The text of the gospels in the works of Gregory of Nazianus

Abstract

Citation of the New Testament by the Church Fathers is a valuable resource in reconstructing the early history of its text, for the time and place each was writing is known. The Society for Biblical Literature has undertaken a series of studies of the Fathers who wrote in Greek in order to make available this resource and to examine in detail what light it sheds on textual development. Among these, the fourth-century Cappadocian father Gregory of Nazianzus was a prolific writer whose work is largely extant; he made extensive and virtuoso use of Scripture in his orations, poetry and other writings. In this study, Gregory's life and works are outlined; the use he makes of NT citation is described and evaluated from a text-critical perspective; the particular difficulties this entails are discussed; and the sources and method used to identify citation laid out in chapters One to Three. This study aims to retrieve all his references to the Gospels, to match them to their NT source where this can be determined, and to present them with critical apparatus as either citations, adaptations or allusions. Chapters Four to Seven list these references to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. An evaluation of their contribution to our understanding of NT textual development completes the study. Earlier work in the series has attempted to locate the text used by individual Fathers within the main strands of textual tradition by calculating proportional agreement with a carefully selected representative number of manuscripts. These attempts have had mixed results; in this study the small number of uniquely-derived verbatim citations in Gregory's work, the insurmountable difficulties of transmission and definition, and the great loss of material if rigorous criteria for inclusion are applied, justify the omission of this analysis. Instead a more qualitative approach has sought to do justice to the special strengths of Gregory as a witness to the Gospel textual tradition