Anlehnungen an andere Autoren in Briefen des Nilus von Ankyra

Abstract

Abstract In 1865, Jean Paul Migne published in Patrologia Graeca 79, the four books of Nilus of Ancyra’s letters, essentially reprinting the 1668 edition of Leon Allatius. To this day, Migne’s edition provides the main access to Nile’s correspondence. In 1969, Jean Gribomont analyzed Allatius’ editorial work on the basis of the manuscript Ottobonianus 250, which was the basis for the editor’s publication of the letters. This manuscript lacked the first book of letters, while other available manuscripts had a different arrangement of letters. A rather chaotic attempt was made to reconstruct the whole. All the collected manuscripts were artificially combined into a single whole, in a peculiar order. In such a confusion, duplicates were added to the correspondence and, moreover, some inauthentic texts could have entered. Due to the lack of sufficient data, it is impossible to decide what was the role of the editors who probably gave their own shape to this correspondence. The letters contain many borrowings from other authors: in the form of a quotation, paraphrase or perfunctory allusion. In this article, the author reviews the research on the issue of loanwords in Nil’s letters. Finally, he lists all the borrowings identified by the following researchers: Josef Fessler, Sebastian Haidacher, Karl Heussi, Jean Gribomont, Manfred Kertsch, and Luciano Bossina. To this list are twenty-one borrowings identified by him in Nil’s letters, many of which come from John Chrysostom and the Cappadocian Fathers. New identifications do not give rise to new views on the authorship or redaction of the letters. Nevertheless, any such parallelism says something about the scale of the borrowings involved in this correspondence.