Isidore of Pelusium (d. ca. 449) was born in Egypt to a prominent Alexandrian family. He became an ascetic, and moved to a mountain near the city of Pelusium, in the tradition of the Desert Fathers.
Isidore is known to us for his letters, written to Cyril of Alexandria, Theodosius II, and a host of others, known and unknown. A collection of 2,000 letters was made in antiquity at the "Sleepless" monastery in Constantinople, and this has come down to us through a number of manuscripts, with each letter numbered and in order. The letters are mostly very short extracts, a sentence or two in length. Further unpublished letters exist in Syriac translation.[1]
Some of the letters are of considerable interest for the exegesis of the Greek bible.[2]
He is revered as a saint, whose feast day is February 4.[3]
History of the text
The letters can be found in volume 78 of the Patrologia Graeca, a collection of the Greek writings of Christian writers and theologians featuring the original Greek text and a Latin translation facing. However the edition given is very confused, and splits the letters into 5 "books" which are unknown to the manuscripts.
This situation arose because of the piecemeal way in which the letters were rediscovered at the Renaissance. The first editor, Jacques de Billy, discovered a manuscript of the collection of 2,000 letters which only contained about 1,200 letters. These he published in three books. The next editor discovered a manuscript containing only a selection of letters by subject, in a different order. He printed the extra letters in his own order as "book 4". Yet another editor found a further manuscript and made up a fifth book.
Pierre Evieux edited the second half of the collection, where the disarrangement was most serious, in 1997 and 2000, in the Sources Chrétiennes series.[4] He also produced a table of cross-reference between the original numbering and that in the Patrologia Graeca. The other letters have never received any critical edition or been translated into any modern language.[5]
References
This article incorporates text from the entry St. Isidore of Pelusium in the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.
- ^ Pierre Evieux, Isidore de Peluse, 1995. A study of the man and his works, in French.
- ^ C.H.Turner, The letters of Isidore of Pelusium, Journal of Theological Studies 6 (1905)
- ^ "Isidore of Pelusium". OrthodoxWiki. http://orthodoxwiki.org/Isidore_of_Pelusium. Retrieved 2007-11-18.
- ^ "Collaborateurs de la collection". Sources Chrétiennes online. http://www.sources-chretiennes.mom.fr/index.php?pageid=collaborateurs&id=635&sourcepg=volume_paru&idsource=361&trisource=pole&selection2source=1. Retrieved 2007-11-18.
- ^ Pierre Evieux, Isidore de Peluse, 1995. A study of the man and his works, in French.
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