Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VIII/Pseudo-Clementine Literature/The Clementine Homilies/Introductory Notice

Introductory Notice

to

The Clementine Homilies.

[By the Rev. Thomas Smith, D.D.]

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We have already given an account of the Clementines in the Introductory Notice to the Recognitions. &#160; All that remains for us to do here, is to notice the principal editions of the Homilies.&#160; The first edition was published by Cotelerius in his collection of the Apostolic Fathers, from a manuscript in the Royal Library at Paris, the only manuscript of the work then known to exist.&#160; He derived assistance from an epitome of the work which he found in the same library.&#160; The text of Cotelerius was revised by Clericus in his edition of Cotelerius, but more carefully by Schwegler, Stuttgart, 1847.&#160; The Paris ms. breaks off in the middle of the fourteenth chapter of the nineteenth book.

In 1853 (G&#246;ttingen) Dressel published a new recension of the Homilies, having found a complete manuscript of the twenty Homilies in the Ottobonian Library in Rome.&#160; In 1859 (Leipzig) he published an edition of two Epitomes of the Homilies,&#8212;the one previously edited by Turnebus and Cotelerius being given more fully, and the other appearing for the first time.&#160; To these Epitomes were appended notes by Frederic Wieseler on the Homilies.&#160; The last edition of the Clementines is by Paul de Lagarde (Leipzig, 1865), which has no new sources, is pretentious, but far from accurate.