Dialogue Against the Marcionites, Exhortation to Martyrdom (Wettstein 1674)

...and I was commanded to expend whatever effort I could on them. For some time, studies of a completely different nature, graciously delegated to me by the Magnificent Elders of the Academy, stood in the way. Nor was I a little deterred by the promised compilation by the learned Huet of all of Origen’s works that could be found, which was completely unknown to me at the beginning of my efforts; nor was there any doubt that much more solid results were to be expected from his profound erudition and his wide-ranging reading of the Fathers, especially Origen. But because it was announced by friends that the most excellent man was intent on more serious matters and was attempting things much greater than these, and because no hope appeared in the meantime as to when he would edit the rest of Origen, and because in the interim the exhortations of learned men and friends here and there, to whom our studies became known, were added, I finally decided, with God’s help, to actually perform what I had committed to many: to edit this whatever-it-is of Origen in Greek for the first time, and to recall to the memory of men those things that had been buried in oblivion for so many centuries, even though I was not unaware that I would be committing my meager talent to the judgment of many and varied people, not without danger.

Now, both manuscript codices from which these were taken are on paper and were written by a Greek hand (as the paper and the character suggest) in Greece itself, of about three, or at most four, centuries of antiquity; for the luster of the writing, the form of the letters, and the paper itself forbid attributing more to our own. Whether it is the same as that which the Zurich polyhistor Conrad Gessner mentioned in his Bibliotheca, under the title "Origen," in the 1545 edition, in these words: "The Dialogue against the Marcionites and the Letter to Africanus lie hidden at Venice with Diego Hurtado, the Emperor’s Orator," I hold to be uncertain. Whether the aforementioned illustrious man perhaps released it to Jerome Froben, from whom Humphrey confesses he received the manuscript codex which he translated, is not known to us. This is certain and can be confirmed by the eyes: that in the year 1557, Lawrence Humphrey, an Englishman, adorned his own version of the Dialogue against the Marcionites from it, which was added to the Works of Origen published at Basel in the year 1571. Furthermore, it is certain, as the learned theologian Andreas Rivetus observed in Critica Sacra, book 2, chapter 13, already sixty years ago, that the translators of the aforementioned dialogue used very different Greek codices; but that the one followed by Humphrey was fuller and more distinct, as is evident to anyone from a collation. Nor did the sharpest theologian of the Society of Jesus, Philipp Labbe, in De Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis, Vol. 2, p. 145, think much differently fifty years later: that Humphrey used...