Thursday, August 24, 2017

Lost Latin Gospel Commentary Found and Made Available Public Domain!

This may be old news to some Gospel scholarship geeks, but I just came across this article this
morning: the lost Gospel commentary of Fortunatianus of Aquileia, a mid-fourth century Italian bishop, has been found and translated into English.  De Gruyter is making the English translation available in the public domain (! Thanks, De Gruyter!) here. 

Fortunatianus' commentary is fascinating for a number of reasons, as he works in Latin from a pre-Vulgate (OL or Old Latin) translation of the Gospels.  On the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, he adopts the Levirate marriage solution to the Jacob-Heli problem, although mentions that "many" commentators prefer to see Matthew's genealogy as that of Joseph, and Luke's as that of Mary (which is my own preferred solution).  In any event, it is intriguing to watch him work through many of the well-known interpretive cruces in the Gospels at this early stage in the Church's history.




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