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A Collation of the Athos Codex of the Shepherd of Hermas
A Collation of the Athos Codex of the Shepherd of Hermas Author:J. Armitage Robinson Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Shepherd of Hermas was known only in Latin. In 1860, Antoine d'Abbadie discovered and published an Ethiopic text. A controversy arose over the Greek version of Hermas, however, for in 1855 Constanine Simonides sold what he claimed to be the original Greek text to the University Library of Leipzig. ... more »It consisted of three leaves of a fourteenth-century paper manuscript from Mount Athos, and a copy of six other leaves that he left in the monastery. As the scholarly community was receiving his copy, Simonides was accused of having forged the text. He was arrested and sent to Berlin; among his papers another copy of the same six leaves from the Hermas manuscript was found. It was a different text than that he had sold to the Leipzig Library. Tischendorf's discovery of Codex Sinaiticus a few years later provided a genuine Greek edition of Hermas, but only the first quarter of the book. Tischendorf published Sinaiticus in 1863, and Lake issued a photographic facsimile of the codex in 1911. During Easter of 1887, J. Armitage Robinson visited Patmos to collate a manuscript he was preparing. He met up with Spyr. P. Lambros, who, seven years before, had cataloged the manuscripts of the numerous monasteries of Mount Athos. He called Robinson's attention to a codex containing portions of Hermas. He had found it in the small monastery of St. Gregory, which contained only 155 codices at the time. The six leaves were well preserved in extremely fine writing. The average number of lines to the page was 72, and each line had about 90 letters. This was the fourteenth-century original that Simonides had forged. Lambros had numbered it 96 in his catalog. No manuscript on Mount Athos has greater value than this one. Lambros was professor of history in the University of Athens at the time he wrote the introduction for the codex and collated it. His results were translated and edited by Robinson, who added a preface and two superb appendices: "On the Forged Greek Ending of the Shepherd of Hermas," and "Hermas in Arcadia."« less