chapter 9

is an instance—that the ceremonies he faithfully describes do not fully accord with his interpretations, and that he himself does not invariably understand his material. Some of the wording of his prayers, moreover, is unmistakably his own, but in his day (10. 4-6) each Christian leader still felt free to frame prayers as he would.

Hippolytus designed his work for “the churches” (1. 3), a phrase most naturally understood of Christendom at large. His own church of Rome appears to have appreciated his work the least, for the majority of Roman Christians gave their allegiance to his rivals and accepted their legislation; it was the reforms of Callistus and not the conservatism of Hippolytus that directed subsequent Roman polity. Probably, too, despite his canonization, his memory was always slightly suspect; the Roman church certainly managed to forget very quickly who he really was. By the middle of the third century, moreover, his church finally abandoned Greek as its official language and became wholly Latinized, so that his writings were no longer accessible. And what was true of Rome was true of the West in general.

In the East, however, especially in Egypt and Syria, Hippolytus’s work was accepted as possessing high authority. It was of course not treated as infallible, for later legal writers do not hesitate to amend or omit laws disagreeing with local usage. Yet the title Hippolytus chose for his work was taken really seriously,[55] and he, more than any other Church Father, gave the laws and the liturgy of the Eastern Church their permanent form.

The Apostolic Tradition was first made known to the Western world in 1691 by Job Ludolf in _Ad suam Historiam Aethiopicam Commentarius_; in this he published in incomplete form the Ethiopic work containing it, to which he gave the title—still in use—of _Statuta Apostolorum_. But he naturally was unable to identify the author. It was not until 1848 that the next contribution was made, Tattam’s _The Apostolic Constitutions or Canons of the Apostles in Coptic_,[56] which gave the Bohairic text with an English translation. The Sahidic text appeared thirty-five years later on pp. 248-266 of Lagarde’s _Aegyptiaca_, and this is still the standard edition. A German translation (by Steindorff) was published in 1891 by Achelis in his _Die ältesten Quellen des orientalischen Kirchenrechtes_:[57] this monograph opened the really critical study of the material and is not yet wholly obsolete. But Hauler’s discovery of the Latin text was the most important event of all. He published his find in 1900 but did not appreciate the full importance of what he describes only as “Aegyptiorum reliquiae” at the end of his long title.[58] And even such an intensely able scholar as Funk, in making his own Latin version of “The Egyptian Church Order”, still preferred to follow the Sahidic.[59] Horner’s _Statutes of the Apostles_ (1904) finally supplied critical Ethiopic and Arabic texts, with scientifically literal translations of these and of the Sahidic as well.

The basic significance of the Latin version was glimpsed by Cooper and Maclean in their edition of the Testament[60] (1902); their use of “Hauler” is often penetrating. In 1906 Baron Eduard von der Goltz[61] finally identified certain sections as definitely Hippolytean, and four years later Dr Eduard Schwartz reached the definite conclusion:[62] the Latin text represents substantially what Hippolytus wrote. Dr Schwartz’s monograph, however, was brief and left many problems unexplored; the detailed demonstration was the—wholly independent—work of Dom Connolly in 1916.

In 1928 Dr Jungklaus published a German translation of Hippolytus’s work, with an elaborate introduction; in some regards it proved unsatisfactory but it should on no account be neglected.

The textual evidence is as follows:

The original Greek of chapters 3 and 12 is preserved in the Epitome, and that of 25. 1-2 in the Vienna fragment printed (e.g.) by Funk (II, p. 112). The Constitutions also give some aid in reconstructing the Greek text elsewhere.

The Latin codex, now in Verona, is a palimpsest,[63] probably of the sixth century, over which some two centuries later three books of Isidore of Seville’s _Sentences_ were written. The translation itself appears to have been made in the fourth century, and is a rendition of a Greek book of church laws, in which Hippolytus’s book is preceded by portions of the Didascalia and the complete Apostolic Church Order. The translator, who presumably had no idea of the authorship of the closing portion, made his version pedantically literal; a great advantage to the modern student. Unquestionably neither the sixth-century copyist, the translator nor the Greek text used was infallible; the last certainly contained duplications.[64] But the version is incomparably the best guide that we have. It includes 1. 1-9. 11a, 21. 14-24. 12a, 26. 3b-38. 2a.

The Oriental manuscripts, all comparatively modern,[65] are fairly numerous,[66] and are likewise collections of laws. The Sahidic—known also as the Egyptian Heptateuch, from its seven Books—begins with the Apostolic Church Order. Then (Book II) comes Hippolytus’s work, in which chapters 1, 3, 4. 4-13, 5-6, 8. 2-5, 9. 9-12 are omitted and chapters 11-14 are arranged in the order[67] 12, 14, 11, 13; there are also minor variations to which attention is usually called in the translation and notes. Books III-VI are parallel to Constitutions VIII; Book VII contains the Apostolic Canons. Like other Coptic ecclesiastical writings it teems with transliterated Greek words, so that the original terms are obvious. But the first translator was evidently often in doubt as to the meaning of the original, and his indecisions have not been clarified by later copyists.

The Bohairic was made from an inferior Sahidic manuscript in the early nineteenth century. All readings of any consequence are listed by Horner.

The Arabic was made from the Sahidic, which it follows in most regards, although chapters 11-14 are not disarranged; it was therefore made from a manuscript other than the archetype of the known Sahidic codices and has a certain independent textual value. Otherwise its features are just about those to be expected in a secondary version.

The Ethiopic is divided into seventy-two “Statutes”, of which the first twenty-one are the Apostolic Church Order. Statute 22 = Hippolytus’s chapters 2-5, concluding with communion prayers.