Hic oracio non est in Hebraica ueritate, nec in Regum nec in Paralipomenon, sed hic interserit eam Ieronimus (“this prayer is not in the Hebrew truth, neither in Kings nor Chronicles, but Jerome inserted it here”).Let me provide some context.
The Prayer of Manasseh is one of those documents in the Vulgate Appendix. It was excluded from the biblical canon by the Council of Trent in 1546, even though it had occupied a place in biblical manuscripts and editions of the Vulgate prior to the Council.
(Actually, I'm not exactly sure how we know that the Council excluded the Prayer. I mean, the Council doesn't mention it in the canon list, but then I don't guess you'd really expect the Prayer to get an independent mention if it's thought of as only an appendix to Chronicles. After all, Lamentations wasn't mentioned by the Council either, but I don't think anyone suspects that the Council intended to exclude Lamentations. It was just considered an appendix to Jeremiah. At any rate, the Prayer has not been considered a part of the Roman Catholic biblical canon established by the Council, while Lamentations has been so considered.)
You can see that Gutenberg located the Prayer immediately after Chronicles (fol. 226r), though here it doesn't appear so much as an appendix as a separate work, similar to the way Esdras appears just afterwards. Same in this edition of the Vulgate edited by Jan Henten with a date of 1583 (first published 1547, described by Gordon and Cameron in NCHB 3, pp. 192–93). And in the Vatable Bible published by Stephanus 1545 (the link is to vol. 2; see vol. 1 here; described by Gordon and Cameron on p. 191).
On the other hand, here's an example of a Paris Bible (Beinecke Yale MS 793) from the thirteenth century, and the Prayer does appear without any break as the conclusion to Chronicles. The Prayer starts on fol. 210r, at the bottom right. You can see that someone later has marked the start of the Prayer, but originally its text was continuous with Chronicles. An explicit appears on the other side of the page after the Prayer, and an inicipit introduces Esdras (or, actually, Jerome's Prologue to Esdras, with the biblical text beginning on the next page).
In this next example, Paris BNF latin 15467 from the year 1270, it is even harder to distinguish between the end of Chronicles and the Prayer. The Prayer begins in the middle of line 13 in the left column of image 220. Again, immediately after the Prayer, Jerome's Prologue to Esdras starts at the top of the next column.
Anyway, from what I hear, the Prayer of Manasseh started to appear in Latin Bibles only in about the 13th century, so these Paris Bibles are early examples, at least as preserved.
What about before the 13th century?
Well, the Prayer was translated into Latin from Greek, of course. Now, if you pick up your Rahlfs(-Hanhart) edition of the LXX, you will not find the Prayer listed in the Table of Contents, but you will find a work called the Odes immediately after the Psalms. The Odes consists mostly of excerpts from other parts of the Bible: Ode 1 is the Song of the Sea (Exod 15), Ode 2 is the Song of Moses (Deut 32), Ode 6 is the Prayer of Jonah (Jonah 2), Odes 7–8 are the (deuterocanonical) Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men (Daniel 3). And Ode 12 is the Prayer of Manasseh.
(The essential book now on the Odes is by Marguerite Harl (2014). The sequence of the odes is arbitrary, and differs according to manuscripts. The earliest surviving manuscript to include the Odes is Alexandrinus. You can take a look here = CSNTM's digital images of the nineteenth-century facsimile by Thompson. The Prayer is Ode 8 in Alexandrinus, and starts at the bottom right of what is labeled in the manuscript as fol. 567 = image GA_02_0557a.jpg.)
It was as part of a similar collection of odes (cantica) that the Prayer of Manasseh first came to be known in Latin. While we know that such collections of canticles were around in Latin from at least the fourth century, the Prayer of Manasseh is clearly attested only from the sixth century, in the commentary on the Canticles by Bishop Verecundus of Junca, such an important author that he merits two separate Wikipedia pages.
But Stephen Langton thought that Jerome was responsible for locating the Prayer after Chronicles, as you can see from the quotation at the top of this post. Langton (main subject of only a single Wikipedia page) is most famous generally for his role in the situation leading to the Magna Carta, but he is also well-known to biblical scholars for popularizing our present chapter divisions. He wrote many biblical commentaries, of which few have been printed. But the beginning of his commentary on the Prayer of Manasseh has been printed by Beryl Smalley in G. Lacombe and B. Smalley, “Studies on the Commentaries of Cardinal Stephen Langton,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 5 (1930): 1–220, on p. 158 (available here). The comment I quoted at the beginning of this post can be found there.
