A Critical Dissertation on the Athanasian Creed; Its Original Language, Date, Authorship, Titles, Text, Reception and Use (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. MANUSCRIPT COPIES NOW EXTANT, OR WHICH, THOUGH NOW LOST, ARE KNOWN TO HAVE EXISTED. Owing to the use of the Athanasian Creed from a remote period in the services of the Western Church, MS. copies of it are exceedingly numerous, as it is commonly found together with the Scriptural Canticles, which were also sung in the congregation, at the end of Psalters. It is found also in some collections of Canons and Formulae of Faith. For the purpose of illustrating its antiquity and early use and reception it will be sufficient to notice a very few comparatively, including of course the oldest. I. The earliest known MS. of the Athanasian Creed is contained in a thin 4to volume of a few leaves deposited in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, and bearing the pressmark O. 212. Muratori, who was custodian of the library, gives some account of the MS. in the second volume of his Anecdoia, published in 1698, and describes it as 'most ancient, written a thousand years ago and more,' i. e. before the eighth century. Montfaucon, who saw and examined the MS. when he visited the library in the course of his literary tour in Italy in 1698, pronounced it to be written in the eighth century1. The present librarian, Dr. Ceriani, agrees with Montfaucon as to the date. Nor has anypalaeographical authority, to the best of my knowledge, ever placed it later. On the fly-leaf of the volume is a list of contents in a modern hand: ' In isto libro contincntur Dogmatum fidei liber, Bachiarii Fides. Fides Catholica seu simbolum S. Athanasii, ut aiunt, De ascensione Domini Sermo, D. Hieronymi fides. Codex seculi VI.' This ' Dogmatum fidei liber' is the ' Liber de ecclesiasticis dogmatibus' commonly ascribed to Gennadius of Marseilles, sometimes to St. Augustine, and printed in the Appendix to his wo...