Complete Works XVIII: Against Celsus I-IV (Lommatzsch)

original: "brigiae anno 1658..." William Spencer, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, published it in Cambridge in the year 1658, and he also added very learned annotations to the end of the work. This edition was reprinted in Cambridge in the year 1677. Truly, it would have been desirable that, as much care as Spencer took to illustrate with most learned notes the almost numberless passages pertaining to history, or to Origen’s peculiar dogmas, or to the discipline of earlier centuries, or to ancient philosophy, he had applied as much diligence both to the emendation of the Greek text and to correcting the frequent hallucinations of the translator Gelenius. He followed the Greek text as it appeared in the edition of David Hoeschelius in its entirety, except for a few places where he introduced certain variant readings, which Hoeschelius had relegated to the margins, into the Greek series as being better. He left countless other things that required a corrective hand untouched, without proposing even the smallest conjecture by which they might at least be recalled to a more convenient sense. In the preface, he notes that he was unable to procure anything of those things which usually serve as aids to others, although he had been very concerned about acquiring them. "Hoeschelius," he says, "had two manuscript codices, which he had taken from the libraries of the Elector Palatine, the Bavarian, and the Augsburg. I used only these printed copies." But what prevented him from approaching the Oxford library himself or through friends? There he certainly would have found three other manuscript codices, and he would not have complained that "the editions of books must be prepared in the greatest scarcity of all aids and codices." Be that as it may, I have not experienced such a lack of manuscript codices myself, for to me, not only were the various readings taken from eight manuscripts a great help,