521 - 50988 - 6 - The Anonymous Sayings of the Desert Fathers : A Select Edition and Complete English Translation

This volume contains a first complete edition and English translation of the second of the three major forms in which the so-called “Sayings of the Desert Fathers” (Apophthegmata Patrum, AP) have come down to us. The first form is known as the “Alphabetic” collection (APalph) because its roughly a thousand items are arranged in more or less alphabetical order by reference to the approximately one hundred and twenty fathers who allegedly uttered the sayings or are mentioned in the tales, ranging from Abba Antony to Abba Ôr, A–Ω. One version of the text of APalph has been available since the seventeenth century in the well-known edition with Latin translation by Jean-Baptiste Cotelier. Par contre (passing over the second collection (APanon) for a moment), there is now an excellent critical edition of the third, the “systematic” collection of apophthegmata (APsys). In one form or another, most of the contents of APsys can be found in one (but rarely in both) of the first and second collections; extracts from the Ascetic Discourses of Isaiah of Scete and a number of pieces from elsewhere were subsequently added to these. APsys is systematic in that here the items (some twelve hundred in the extant Greek