Most prominent scholars possessed in addition a certain number of manuscripts; but these were in most cases late in date, and, in proportion as the critical sense was developed, the productions of the fifteenth century scribes lost their value as compared with the correct and beautiful texts issued by Aldo or Froben, and supervised by Erasmus or Beatus Rhenanus. Still, a long time must needs elapse before complete editions of the greater Greek Fathers-Chrysostom, say, or Basil-could be produced; and for the purposes of studying these unprinted texts, manuscripts were still indispensable: nay, they continued to be multiplied. This was especially the case with Greek texts. Numberless are the sixteenth century manuscripts of Greek authors, pagan and Christian alike. The relics of Grocyn’s library at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, afford a ready instance, or the books given by Cardinal Pole to New College. A glance at the Catalogue of the Greek manuscripts at Paris is yet more instructive in this respect. Vergecius, Darmarius, Valeriano of Forli, and a score of others were gaining great names as copyists in the service of princes, secular and ecclesiastical. Every noble and every prelate was in honour bound to be the owner of as brilliant a collection as he could. In these libraries the Greek classics were doubtless more prominent and more valued than the Greek Fathers; yet these latter held their place also, especially on the shelves of the princes of the Church. In England, for example, Warham, Pole, and Cranmer had no inconsiderable stores of such books; and there is no lack of similar instances on the Continent. Representative examples of the libraries of individual scholars of humbler position can also be cited. We have the catalogue of the books possessed by Grocyn at his death; and the library of Beatus Rhenanus forms the nucleus of the town library of Schlettstadt.
We have spoken incidentally of the work done by such men as Erasmus in the publication of patristic texts. Before we close this imperfect survey of the movement which we have called the Christian Renaissance, it will be right to ask what progress was made during the sixteenth century in the task of bringing together the literature of the early Christian centuries and making it accessible in print. It appears to us that the most effective way of answering this question will be to review the actual work done in certain selected instances; and we shall not shrink from entering upon bibliographical detail to a somewhat larger extent than we have hitherto done. Our survey will naturally not be complete; its aim will be to give an idea of the activity of those engaged, and to show in what quarters this activity was specially noticeable. It will be convenient to adopt an order mainly depending on the dates, supposed or real, of the writings concerned. A place apart may be assigned to the two great Jewish writers of the first century whose works have had so potent an influence on Christian learning, to wit, Philo and Josephus.
A tract by Philo in a Latin version was first printed at Paris in 1520 by Agostino Giustiniani. A further instalment, likewise in Latin, appeared at Basel in 1527. One of the Philonian writings in this volume-a fabulous chronicle of Biblical events from Adam to Saul-is a spurious book. In spite of its remarkably sensational con- tents, and of the fact that it was reprinted at least thrice during the century, this early apocryphon suffered the singular fate of being absolutely forgotten until a year or two ago, when attention was called to it once more.
Not until 1552 did any of Philo’s works appear in Greek. It was Adrien Turnebe who produced the first collection. John Christopherson, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, Sigismund Gelenius, Frederic Morel, and David Hoeschel were the scholars who contributed most to the publication and elucidation of this author during the second half of the century; but no great collective edition of his works was brought out before the seventeenth century.
Josephus, as we have seen, was known during the medieval period through the medium of ancient Latin versions. As late as the year 1524, indeed, doubts were expressed by scholars as to whether the Greek originals of his writings were still in existence. Many editions in Latin were produced from about 1470 until 1544. One of these (that of Basel, 1537) had been superintended by Erasmus. In 1544 the first Greek Josephus appeared-also at Basel, and from Froben’s press. The text was supplied mainly by a manuscript, then the property of Diego Hurtado Mendoza, which, with other of his books, found a home in the Escurial. An Orleans edition, printed in 1591 by de la Roviere, also gave the Greek text. Exactly a century later Thomas Ittig superintended a Leipzig edition, and Edward Bernard issued a portion of one at Oxford.
We may next say something of the apocryphal literature; and in so doing we will confine ourselves to that connected with the New Testament. The Old Testament pseudepigrapha, other than those which were circulated with the Vulgate or the Septuagint-the Fourth Book of Esdras, for example, or the Prayer of Manasses-were almost wholly unknown during our period; of the one really important exception, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, we have already spoken. On the other hand there were spurious Gospels, Epistles, and Acts of Apostles which continued to influence popular imagination and sacred art both in East and West. The Gospel of Nicodemus, so-called, the letters of Paul and Seneca, the correspondence of our Lord with Abgarus of Edessa, had never been forgotten. Narratives of the Infancy of the Virgin and of Christ enjoyed a certain repute; and the fabulous Passions of the Apostles were taken seriously by the mass of readers.
The first document of this class which had been previously unknown to the West was the important so-called Protevangelhim. This had been brought from the East by Guillaume Postel, who insisted that it was a genuine work of James, the brother of the Lord, and contained authentic history; for these assertions he was soundly castigated by Henri Estienne, who seems to have suspected, wrongly, that Postel himself was the author. The book was printed in Latin in 1552, and in Greek in 1563 by Michael Neander in the first collection ever made of Christian Apocrypha. Grynaeus1 Orthodoxographa of 1569, and Glaser’s Apocrypha of 1614 are the only subsequent collections of texts which deserve mention before 1703. In that year appeared the Codex Apocryphus of John Albert Fabricius, eclipsing all previous attempts, and still an indispensable authority on the subject of the spurious Christian literature.
The next group of writings to be considered are those conventionally classed as the Apostolic Fathers; that is, the Epistles of Barnabas, Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp, and The Shepherd of Hermas. Occupying a place midway between them and the Apocryphal literature are the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and Homilies, the Apostolic Constitutions, and the Liturgies current under the names of various Apostles. We will notice them in order.
It was long before the two first-named authors made their appearance at all: Barnabas, at Paris in 1645, in a posthumous publication of Hugues Menard superintended by Dachery; Clement, in 1633 at Oxford, edited by Patrick Young.
The letters of Ignatius-extant, as is well known, in two recensions, one copiously interpolated-were known in Latin versions in medieval times: and the Letter of Polycarp was preserved with them. The longer Latin version was first printed at Paris in 1498 along with the pseudo-Dionysian works. The editor was Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples. They did not appear in Greek until 1557, when Valentine Frid (Paceus) edited them at Dillingen. About a century later (in 1644) the first great critical exposition of the vexed Ignatian question was made by Archbishop Ussher.
The bulky allegory called the Shepherd of Hermas was current, like the last-named documents, in Latin versions. The Greek original, indeed, was only discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Latin appeared first in 1513 at Paris. Lefevre d’Etaples was in this instance again the editor. He rather obscured the true character of his text by discarding its old name of Pastor, and substituting one apparently of his own devising: Liber trium virorum et trium spiritu-alium virginum.
Last come the important pseudonymous works associated with the name of Clement of Rome: the two romances, called the Recognitions, and the Homilies of Clement: and the manual of ecclesiastical usages known as the Apostolic Constitutions. The first of these had been early popularised in the Latin version of Rufinus, in which form alone it has survived complete. Lefevre d’Etaples printed it first at Paris in 1504: the Homilies, which we only have in Greek, were not given to the world until 1672. Bovius and Turrianus in 1563 produced editions of the Constitutions, the former