xiii registered in the Catalogue of the Library of Paris,
vol. ii. p. 65. It is deficient at the beginning and end, beginning with the
words η παιδισκη σοι, p. 17, and ending at της σωτηρος ημων παρακελευσεως, p. 688. These
deficiencies were supplied by J. A. Fabricius in his Delectus argumentorum
et syllabus scriptorum, qui veritatem religionis Christianae adversos atheos .
. . asseruerunt, who used a copy that had been made by Stephen Bergler, at
Hamburg, in 1725, from a MS. in the possession of Nicholas Mavrocordato, Prince
of Wallachia, who collected many Greek MSS. from Mount Athos and other
monasteries. The MS. was unfortunately lost at the death of the Prince. Bergler
gave no information about its age or condition. It was almost certain that it
was either derived from Parisinus 469 before its mutilation, or from a MS. of
the same family.
There are four other
MSS. of the Demonstratio at Paris, parchments of the sixteenth century
numbered 470, 471, 472 and 473 in the Catalogue, vol. ii. pp. 65, 66. And there
is at St. John's College, Oxford, a parchment MS. of the fifteenth century (No.
41 in the Catalogue of O. Coxius, p. 12). As all these have the same
deficiencies, there is little doubt that they come from the common source,
Parisinus 469.
There is a sixth MS. in
the Ambrosian Library, at Milan, of the fifteenth century, of the same family
(Montfaucon in Bibliothcca Bibliothecarum, vol. i. p. 527). And a
seventh was possessed by T. F. Mirandola, and was used by Donatus of Verona for
his Latin version, first published at Rome in 1498.
Of the four later Paris
MSS., 473 bears the date 1543, and was written at Venice (or 1533 according to
Montfaucon, Diario Italico, p. 408) by Valeriano of Forli. One of the
four was no doubt the foundation of Stephen's Paris edition of 1548.
The Oxford MS. was
collated by Gaisford with this edition of Robert Stephen in 1548 with the
minutest care. But in the opinion of Dindorf his work added little to the
elucidation of the text, beyond the correction of a few slight mistakes of
copying, the divergencies in the quotations from the LXX being probably changes
made by later scribes in order to bring the quotations into agreement with the
accepted text.
xiv
Dindorf's conclusion is
that a satisfactory text is secured by the use of the Parisinus 469, on which
his own edition (Teubner series) is based. It is, he says, comparatively free
from the errors of transcribers, with the exception of some lacunae; (pp. 195
d, 210 a, 217 b), and from the frequent interpolations of the Praeparatio
and the History, because the Demonstratio, having fewer readers,
was seldom copied. There is, therefore, little room in the study of the text
for conjectural emendation.
The first Edition of the
Greek was that of Robert Stephen, 1548.
Viguier's Praeparatio
was published at Paris in 1628, with the Demonstratio and other works of
Eusebius, and the Latin translation of Donatus.
Gaisford's edition (2
vols., Oxford) appeared in 1852 with critical apparatus and the same Latin
translation.
The Demonstratio
forms vol. xxii. of the Greek Patrology of Migne (1857), who uses the
Paris edition of 1628 with the same translation.
The most recent text is
W. Dindorf's in the Teubner Series (Leipzig, 1867), from whose Preface the data
of the above are drawn.
The Latin version of
Donatus (Rome, 1498) was reprinted at Basle in 1542, 1549, 1559 and 1570, and
with the Scholia of J. J. Grynaeus at Paris in 1587. It is remarkable for its
omissions and alterations of passages doctrinally suspected.
The present translation
is made from the text of Gaisford (Oxford, 1852), with reference to Migne.