comp. Sacrosancti … concilii Ephesini acta omnia Theodori Peltani … opera … latinitate donata, Ingolstadt, 1576, p. 220) and by the editio Commeliana (Τὰ πρακτικὰ τῆς οἰκουμενικῆς τρίτης συνόδου κ.τ.λ., 1591, p. 73), in the cod. Coislin. 32 (saec. xiii) of which Professor Henry Lebègue, of Paris, kindly has sent me a collation, in the codices Monacenses 115 and 116 (both saec. xvi; Nestoriana, p. 10, I gave erroneously the numbers 114 and 115) about which I received kind information from the Royal Library of Munich, and in the cod. Vat. 830 (saec. xv), as I learnt from a kind letter of Dr Erich Katterfeld, now at Rome, the "supplement" (τὸ δέ γε σχεδάριον κ.τ.λ.) immediately follows the preceding sentence (explicit: εἰ μή τις γένηται μετάγνωσις). But the Greek text given by these manuscripts proves itself to be very badly preserved, as is shown even by the address (πρὸς τοὺς Κωνσταντινουπόλεως κληρικοὺς στασιάζοντας); the Greek manuscripts cannot therefore give evidence against the hypothesis that the "supplement" originally was a separate letter or part of such. The Latin versions of the Acta Ephesina do not contain Cyril's letter to his agents (comp. Mansi, v, 465 ff.).