The Pseudo-Oecumenian Catena on Ephesians: Text, Translation, and Commentary

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Initial interest in the catena manuscripts of the early church was constrained to the cataloguing of a limited range of documents (Karo and Lietzmann, 1902). Following this, a fuller enquiry into the format and content of these texts was undertaken by Karl Staab in 1926. The current standard classification of Pauline catenae in the Clavis Patrum Graecorum (198*, 2nd ed. 2018) depends entirely on Staab's publications, despite the recent discovery of more than one hundred catena manuscripts not featured in existing catalogues (Houghton and Parker, 2016). The Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) at the University of Birmingham has led the way in this new wave of catena research, promoting the first integrated study of these manuscripts as witnesses both to the New Testament text and the development of Christian exegesis, even identifying extracts which preserve otherwise unknown texts from early Christian writers, including works later banned as heretical (Moss, 2016). Recent research such as Panella's M3C thesis on Galatians Catenae, the Codex Zacynthius project and the ERC CATENA project offers an unparalleled environment to study these manuscripts.My research will build on these freshly-created resources to advance a new understanding of the early commentary tradition on Ephesians-one of the key Pauline Epistles, sometimes described as a summary of Paul's theology (Lincoln, 1998). My central research question considers how the collection of diverse theological commentators demonstrated in the earliest form of Ephesians catenae impacted the interpretational methodology of the pre-medieval church.This project aims to produce the first-ever critical edition of this commentary and to compare its theological methodology with that of contemporary Western interpretational constructs. In preparation to produce this edition, I have begun classifying the existing documents into the categories of Staab and the Clavis Patrum Graecorum. Those manuscripts attesting to the earliest commentary form will be fully transcribed. These transcriptions will be collated for the production of the final digital edition with hyperlinks to each file. The completion of the edition will then enable critical engagement with the theological nature of the commentaries it contains.By recovering these early voices of the Christian community, some lost through time, the modern church will be able to reconnect with forgotten interpretational methodologies potentially shifting modern hermeneutical approaches in ways more aligned with previous centuries. Additionally, this work will serve as a template for future critical editions of other, similar commentary manuscripts of the Bible.