Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Has Anyone Ever Suggested that the Reason Why the Mar Saba Scribe Copied the Letter to Theodore into the 1646 Voss Book is Because it is a Collection of Patristic Letters?

I don't know if you have ever done this before but I was trying to figure out which shelf to place a new book I just purchased.   I have a small library and books are divide into broad subject categories because of my eclectic tastes.  Even though the new purchase was quite different from any of the books I normally buy in a split second I unconsciously made a decision about where it 'belonged.'  I wonder whether the seventeenth century scribe did the same thing.  Agamemnon Tselikas argues that he 'should have' written the letter in a collection of writings of Clement of Alexandria that were there on the shelf.  Yet sometimes we take what is nearest at hand.  Perhaps he saw that the collection of letters of Clement of Alexandria had been mostly destroyed except for this one leaf and so - quickly copied the manuscript into a collection of Patristic letters.

It is amazing to look back and see how many of the decisions that would have a lasting impact on our lives were made by a split second decision.  


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