ART. V. THE CHURCH ORDER OF PART II The So-called Egyptian Church Order and derived documents. By Dom R. H. CONNOLLY. Cambridge Texts and Studies,' viii. 4. (Cambridge: at the University Press: 1916.) IN a former article in this Review the attempt was made to give a connected account of the recent history of the criticism of a group of documents which all fall under the general heading of Church Orders, and which on examination are found to be beyond question related in some sort of way to one another. These documents are the so-called Egyptian Church Order in its various versions or recensions, the Canons of Hippolytus, the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions, and the Testament of the Lord. On a review 1 Church Quarterly Review, October 1917. It may be well that two errors in that article should be recorded here. (1) It was suggested on p. 86 that it was perhaps only in the Seventh century that the Apocalyptic 'Testament of the Lord' and the Church Order were brought together in a single document under the former title. Dom Connolly points out to me that Severus of Antioch (see Brooks' translation of the Letters, p. 426) already quotes a passage from the Church Order portion under the title 'The Commands of the Apostles which they named the Testament of the Lord.' The fusion therefore took place not later than c. 500 A.D. (2) It was stated on p. 87 that the Syriac compilation differed from the Ethiopic, Sahidic, and Arabic, in adding the Apostolic Canons after the selections from the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions. I was misled by the absence of the Apostolic Canons from Mr. Horner's English version in his Statutes of the Apostles and I had not noticed that Mr. Horner on p. x of his preface indicates distinctly their presence in the Sahidic and, more obscurely, in the Ethiopic and Arabic. As a matter of fact the table on p. 87 should be completed by inserting in the vacant places the figures 73-128 for the Apostolic Canons in the Ethiopic, 72-127 in the Arabic, 1-71 in the Sahidic. of the critical process which has been going on during the last twenty-five or thirty years we arrived, following in the footsteps of Professor E. Schwartz and of Dom Connolly, at the tentative result that the Egyptian Church Order, more particularly in the form in which the lately recovered Latin fragments present it, was not only the source and single starting-point of a whole series of developments, but was rightly attributed to the authorship of St. Hippolytus, that is to Rome and to the early part of the Third century. That tentative result we have now on the present occasion to raise, if we can, to the level of practical certainty. At the end of Dom Connolly's book, pp. 175-194, will be found a complete and continuous text of the Egyptian or (as we may without prejudice already call it) Hippolytean Church Order, constructed out of the Latin version, so far as fragments of this are available, and where that fails us of Mr. Horner's English translation of the Ethiopic; and it is this composite text to which our references will be made.1 1 But the caution must be given in limine that the passage from the Ethiopic extending from the top of Connolly p. 177 to the middle of p. 178 has no claim-as indeed the editor practically admits— to be considered part of the original. One does not indeed see why it appears at all in Dom Connolly's text, since the Latin is extant at this point and does not contain it. It is of a piece with several other unauthorized insertions scattered throughout the Ethiopic text. For the further control of the Ethiopic and other Egyptian versions, where the Latin fails us, recourse can often be had to the Syriac Testament of the Lord: Dom Connolly fully recognizes this (e.g. p. 183 n. 9), but, as I have occasion to note at a later point, I hardly think that he has made enough use of it. I suspect, for instance, that it may help us to see our way through a very obscure paragraph at the end of Statute 35 ( Arabic 34, Sahidic 46), where we find reference on the one hand to teaching about Resurrection of the body, and on the other hand, in connexion with postbaptismal instruction, to the new name written upon the ĥpos— the Sahidic retains the Greek word of Apoc. ii 17—' which no man knows but he who receives.' Taking the Syriac as our guide, and altering the punctuation so as to end one sentence after the words 'we have finished the instruction which we give you' and to begin another with the words 'Concerning the Resurrection of the body,' we arrive at the result that fuller instruction about the Last Things The proof that this Church Order lies behind our other documents, and not they, or any of them, behind it, has been patiently and exhaustively worked out in Dom Connolly's book. The central pivot of his argument is that no two of the other documents, Apostolic Constitutions, Canons of Hippolytus, Testament of the Lord, agree anywhere together without agreeing also with the Church Order: their 'greatest common measure' is in effect identical with the Order. Taking the ordination prayer for a Bishop as his test, he shews that there is no phrase in the Church Order of more than a word or two which does not reappear in some one or other of the rest; while conversely there is no other authority which does not betray peculiarities of its own. Thus the prayer as given in book viii. of the Constitutions is on a considerably larger scale: but the whole of the additional matter is redolent of the style, unique and unmistakable, of the compiler of the Constitutions.1 The Canons of Hippolytus too have