Ethiopic Didascalia

Platt 1834 historical front matter, source page 15

PREFACE. vii was there for Dr. Grabe'a numerous and pathetical Exclamations, Admirations, or Imputa- tions upon my Conduct in tiiis matter ? None of which yet shall I here return upon him ; as being very willing to undergo all this, and much more, in case the Church and the Learned will at last hear the Merits of my Cause, and come to fair Enquiry and Examination. But to wave this matter and return: I proceed now to my third and last Head, viz. To express my present Thoughts concerning this Arabick Book and its Preface, since I have had the happy Opportunity of perusing the Account and the Arguments which Dr. Grabs has given us about them ; which I shall do under the following Proposition. Desiring the Reader only to Note, that the fourth Argument for the genuineness of the Preface to the Arabick Books, taken from that name of Apostle of Jerusalem instead of Bishop of the same, therein supposed to be ascribed to James, is to be omitted ; as being, it seems, the bare mistake of the first Translator : and that all the other Arguments are still insisted on by me in that case : as being agreeable to that intire and more exact Translation of the whole which I have now by me, and which I design to give the Reader in my Essay on the Constitutions. " PROPOSITION. " The Preface to this Arabick Doctrine is the real Preface to the Original Doctrine of the Apostles ; but the Book itself is a corrupt Edition of <AeCatholickDoctrine, or former Six Books of the Apostolical Constitutions, made by the Athanasians in the Fourth Century of the Church." pp. 35—41. In all this it does not appear that Whiston had changed his views of the im- portance and authority of the Ethiopic Didascalia, though he gives up the case of the Arabic Doctrine ; but in a work which he published in the same year (1711), called "An Essay on the Apostohcal Constitutions,"* he says (p. 549) that the Ethiopic Didascalia is either the very same as that Arabic one at Oxford, or a mere abridgment of it. On this I have only to say, that he seems here at length to have come to a right opinion upon the subject. We have now the greater part of the Ethiopic Didascalia before us ; and we find that the Proposition, just quoted above, about the Arabic Didascalia, is precisely applicable to the Ethiopic : it is precisely what Whiston, with his views, must have said of the Ethiopic Text also, if he had seen it. The work is set forth in the name of the Twelve Apostles ; he would regard its Preface therefore to be the real and genuine Preface : but the Book itself, so far as we have it, is nothing more nor less than " a corrupt Edition of the Catholic Doctrine, or former Four Books of the Apostohcal Constitutions." It results, however, from what has been here adduced, that no copy of the Ethiopic Didascalia could be obtained at the time of this controversy ; and what * Forming the Third Volume of his " Primitive Christianity reviv'd."