Page:Nestorius and his place in the history of Christian doctrine.djvu/23

Rh cannot in the least be doubted. It must remain a riddle for us how this manuscript could be preserved without attention having been drawn to it. Nevertheless it is a matter of fact that these 11 treatises of Priscillian now, more than 1500 years after his death, can again be read; they were printed in the edition of the discoverer, Dr s, in 1889.

A similar fortune was prepared for Nestorius. A Syriac translation of his Book of Heraclides mentioned above, which was made about 540, is preserved in a manuscript, dating from about 1100, in the library of the Nestorian Patriarch at Kotschanes in Persian Turkestan. The American missionaries in the neighbourhood of the Urmia Lake having heard about this manuscript, attempted to gain further information about it, and in 1889 a Syrian priest, by name Auscha’nâ, succeeded in making secretly a hurried copy of the manuscript for the library of the missionaries at Urmia. One copy of this Urmia copy came into the University library of Strassburg, another into the possession of Professor r of Cambridge; a fourth copy has been made directly after the original at Kotschanes for the use of the Roman Catholic editor, the well-known Syriac scholar  n.

The rediscovery of this work of Nestorius was first made known when the existence of the Strassburg manuscript was heard of, in 1897. The publication of