TO THE NOBLE AND

MOST VIRTUOUS COMPANIONS

OF THE CHURCH

OF FULDA, JOHANN

SICHARD, GREETINGS.

A decorative initial letter 'P' contains an illustration of two infants in a landscape with hills and a tree.

I send to you, most distinguished men, Philo the Jew, the most ancient of all authors who survive today, and by the testimony of Jerome, the most eloquent. It seemed appropriate that he who was rescued by your care and at such great expense from the incursion of the Goths, if he should one day return under your auspices to the hands of the learned, should at last bring you lasting glory. This glory will endure the longer, the more renowned the estimation of such an author is among all people. This renown he earned for himself not so much by the name of his erudition—though he is said to have equaled Plato himself, the god of philosophers—as from the fact that he used the familiarity of the Apostles themselves, and indeed of that prince PETER, when he was sent to Rome as an ambassador of the Jewish people to Caligula. It is likely that he, as a Jewish man, conferred with him on Christianity and received the beginnings of the faith. Yet, I would not deny that some things are found in these books that smack more of the profane philosophy—to which he had devoted himself more than a little at Alexandria—than of the Christian. This is easy for anyone to see who has read the most elegant little book De mundo On the World. Unless we are of the opinion that there was another Philo who was the author of some things that were later begun to be read under his name—a view to which the most learned man of our age, Guillaume Budé, openly subscribes—or we prefer to blame the manuscripts. With these, we have struggled so much that I could scarcely believe Hercules himself would have had more labor to exhaust in subduing many monsters. For when we first waged war against the ignorance of the scribes, which is difficult and full of risk even if nothing else comes from elsewhere, and especially for one who has once decided to dwell religiously among those ancients, there occur some instances of such affected and ambitious corruption that the more you strive, the less you accomplish; and the more places you put your hand to in order to bring help, the more desperate you leave them. Many things seemed this way to me, and when they had distracted us for a long time, while we were trying to bring some light to the author and felt at last that nothing was progressing—and the copies, of which we had two, so constantly and by design defended their errors—we abandoned the plan we had begun to change some things. We followed what each copy had, though they were so similar to one another that you would not say one egg was more like another, and I had no doubt that one had been transcribed from the other, however far apart they were located. For we had brought that comfortable Fulda manuscript of yours, having previously obtained that ancient one from the Lorsch monastery, which had given us great hope of a most happy edition, but as we progressed a little, it not only foully failed us, but also made us regret our hasty edition. For the difficulty of such matters, where it leaves no room for the diligence and vigilance which we certainly did not spare, and where the matter had now become clear, resulted in our having to bear the blame not only for ourselves but also for the...