Nick Nicholas has laboriously and generously made extensive edits, suggestions and improvements to the first edition. These are all incorporated into this edition, though a final draft has not been completed. I am pleased to welcome him as a coauthor with myself and am very thankful for his help. The 2nd edition can be found here.
Unfortunately, my translation of Hippolytus’ Commentary on Daniel will be delayed again for a while as it is receiving a thorough editorial scrubbing! Thanks for your patience.
Excellent news!
I’m curious about this H2 recension. Is there any material reason to suppose it actually existed, or could it simply be a phantom, the result of an inexact translation of H1 into Latin that later spawned the extant Latin versions?
Or is this simply a convention I don’t understand?
Hi John,
The short answer is that there are greek fragments of H2 and that it is likelier that they stem from the H2 “recension” rather than stemming from a retranslation of an inexact Latin translation. Of course “likelier” is the key word here, many things are possible, but I think that the current theory makes the most sense.
Of course, H1 and H2 are just ways of describing different bunches of manuscripts — and all the representatives of H2 are Latin and Armenian. Looking at the introduction, the editor is adamant that H2 was compiled in Alexandria; the arguments aren’t explicit (glancing discussion in xii-xiii), but I gather it’s because the H2 editor is familiar with the Septuagint, which points to someone familiar with Greek rather than translating straight into Latin. I presume that H2 showing up in Armenian as well as Latin (because the Latin and Armenian versions share features) also point to a Greek original.
There are Greek bits that fit into H2, but they’re either much smaller bits, or reflections of the text in later chroniclers, rather than self-standing witnesses like the Madrid ms and the Latin Barbarus for H1, or the Books of Generation and the Armenian version for H2.
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