Page:Nestorius and his place in the history of Christian doctrine.djvu/21

Rh And, besides others, your famous countryman E. W. s has, to the great advantage of historical science, begun the publication of this material.

Pelagius, the well-known western contemporary of Nestorius, whose doctrine Augustine opposed, wrote beside other smaller dogmatical works a large commentary on the Epistles of Saint Paul, the original text of which was held to be lost. An orthodox adaptation only of this work, as was the opinion of ancient and modern scholars, existed in a commentary regarded since olden times as belonging to the works of Hieronymus and it has been printed among them. But nobody took much notice of these commentaries; for because they were regarded as having been revised they could teach nothing new about Pelagius, and one could only make use of those thoughts which otherwise were known to be his. Lately we have come by curious bypaths to valuable knowledge about the Pelagius-commentary which we hope will soon put us in possession of the original text of Pelagius. The well-known Celtic scholar, r, formerly professor at the University of Berlin (†1910), was led, as we see in his book Pelagius in Irland (1901), to traces of the original Pelagius-commentary by quotations in Irish manuscripts. He