Alcuin Club

The Alcuin Club

Promoting the Study of Liturgy

The Alcuin Club

Promoting the Study of Liturgy

The Canons of Hippolytus

SKU JLS 2 Category

£5.95

15 in stock

Joint Liturgical Studies 2

The document known as the ‘Canons of Hippolytus’ (CH), a collection of thirty-eight canons with a concluding sermon, is now extant only in Arabic, but it is generally agreed that this is derived from a lost Coptic version, which was in turn translated from an original Greek text Although J M. Vansleb drew attention to it in the seventeenth century, it was only in the nineteenth century that a full text, with a Latin translation, was published by Daniel von Haneberg, Bishop of Speyer. This was based on only two manuscripts from the same family. From this text a new Latin version, with many doubtful conjectures, was prepared by two Orientalists, H. Vielhaber and L Stern, and published by Hans Achelis in 1891. Achelis accepted the attribution to Hippolytus as genuine and arrived at the conclusion that CH was the third-century original from which all the other Church Orders containing similar material (AC, AT, and TD) were derived. As a consequence of this, interest was aroused in the document among liturgical scholars, and Haneberg’s Latin translation was reproduced in an appendix to some early editions of Louis Duchesne’s, Origines du culte chretien. A German version from earlier and better manuscripts was produced by Wilhelm Riedel in 1900. However, after the researches of Eduard Schwartz and R H. Connolly demonstrated that AT was in reality the original document of the group, and CH merely a later derivative of it, interest in it rapidly declined, and its place was
taken in the fifth edition of Duchesne’s work by extracts from AT.

Paul F. Bradshaw (editor)

English Translation by Carol Bebawi

Reprinted from an original copy