Bibliotheca divina: Filologia e storia dei testi cristiani (review)

Abstract

The present volume is a history of the transmission and interpretation of ancient Christian texts. It is written at the introductory level, and Vian presents it as something of an equivalent for the field of patristic philology of the classic work of Leighton Reynolds and Nigel Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, first published in 1968. But what precisely does Vian mean by what he calls "filologia patristica" and "filologia dei testi cristiani," expressions which, so he states in his preface (11-12), he regards as synonymous? The first chapter of the book is dedicated to this question, and it allows us to appreciate better Vian's conception of the discipline of patristic philology, which certainly differs from the one current in North America. He views this discipline more broadly as the "philology of Christian texts," and, accordingly, he includes within the latter category both the Old and the New Testaments and the corpus of Judeo-Hellenistic literature (19–20). [End Page 124] Vian justifies this by pointing to the first "patrology," namely, Jerome's De viris illustribus, in which biblical and Judeo-Hellenistic authors were included together with the later ecclesiastical writers. As he sees it, a clear and meaningful distinction between the study of biblical texts and the study of patristic literature is a post medieval development, and disregarding that distinction will allow for a better understanding of Christian philology, at least as practiced in the early period.