Abstract
The Antichrist and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ are important issues for everyone who is involved with Christianity and its literature, since from the very beginning of Christendom apocalyptic ideas have played an important role in the Christian life. This explains the fact that through the centuries many writers of the early Christian, byzantine and post-byzantine period wrote concerning the theme of the end of the world. One of these was Hippolytus (2nd – 3rd Century A. D.), who was considered to be an authority on eschatological and exegetical Christian literature by his contemporaries and by Christians of later generations. There are, however, a number of problems related to the writer’s identity and the hippolytean corpus in general, which have confounded scholars from the 16th century until now. The debates among specialists of early Christian literature continue, since the nature of the hippolytean problem is so complex and multifaceted that significant questions about Hipp ...
The Antichrist and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ are important issues for everyone who is involved with Christianity and its literature, since from the very beginning of Christendom apocalyptic ideas have played an important role in the Christian life. This explains the fact that through the centuries many writers of the early Christian, byzantine and post-byzantine period wrote concerning the theme of the end of the world. One of these was Hippolytus (2nd – 3rd Century A. D.), who was considered to be an authority on eschatological and exegetical Christian literature by his contemporaries and by Christians of later generations. There are, however, a number of problems related to the writer’s identity and the hippolytean corpus in general, which have confounded scholars from the 16th century until now. The debates among specialists of early Christian literature continue, since the nature of the hippolytean problem is so complex and multifaceted that significant questions about Hippolytus still demand persuasive answers. As the object of this Thesis is the critical edition of Hippolytus’ De Antichristo (Περὶ τοῦ Ἀντιχρίστου), it is beyond its scope to attempt to answer all these questions. For this reason, after we have outlined the history of the hippolytean problems and the theories about Hippolytus and his corpus, we have felt confident placing ourselves on the side of the majority of scholars, who consider Hippolytus to be a schismatic bishop in Rome, and ascribing to him the genuine works of the corpus. The work De Antichristo was written about 200 A. D. and became popular reading during the byzantine era. This is well attested by later writers’ testimonies and by the nature of the manuscript tradition of this work, which includes, apart from the four manuscripts of the direct tradition, fragments of De Antichristo in the works of later writers, Florilegia, and Catenae, and translations in ancient eastern languages (Slavonic, Armenian, Syrian, Ethiopian, and Georgian). The text was first published by M. Gudius on 1661 and has been republished several times since then. However the text, last edited by E. Norelli in 1987, still needed improvement, because the former editors and scholars made various methodological errors in the restoration of the correct text, (e. g. the so-called Lachmann method was not applied carefully in the examination of the manuscripts). In addition, the text suffers from more lacunae than the former editors suspected, and there was still unexamined material in the Greek direct (ms. Athos, Vatopedi 1213) and the Greek indirect (ms. Milan, Ambrosian Library, Gr. 1041 (H 257 inf., olim A 28)) tradition, which we have utilized. Moreover, the previous scholarship did not consider it necessary to improve the validity of the known indirect Greek tradition of the text.For this reason we have tried to improve this part of the tradition by considering the mss. of Catenae or Florilegia (e. g. Chigi Fragment) containing hippolytean fragments, which are published in the Appendix of this Thesis, and to undertake a new critical edition of a significant, but until recently unrecognized, branch of the Greek indirect tradition, the spurious De Consummatione Mundi (Περὶ τῆς συντελείας τοῦ κόσμου). This text was probably written toward the end of the 7th or the beginning of the 8th century A. D. by an unknown writer in the area of Antioch, but its manuscript tradition ascribes it to Hippolytus of Rome. Its writer, who conventionally is called by scholars Pseudo-Hippolytus, utilized lengthy sections of the hippolytean De Antichristo along with a Homily which is included in the corpus of Ephraim Syrus and is called In Adventum Domini (Λόγος εἰς τὴν παρουσίαν τοῦ Κυρίου καὶ περὶ συντελείας τοῦ κόσμου καὶ εἰς τὴν παρουσίαν τοῦ Ἀντιχρίστου). This makes the Pseudo-Hippolytus’ text a valuable testimony from an earlier period than the preserved mss. of De Antichristo.However, the De Consummatione Mundi required a new critical edition, since it was first published by I. Picus in 1556 on the basis of two mss., which apparently were later lost, and was partially and carelessly corrected by J. A. Fabricius in 1716 on the basis of a contaminated and later ms. (Oxford, Barocci 93). The last attempt at an improvement of this text was the edition of H. Achelis in 1897, who reprinted the text of the first edition with some corrections of former scholars and editors. But this text is preserved today in almost 60 mss. (this is the number of mss. we have discovered and listed), from which we chose eight of the oldest mss. (we also read the ms. Barocci 93, which we decided not to use, since it has nothing to add to this critical edition). The recensio codicum shows an extensive degree of contamination in the manuscript tradition of De Consummatione Mundi. Of the previous editions we have used that of 1897 by H. Achelis.Returning to Hippolytus’ De Antichristo, we decided to base our edition on the Greek direct and indirect tradition (considering also the major previous editions and critical notes of the scholars). Of these only the direct can be represented on a stemma codicum – the fragmentary indirect tradition does not provide the basis for a stemmatic representation and that is exactly the point at which P. Wendland’s stemma codicum (1899) is problematic. The editions of Hippolytus’ De Antichristo (primarily) and Pseudo-Hippolytus’ De Consummatione Mundi (less) are accompanied by brief introductory chapters (with information about the writers and the dates, titles, contents, sources from which the writers drew material, evaluation of these texts in the Christian literature, etc.), translations in Modern Greek and an Appendix, where the reader can find reference tables relating the chapters of Holy Bible which the two writers cited. Here also texts from the indirect tradition of De Antichristo are recorded or re-edited and the sources of De Consummatione Mundi (e. g. In Adventum Domini) are listed. The Bibliography chapter contains, apart from the published books cited in this Thesis, the necessary software (e. g. TLG) that was used and some reliable internet sites about Hippolytus, Ps.-Hippolytus and their works.
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