I'm left with some questions? Did Langton not know about Bibles that excluded the Prayer? Did he not realize that it was only during his own lifetime that the Prayer came to be located after Chronicles? Or did he think that this recent habit restored a long-abandoned practice introduced by Jerome?
Just for the record, we have no evidence suggesting that Jerome was familiar with the Prayer of Manasseh.
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ReplyDeleteThanks for this interesting post!
ReplyDeleteA few further thoughts on PrMan and the biblical odes: Rahlfs' order in his Psalmi cum Odis and in the Handausgabe does not reflect an order that we find in manuscripts. Instead, it puts first the ten odes (which he numbers as nine) which form the core collection in many Byzantine Greek Psalters. These texts tend to occur in a stable order and are often numbered. But other odes often circulate around the edges of the collection, including PrMan, Isa 38:10–20, and Luke 2:29–32. The occurrence and order of these odes is less consistent. Other sequences appear in a number of manuscripts.
Latin collections of biblical odes exhibit significant diversity in contents and sequence. PrMan is not a particularly component of these collections.
Beyond Greek and Latin, PrMan also occurs as an ode in some Sahidic, Bohairic, Syriac, Arabic, Slavonic, Georgian, and Ethiopic manuscripts.
In addition to Harl's valuable monograph, Schneider's 1948 study (published as a series of articles in Biblica) remains the most comprehensive published discussion of the origins and reception of collections of biblical odes. I also have forthcoming work in this area.
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ReplyDeleteChristian authors tend to quote what they came to have as bible in their own time and locations. in England the parisine Vulgate was the version of the Vulgate that came to be known as “the bible” in the 12/13th century by Langton and Bacon, just as in the continent let’s say to Thomas of Aquinas and Albert the great (who they also quoted the prayer of Manasseh as scripture/part of paralipomenos). I don't think they have the luxury of critically comparing old Vulgate editions from all around Europe.
ReplyDeleteEven if the biblical canon was fixed theoretically in the canon law of the catholic church by several synods and pope´s excathedra declaration in the 4th and 5th century: (laodicea360/Rome382/ hipopo393 /carthage397/ innocence I 405/ cartage419/ Galesius492); and their relevant canons indirectly ratify and received by later universal councils, it didn't translate in praxis (hardcore bible exclusive) until the sixtoclementine1592 Vulgate even when several blessed fathers try to make approximations on it through time so to assemble a Christian bible with only the titles of the church´s canonical books (Cassiodorus, Ceolfrid, Alcuin, Theodolf); oratio manasse of course was not in those editions since was never punctually mention in the canons of those synods/decrees The prayer was translated to Latin in antiquity when the translation of the book of odes (cantica/canticles) -for liturgical proposes-, and later, the Didascalia Apostolorum, -that contain it in full -was done; but despite its ancient liturgical use, attested by the mozarabic, ambrosian and Gregorian liturgies that quote it to a variable extend, this canticle was not appended to the Latin biblical manuscript (vetus or early vulgate) as was done for example in the Greek codex alexandrinus400, so much that saint Jerome didn’t even feel the need to speak against it as he did of every other book and apart of the deuterocanon that were present in the bible of his day, but that antagonize his particular canonical views. The oldest preserved quote in Latin from the manasseh´s prayer is recorded by Eucherius of Lyon (+449); he quotes the text as “in Cantinco”.
Eucherius Lugdunensis (380 – 449), Formulae Spiritalis Intelligentiae:
CAPUT VII. DE INTERIORE HOMINE.
Genua confessio humilitatis In Cantico: Et nunc flecto genua cordis mei (Or.Man. 11), et in Psalmo: Genua mea infirmata sunt a jejunio (Ps.CVIII, 24).
