N. Bonwetsch's Greek text of Hippolytus’ Commentary on Daniel (Hippolytus Werke: Kommentar zu Daniel, i, GCS 7, Leipzig 1897) was considerably improved by G. Bardy and M. Lefèvre in Hippolyte: commentaire sur Daniel (Sources Chrétiennes xiv, Paris 1947) following the discovery of the Codex Meteora 573. A. Dihle and M. Richard, Hippolyts Werke (GCS Neue Folge 7, Berlin 2000) were able to make further improvements following the discovery of new leaves in the Codex Vatopedi 290 that is our sole surviving complete Greek manuscript. The recovered texts were translated by their respective editors into German and into French. The Greek fragments found in Migne, Patrologia Graeca x. 637–70, Paris 1857, I– XLIV under the heading Hippolyti episcopi Romae Danielis et Nabuchodonosori visionum solutiones ambarum simul had been translated into English in Philip Scaff's Library of the Ante Nicene Fathers v. Schmidt has now provided us with a much to be welcomed, accurate, literal translation in English of the entire restored text.
General interest in this text has been directed at the chronological issues raised. The divergent chronologies that appear in the works in the surviving Hippolytan corpus have inevitably raised the question as to whether those divergences represent different authors with different chronological interests and perspectives, or whether they result from confusions in the mind of a single author. Furthermore, if we are to regard (as Schmidt actually regards) those surviving works as from more than one writer representing a second-century, Roman ecclesial community, each influenced by a quite different perspective, then we can explain, for example, what the Commentary on Daniel presents as the chronology of Christ's life. In a manuscript reading that is disputed, 4.23.3 informs us that Christ was born on Wednesday 25 December but his Passion took place on Friday 25 March. The author's reasoning is on the one hand strictly chronographic, based upon data drawn from Luke's Gospel that affirms that Jesus, less than thirty years old, died in Tiberius’ eighteenth year. The consuls for that year were duly named. However, on the other hand, parts of his chronology were based upon a highly allegorical hermeneutic that is quite the opposite to a strictly chronographic approach. The six days of creation were 6,000 years; the measurement of the Ark of the Covenant, five- and one-half cubits, indicated mystically that Christ's conception took place 5,500 years after creation and was therefore 500 years short of the 6,000 in which his second coming and sabbath of rest would take place (4.23.4– 24.6). We have here seemingly together the criteria used to distinguish two distinct literary profiles of two distinct authors whose different works are found in the Hippolytan corpus. One profile is of a writer impressed by chronographic concerns raised by dates established against astronomical observations and consular lists and Passover calendars, the other is concerned with biblical exegesis based upon a complex method of allegorisation (pp. 19– 20).
Schmidt is quite correct to see the Commentary on Daniel as the product of a distinct school of writers and exegetes and, moreover, to emphasise that such a community was geographically located in Rome despite its Eastern cultural and religious heritage. In multicultural Severan Rome in particular, cultural space between communities is only fallaciously equated with geographical distance. As a consequence, different methods (astronomical and chronographic as opposed to biblical and exegetical) could be employed by members within the same community, however much in conflict their original proponents may have been (pp. 5–7). But, none the less, the distinction between those different approaches is sufficient to point to two distinct profiles that in turn points to two distinct individuals from which they emanated in an originally separate form and whose difference as teachers lead to some contradictory approaches in biblical commentaries composed by members of the community of which they were the teachers. I am not sure that Schmidt has recognised this point in his acknowledgement of different, conflicting perspectives owned within a common cultural backcloth (pp. 6–7).
The engraving in stone of the list of works on the statue of ‘Hippolytus’ in the Bibliotheca Vaticana (pp. 2–3) in my opinion proves empirically and beyond any hypothetical deduction from constructed literary profiles the existence of two different authors in the Hippolytan corpus. At certain points, dates from the author of the original Chronicon have been corrected by the engraver or by a second hand κατὰ Δανιέλα. Thus the witness of the existence of the second author, beyond mere literary hypothesis, has been set in the stone forever. What Schmidt has shown is that work that survives as the Commentary on Daniel is not the work of the engraver/corrector: that title is found neither on the plinth of the statue nor in Eusebius’ catalogue but only in that of Jerome. The author of the Commentary on Daniel is clearly the heir to two conflicting chronological approaches, the one astronomical and scientific (or trying hard to be so) and the other hermeneutic and allegorical that he has combined, not without some mutual contradictions.
Schmidt is to be congratulated for both a welcome and a much needed translation of the fully restored text, with a commentary that points out implications for the construction of this work.
