Introduction

The texts and translations published in this volume are chiefly intended to provide new material for the solution of an important problem in Church history: the sources of the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions.

These Constitutions, consisting of a body of ecclesiastical law and of directions and instructions for Christian life, profess to have been handed down from the Apostles by Saint Clement, the fourth bishop of Rome. Yet, in all probability, they were actually written in Greek by the pseudo-Ignatius An unknown author writing under the name of Ignatius of Antioch. in Syria, likely in Antioch between A.D. 350 and 400. The present publication is not concerned with the first seven books, but only with the eighth. It presents three of the other documents which contain material similar to the regulations of that last book, excluding the final chapter, which—for reasons stated below—does not come under investigation here.

Of these other writings, several Greek manuscripts provide a preliminary draft of the eighth book, or perhaps an excerpt from such a draft. The Saidic, Arabic, and Ethiopic texts preserve two forms of these same canons, the second of which coincides remarkably with the eighth book. The Syriac version probably translated both forms as well, though hitherto only an incomplete version has been discovered, and the statement of an Arabic colophon A concluding statement in a manuscript providing information about its production. mentioned below has not yet been verified.