Authenticity,
Transmission, and Authenticity
No manuscript ascribing the
commentaries to Pelagius has survived, but there is no doubt that he was their
author. When Augustine introduces the third book of On the Merits and
Forgiveness of Sins and on Infant Baptism, composed in 411 CE, he explains that
he had read 'some works by Pelagius . . . containing very short explanations [expositiones
breuissimas] of the letters of the apostle Paul' (Pecc. merit.
3,1.1; Souter 1922: 4). This motivated him to refute certain arguments against
the transmission of sin from Adam to his descendants, relayed by Pelagius in
his comment on Rom. 5:15, which Augustine then quotes (Pecc. merit.
3.2.2, 3.3.5; Souter 1922: 40-41). About two decades later, in a brief prepared
for the church in Constantinople, Marius Mercator states that Pelagius composed
commentaries (commentarios) on the Pauline letters for a circle of
friends prior to the sack of Rome in 410 (Commonitorium super nomine
Caelestii 2.1; Souter 1922: 4). In that work Mercator paraphrases Pelagius'
comments on Rom. 5:12-14 (Souter 1922: 41-44).
A century later, if not earlier,
the commentaries were already circulating under another name. When Cassiodorus
in his Institutes (begun in the 530s) describes commentaries on the
apostolic (not just Pauline) letters, he begins with a set of glosses (annotationes)
on thirteen Pauline letters that were widely known and admired but erroneously
attributed to Pope Gelasius. Cassiodorus, detecting 'the poison of the Pelagian
error' in these glosses, undertook to remove the offending passages, a task he
completed for the commentary on Romans, leaving the rest of the commentaries to
his students (Inst. 1.8.1; Johnson 1989).
Early on, the commentaries were
used in monastic circles in Ireland (Zimmer 1901; Kelly 1978), England
(Dumville 1986), and the Continent (Frede 1975-1991: 1026), as one can see from
quotations taken from the commentaries or copies made of them. Although the
commentaries were popular in Irish circles, the Irish were not the exclusive
means of their early transmission, as was once thought ( de Bruyn 1993: 28-29
). From glosses introduced into early medieval copies of the text of the
Pauline letters with a sign indicating that they came from Pelagius (Zimmer
1901: 39-112, 137-155; Souter 1922: 5, 25-28, 326-330; Picard 2003; De Paor
2016; Dunphy 2019), it is evident that Pelagius was known to have produced
commentaries on the Pauline letters, probably because the manuscripts from
which the glosses were derived attributed the commentaries or the comments to
Pelagius (Zimmer 1901: 156-158; Souter 1922: 28). But otherwise the
commentaries were transmitted throughout the Middle Ages anonymously or under
the name of Jerome.
The texts preserved in
manuscripts of the commentaries, some of which can be grouped into families,
differ. Although early modern scholars from Erasmus onwards no longer accepted
that the commentaries were by Jerome and suspected or argued that they were by
a Pelagian, they were misled in their efforts to ascertain the author by the
absence in the prevailing text of the commentaries (in the tradition now called
pseudo-Jerome) of exact parallels to the passages quoted by Augustine and
paraphrased by Mercator. This led them to conflate the pseudo-Jerome
commentaries with the expurgated version produced by Cassiodorus and his
students (Souter 1922: 6- 24), which in the first printed edition in 1537 was
erroneously attributed to Primasius (Souter 1922: 319-321). It is owing to the
observations of Heinrich Zimmer (1901), Cuthbert Turner (1902), Sigmund
Hellmann (1906) (see Souter 1922: 28-33), and above all Alexander Souter that
several strands of the commentaries' early transmission were unravelled and
distinguished: the original commentaries by Pelagius; copies of Pelagius' commentaries
with additional material found primarily but not exclusively in the
pseudo-Jerome family of manuscripts; and the revision of Pelagius' commentaries
by Cassiodorus and his students.
As Souter demonstrated in the
introduction to his edition of the commentaries, two manuscripts to which
Souter gave the sigla A and B-Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Augiensis
CXIX (A; 8th-9th c.) and Oxford, Balliol College 157 (B; 15th c.)-have the
strongest claim to preserving the text of Pelagius' commentaries. They attest
to the passages quoted by Augustine and paraphrased by Mercator completely and,
importantly, without the additional material found, to varying degrees, in all
the other witnesses (Souter 1922: 34-48). Their fidelity to a very early
transmission of the commentary is further demonstrated by leaves from a
sixth-century manuscript, Vatican, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana lat. 10800
(Mercati 1907). The leaves preserve a text similar to that in B (Souter 1922:
48-51, 226-228). In reconstructing the text of Pelagius' commentary, Souter
justifiably relied on A and B, while also taking into consideration the
witnesses of the other manuscripts, Cassiodorus' revision, and early medieval
glosses.
The two manuscripts are not
without difficulties. They present different versions of the text of the
Pauline letters (see below), and they each include material that the other
omits. The text in A is shorter and, on the whole, more reliable than the text
in B, whose scribe was copying from a defective manuscript (Souter 1922:
211-212, 216-223). The text in B includes comments that were added to Pelagius'
commentary by a 'Pelagian' writer within decades of its circulation-the
so-called pseudo-Jerome interpolations that were published by Souter (1922:
265-267; 1931) and then verified with greater precision by Hermann Frede in his
edition of a manuscript-Budapest, Hungarian National Museum codex latinus medii
aeui 1 (800 CE)-that preserves comments from an anonymous commentator used by
Pelagius as well as comments from the later interpolator (Frede 1973: 164-205;
1974; on the manuscript, see further Dunphy 2013, 2014, 2015; Maclachlan 2014).
Occasionally A also includes comments not found in the other witnesses.
More problematic in A, however,
are variations in the phrasing of a comment that alter its meaning in what
might be considered an 'Augustinian' direction. These variants are often, but
not always, also found in one other manuscript, St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 73 (
G; 9th c.). Many of the variants occur in the commentary on Romans, the Pauline
letter that had the greatest bearing on the central interpretative questions of
the early Pelagian controversy (de Bruyn 1993: 32-33). Were these variants
present in the original commentary and later altered by a reviser, or were they
absent from the original commentary and later added by a reviser? While there
is no decisive evidence to eliminate one of these possibilities, the presence
elsewhere in Pelagius' commentaries of remarks similar to those that are
disputed, but with the support of multiple witnesses, argues in favour of
regarding these variants as coming from Pelagius ( de Bruyn 1993: 33-34;
Matteoli 2011). But, even if one questions the authenticity of these variants,
most of the text of the commentaries has been transmitted with only
inconsequential discrepancies among the witnesses. To exclude the entire work
from consideration when studying Pelagius' thought and practice (see A. Bonner
2018: pp. xvii-xviii) is too radical as a general method, since it dispenses
with much that probably comes from Pelagius. A more nuanced approach would be
to be cognizant of variants that introduce significant alterations in meaning
and weigh their value as warranted (see e.g. Matteoli 2011) . Souter's practice
( 1926: p. viii) of marking points where A and B diverge with square brackets
in his edition is useful for that purpose. These are replicated in the translations
of de Bruyn ( 1993 ) and Scheck (2022), as well as in the quotations below.
However, one must always consult the apparatus in Souter's edition, since the
variants differ in type and importance. (Theodore De Bruyn, “Exegetical
Commentaries by Pelagius,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Pelagian
Controversy, ed. Anthony Dupont, Giulio Malavasi, and Brian Matz [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2025], 281-84)