speak of the peculiar value of their evidence as enabling us to trace the outlines of the early history of the text. This is however the place for observing that the extent of patristic evidence still preserved is considerably less than might have been a priori anticipated. Numerous verses of the New Testament are rarely or never quoted by the Fathers: the gaps in the evidence are still more striking if we take the Ante-Nicene Fathers by themselves. A small portion of Origen's commentaries is virtually all that remains to us of the continuous commentaries on the New Testament belonging to this period: they include Matt. xiii 36—xxii 33 in the original Greek (perhaps in an abridged form), and Matt. xvi 13—xxvii 66 in a condensed Latin translation, preserving matter not found in the Greek now extant; some verses of St Luke (a much condensed Latin translation of Homilies on i—iv, not continuous, and on five later passages of St Luke being also extant); John i 1—7, 19—29; ii 12—25; iv 13—54; viii 19—25 and 37—53; xi 39—57; xiii 2—33 (little more than a sixth of the whole) in the full original text; Romans in the much condensed and much altered version of Rufinus; many verses of 1 Corinthians and Ephesians; and a few scattered verses of some of the other books. The extant commentaries and continuous series of homilies written before the middle of the fifth century are as follows:—Theodore of Mopsuestia on the minor Pauline Epistles in a Latin translation; Chrysostom's Homilies, which include St Matthew, St John, Acts (ill preserved), and all the Pauline Epistles; Theodoret on all the Pauline Epistles, his notes being chiefly founded on the works of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Chrysostom; and Cyril of Alexandria's Homilies on St Luke (many fragments in Greek and large portions in a Syriac translation) and Commentary on John i 1—x 17; xii 49—end, with fragments on the rest of the book and on the other Gospels and several of the Pauline Epistles; together with fragments by other writers preserved in Catenæ under various conditions, sometimes apparently in their original integrity, but much oftener in a condensed and partly altered shape.
126. It is on the whole best to class with patristic evidence a few collections of biblical extracts, with little or no intervening matter, selected and arranged for doctrinal or ethical purposes. The Ethica of Basil of Cæsarea (Cent. IV) and the Parallela Sacra of John of Damascus (Cent. VIII) are the best known Greek ex-