It’s true that the oldest Latin commentary on the book of odes, including the ode of Manasseh was made by verecundius iucensis (+552), but the oldest preserved commentary on it by any church fathers was made by hesychius of Jerusalem (+433). (For the attribution to Hesych cf. H. Schneider, supplementum Psaltern Bononiensis, Vienna 1917pp. 58-65)
Since the text of the prayer in Latin was not transmitted via biblical manuscript it become a rare object of prayer´s books, difficult to find entirely in its own, -aside its excerpts from the liturgy-. The prayer was from Greek translated De Novo, and appear in Gallican bibles first scarcely in the 12th century (as is the case of the earliest preserved bible I know of containing the manasseh´s preyer: Exceter college ms.5, folio 122f) and it become generalized edited in the 13th century bibles from which are preserved nearly a hundred from all around the European libraries. It was initially added as a continuous part of the text at the end of the book of 2-chonicles, without any brake or distinction, later on, was separate and entitled under its own name after this book. One of this parisine vulgates was the guide for the Guttenberg’s bible, and when the reformation surged in the 16th century they believed that, what was in the Guttenberg’s bible was the canon of the catholic church, such was not the case (the catholic church define her canon not as appear in any given pandex but as a juridical list given by the conjunction of the titles recognized as divine inspirited -canonized- at laodicea360 plus Carthage419 canons, ergo the word CANONICAL). Langton in the 13th century believed the vulgate -as was available to him back in his time (a parisine vulgate) - was a faithfully transmition of the catholic canon and Jerome works, an innocent but false believe I fear.
ReplyDeleteAs for the question if the oratio manasse was ever located at the end of 2 chronicles in the lxx Greek before Origen’s hexaplaric correction, or in any of the vetus Latina translations before Jerome, the answer is: there is no evidence; not only of manuscripts portraying such a thing, but also not at all patristic evidence: I mean church´s fathers ever quoting this prayer as part of the book of paralipomenos, as we have from them and the liturgical testimony for example of Baruch/ep being at some early point in history an integral part of LXX/vetus-Jeremiah. If the church has had that sort of historical evidence in its magisterial tradition, the fathers of Trent would have acknowledge the prayer as integral part of LXXparalipomenos and as such: canonical, as was done with the deuterocanonical LXXcorpus parts in Daniel, Esther and Jeremiah. But that didn’t happened.
In any case, we could be sure that if that integration was ever the case in the vetus edition, Jerome would had point it out, but not even this would be an absolute, Jerome for example never protest against Greek EsdrasA (3 esdras) position in the biblical codex, he actually quoted it as scripture several times in his works, even if he considered it a lesser exact account -in comparison with the Masoretic esdras/Nehemiah one-, he never spoke ill about it. (be aware that when he wrote against a the 3th and 4th books of esdras, he was likely referring as 3 esdras to what we today known as 4esdras3-14, just as was known by other contemporary to Jerome: ambrosius, and as 4esdras what we today know as 5/6esdras.) be aware that when Jerome wrote against vigilantius who he use 4esdras7 as scriptural evidence, Jerome say he has never even red from that book as is not received by the church, so we know he knew this book as 3esdras, -as also named it Ambrose-, because Greek esdras A (our current 3 esdras) he did quote it. (See. Bogaert).
To Henry, who wrote:
ReplyDelete"As for the question if the oratio manasse was ever located at the end of 2 chronicles in the lxx Greek before Origen’s hexaplaric correction, or in any of the vetus Latina translations before Jerome, the answer is: there is no evidence; not only of manuscripts portraying such a thing, but also not at all patristic evidence"
Well, maybe there we lack patristic quotations, but we have the Didascalia Apostolorum and the Syriach version includes it right after Par. Further, we have Jewish evidence, from none else than Josephus:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44092039?saml_data=eyJzYW1sVG9rZW4iOiI5ZjI0N2JhZC04ZWNlLTRhMGUtYjY4Yy05Y2YyNzdlNWIwOWYiLCJlbWFpbCI6IjI1ODY4M0BtYWlsLm11bmkuY3oiLCJpbnN0aXR1dGlvbklkcyI6WyI4MzI3N2VmOC0yNTg5LTQ0ODktOGUwMS01MmRlM2RhZTMyNDciXX0
also, pp. 199-205:
https://books.google.cz/books/about/The_Hebrew_Bible_of_Josephus.html?id=tJpouwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y