This is a new edition of the Greek and Latin remains of Theodore's treatise On the incarnation, together with a translation into German in the appendix. Till holds that these sources, and the Syriac remnants which substantiate them, are concurrent enough yet independent enough to withstand Marcel Richard's suspicion of wholesale forgery; as he demonstrates in his lucid and scholarly introduction, however, it is no new thing for Theodore's admirers to complain of the mutilation of his text. The witnesses to whom we owe the Greek fragments seem, for the most part, to be quoting from catenae which were drawn up to incriminate him, the first by Proclus of Constantinople within a few years of his death. Hill recounts in detail the controversy that this engendered in Cilicia and Armenia, where the accuracy of the Byzantine indictment was disputed; another batch of invidious citations, published in the sixth century by partisans of Severus of Antioch, can be genuine only if it derives from a work by Cyril of Alexandria which is lost to us and was not known even then to those who took the other side in the disputation. Our reconstruction of Theodore's Christology depends heavily on the catalogues of his errors compiled by the Emperor Justinian and Leontius of Byzantium. The latter of whom, having turned his coat after some years as a champion of Theodore, may be trusted to be erudite, if not scrupulous. Justinian, in Till's view, offers little more than an echo of his testimony, while the Fifth Oecumencial Council, in endorsing his edict against the Mopsuestian, appears to have mined a different source, the Contra Apollinarium. One of the western dissidents in 553, Facundus of Hermiane, purports to correct another catena, in which innocuous sayings had been truncated or isolated in order to make them serviceable to an indictment; Till contends that his evidence, though credible, does not make liars of the more hostile witnesses. He amply achieves his goal of producing a tenable edition of the fragments, though I do not understand why he adds that it would be inconsistent with his historical purpose to determine whether Theodore was a heretic (p. 9). The evidence of an impeachment in his own lifetime may be dubious, but men who had been his contemporaries thought it no more an anachronism to call him a heretic after his death than it was for Theodore himself to lay this charge against his elders Apollinarius and Eunomius. The consensus of his time was already intolerant of his assertion that the Word alone is properly the Son, while the man is a son only by conjunction (p. 253); Nestorius and Theodoret do not imitate his frank subordination of the language of becoming flesh to that of assuming manhood (p. 245). If authentic, the statements imputed to him are heretical; for this reason his advocates chose to dispute their provenance rather than vindicate their orthodoxy, thus furnishing matter for this excellent book.
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