their special elements in the same prayer, where they diverge from our other authorities : and again these special elements reappear in other parts of the same Canons. Our Church Order stands alone in having practically nothing in the prayer which is not incorporated in one or more of the related documents. and the other world, and if there is anything else which is right to be told,' is given by the bishop to the newly baptized after their initiation and communion. It is a sort of disciplina arcani, and is connected by the author with the Apocalyptic teaching about the hidden manna and the new name known to no outsider. I take it that he certainly thought of the 'hidden manna' as the Eucharist, and I have little doubt that the pos suggested to him the Roman use of tessera, especially in its military signification as a tablet containing the pass-word. The ideas of newness and of whiteness attach themselves not unnaturally to the newly baptized: the new name on the tessera is the esoteric teaching about heavenly things open only to the baptized communicant. 1 Connolly, pp. 28-33: to the list of parallels on p. 29 add, for δέσποτα κύριε ὁ θεὸς ὁ παντοκράτωρ, vii 34. 7 δέσποτα κύριε, vii 37. Ι δέσποτα ὁ θεός, vii 25. 3 δέσποτα παντοκράτορ. παντοκράτωρ is a favourite term of the Ignatian interpolator.' Connolly, pp. 55-59. It is not proposed in the present article to repeat or develop this side of Dom Connolly's work. Such proofs do not easily lend themselves to treatment in outline: and the previous article perhaps shewed sufficiently that the theory of the superior originality of the Egyptian Church Order was at least the best working hypothesis. We shall rather deal with the remaining lines of argument which were enumerated at the close of our former article: that is to say, in broad outline, with evidence of two kinds-evidence that points to early or Western origin, and evidence that concentrates our attention on the particular figure of St. Hippolytus. I In the first place the name of Hippolytus as author is actually found at the head of more than one document of the group which forms the subject-matter of our inquiry. The Canons of Hippolytus have come down to us only in the Arabic the Latin version of the Arabic heading runs 'Canones ecclesiae cum praeceptis quae scripsit Hippolytus summus episcopus Romae secundum mandata apostolorum.' The Epitome of the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions-or, to be more exact, that section of the Epitome, corresponding to A.C. viii. 4-31, which we might call the Ordinalbears the title Διατάξεις τῶν ἁγίων ἀποστόλων περὶ χειροτονιῶν διὰ Ἱππολύτου, • Constitutions of the holy Apostles concerning ordinations given by the mouthpiece of Hippolytus.' Now these Canons and Epitome are certainly not related to one another by immediate ancestry or descent each of the two is nearer to the Church Order than to the other, and as they share otherwise no matter in common which is not also found in the Church Order, it is a reasonable presumption that the name which they share as common title once stood at the head of the Church Order also. It is not indeed found in that place to-day. But with regard to the principal witness, the Latin version, the explanation is simple not only this title but the title of every document and the heading of every chapter has disappeared from the Verona MS., though, where titles and headings should be, blank spaces remain to bear witness to the rubrics which once stood there.1 With regard to the remaining versions, they have not merely, like the Latin, preserved our Church Order in close company and juxtaposition with other similar documents, but they have gone so far as actually to incorporate it into some larger whole, 'Statutes of the Apostles,' 'Canons of the Apostles,' Octateuch of Clement,' as the case may be and since in no case is our Order the first term in the series, its special title naturally dropped out. If indeed it had come first, it might have given its own name to the rest; but it became more and more, from the middle of the Third century onwards, an accepted convention for this sort of literature that its putative origin must be taken back to the age of the Apostles. Direct claim to apostolic authorship, or at least to that of some personal disciple and amanuensis of the Apostles like Clement, would tend to supersede the name of a writer so inferior in date as Hippolytus: nay, it is possible that the work did in fact only obtain admission at all into the group of the Church Orders because Hippolytus had in its title, as we shall see further on, definitely associated it with the Apostles. It is really more a matter for surprise that the ascription of Hippolytean authorship has survived in some quarters than that it has been lost in others. When we find it preserved in two members of the group, we are driven to conclude that its place in them implies its place in their common original. And in the case of two recensions so entirely disconnected from one another as the Canons of Hippolytus and the Epitome of the eighth book of the Constitutions, this original can be nothing short of the common source of the whole group. But in the second place, then, if our treatise in its ultimate ascertainable form bore the name of Hippolytus, was that ascription correct? The name of Hippolytus is given, if not very frequently, to works which were certainly not 1 It is a not uncommon feature in very old MSS to find that the paint has vanished when the ink has survived. In the case of the Verona MS the ink itself appears to be barely legible. VOL. LXXXVII.-NO. CLXXIII. H |