Preface

With this third part, which I hereby present to the public, the edition of the Church History of Eusebius is complete: it contains the introduction and the indices.

The critical preparation of a text as diversely transmitted as the KG Church History is an art that is easier to practice than to describe theoretically. I do not blame the masters of the craft if they prefer to verify such work on the object itself rather than delve into wordy arguments regarding the groups of Hss. manuscripts. However, the transmission of the KG is, by virtue of its age, richness, and the peculiar contrast between an interpolation affecting all Hss. and a continuous cross-verification of the Hss. among themselves, such a unique example for the methods of philological criticism, and permits such a deep insight into the development of a text, that I did not want to forgo the opportunity to demonstrate in numerous instances how little is achieved by the method of establishing family trees and selecting the 'best' Hss.. Philology must come to terms with the fact that the manuscripts of a Greek prose text are not mechanical copies of a prototype, but to a greater or lesser extent ἐκδόσεις editions, that is, recensions that were produced with the same means of collation and conjecture that we ourselves employ. From this it follows that the mechanical corruption of letters, which modern philological criticism focuses on first, is the form of corruption that rarely becomes truly dangerous to the text in a rich and ancient transmission, since it cannot easily spread across all Hss.. Rather, the arbitrary rewriting of the text causes the greatest harm, which becomes incurable as soon as the transmission does not offer the possibility of verification through early and manifold divergence. In the case of the transmission of the KG, there is the additional factor that the various editions prepared by the author himself have been carried over into the groups of Hss. and translations: for this reason alone, it is necessary to subject these to a more detailed examination.