The 6th/7th c. recension of the Latin Martyrologium Hieronymianum, as transmitted in 8th c. manuscripts, records the feasts of a number of saints on 27 December.
Evidence ID
E05066
Type of Evidence
Liturgical texts - Calendars and martyrologies
Major author/Major anonymous work
Martyrologium Hieronymianum
The Martyrologium Hieronymianum is preserved in a number of early manuscripts which share much in common, but also diverge, making it impossible to reconstruct from them a single authoritative text. Below, we therefore offer separate English translations of each important early manuscript. By clicking 'Latin Text' (above), you can view these different versions in their original Latin, set side-by-side for ease of comparison, with also the editions and interpretations of the text suggested by the scholars Quentin and Delehaye. For a full discussion of the Martyrologium, click 'Discussion/Bibliography.'
The Martyrologium Hieronymianum commemorates on 27 December the following feasts:
The Assumption of *John, the Apostle and Evangelist, (S00042),
The ordination as bishop of Jerusalem of *James, the Brother of the Lord, (S00058).
BnF 10837:
'On the sixth day before the Kalends of January, the assumption of saint John the Evangelist in Ephesos. And the ordination as bishop of saint James, the brother of the Lord, who was the first among the Jews to be ordained bishop of Jerusalem by the apostles and who was crowned with martyrdom at Easter in Jerusalem, whose passion was on the eighth day before the Kalends of April.'
Bern 289:
'On the sixth day before the Kalends of January, the assumption of saint John the Evangelist in Ephesus. And the ordination as of saint James, the brother of the Lord, who was the first among the Jews to be ordained bishop of Jerusalem by the apostles and who was crowned with martyrdom at Easter.'
Weissenburg 81:
'On the sixth day before the Kalends of January, the assumption of saint John the Evangelist in Ephesos. And the ordination to bishopric of saint James, the brother of the Lord, who was the first among the Jews to be ordained by the apostles the bishop of Jerusalem and who was crowned with martyrdom at Easter.'
BAV 238:
'On the sixth day before the Kalends of January, the assumption of saint John the Evangelist in Ephesos. And the ordination to bishopric of saint James, the brother of the Lord, who was the first among the Jews to be ordained by the apostles the bishop of Jerusalem and who was crowned with martyrdom at Easter.'
Both Quentin and Delehaye follow closely the early manuscripts on this day.
Translation and comments: M. Vukovic.
Festivals
Saint’s feast
Source
The Martyrologium Hieronymianum ('Martyrology of Jerome'), is the oldest extensive martyrology of the Latin West, listing the feast days of the saints for the entire calendar year, generally also specifying where their feasts are held (which is normally their place of burial). It derives its name from prefatory letters copied at the start of the martyrology, which attribute the text to the Church Father, Jerome of Stridon (ob. 420). These letters are present in all the earliest manuscripts, but it is uncertain when they were first attached to the text. The Hieronymianum is the primary source of all later martyrologies of the Latin world.It is universally accepted that the attribution to Jerome, intended to give the text greater authority, is false, and the predominant scholarly view is that the first version of the martyrology was compiled in northern Italy during the 5th century (probably in Aquileia), though no manuscript of this Aquileian redaction has survived. The text was then evidently revised and added to in Gaul, probably in Burgundy, around AD 600. The north Italian origin of the text, and its Gallic revision, are deduced from the presence in the martyrology of saints from northern Italy, and then of saints from Frankish Gaul. This Gallic version (sometimes referred to as the recensio gallica), just like its north Italian predecessor, does not survive in its original form in any manuscript (Lifshitz 2006, 14).
At some point in the 7th century, and no later than the early 8th, the Martyrologium reached Northumbria (in northern Britain), where it underwent some further revision and additions (Lapidge 2005, 45-46). From Northumbria, the text returned to the continent in the 8th century, and it is here that the earliest surviving manuscript copies were made, as listed below (Lapidge 2005, 73).
Some of the sources that were used by the compilers of the Martyrologium in northern Italy, and subsequently in Gaul, can be identified: the so-called Chronography of 354, a mid-4th-century list from Rome of saintly commemorations, primarily of local martyrs (E010151 and E01052); a lost Greek martyrology compiled at Nicomedia around 360 (drawn basically from Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History and Martyrs of Palestine), which was also a prime source for the Syriac Martyrology of 411 (E00465); the African Calendar of Carthage of 505/535 (E02195 - E02205); and early local calendars from Aquileia and Auxerre (Lifshitz 2006, 20).
The four earliest manuscripts of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum (three of them complete, one a fragment), on which all editions, including our own, are based, are all from eastern Francia and were copied in the eighth and early ninth centuries. They are as follows:
Ms Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), lat. 10837
Written in the abbey of Echternach (in present-day Luxembourg) by a single scribe, Laurentius, between 703 and 710 (Lifshitz 2006, 32). The Catalogue of the BnF, which publishes BnF lat. 10837 on-line, also provides brief information about the dating: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6001113z/f22.image (click Information). The text of the Hieronymianum is at fol. 2r-32v.
Ms Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Weissenburg 81
From the abbey of Weissenburg in Alsace. Dated to around 800 by the Wolfenbüttel on-line catalogue: http://diglib.hab.de/?db=mss&list=ms&id=81-weiss&lang=en. Lifshitz argues that the manuscript dates from around 772, and was written in the Carolingian royal sphere, in or around Maastrict (Lifshitz 2006, 4). The text of the Hieronymianum is at fol. 7r-103r.
Ms Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Bongars 289
From the abbey of Saint-Avold, near Metz. De Rossi and Duchesne, in the introduction to their edition, argue that Bern 289 must have been written after 766. The text of the Hieronymianum is at fol. 53v-129v. This manuscript is not yet available on line, but we have been able to check it through a microfilm.
Ms Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 238
From the abbey of Lorsch, near Worms. The manuscript contains only a fragment (five pages) of the Hieronymianum, covering 25 December to 3 January, and 27 January to 31 January, written in Lorsch in the first half of the 9th century: http://bibliotheca-laureshamensis-digital.de/bav/bav_pal_lat_238). The fragment is at fol. 74-75, 1-2.
The standard edition of 1894, by G. B. de Rossi and L. Duchesne, published these four manuscripts in parallel columns. In 1931, H. Quentin produced a new edition, with a commentary by H. Delehaye, which attempted to collate the different manuscript readings into a single text.
Even though all the early manuscripts are believed to descend from the same redaction, they are by no means identical. In particular, BnF lat. 10837, the earliest of all, often contains a text which differs markedly from Bern 289 and Weissenburg 81, which are much closer to each other. Because the text varies between manuscripts, in content as well as spelling, it is now universally agreed that it will never be possible to create an 'authoritative' single text of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum. De Rossi and Duchesne in 1894, facing the same problem, decided to print for each day of the year the text of all four early manuscripts, in four columns, and we have followed their lead. Our edition is essentially based on their edition, though we have checked their readings against the manuscripts, and corrected or removed some letters, words, diacritical marks, and comments introduced by the editors that do not exist in the manuscripts. We have then added three more columns: for Quentin’s text for the feast day, which sometimes comes in one version, sometimes in two, and for Delehaye’s reconstruction of much of the text, drawn from his Commentary. Delehaye's erudition was, and remains, unmatched, and we have leaned heavily on his commentary (which is in Latin), but it should be noted that his reconstructed text often departs markedly from the manuscripts. Using his extraordinary knowledge of the saints and their hagiography, he felt able to combine different parts of the Hieronymianum's text, and to correct garbled versions of names, to produce a more coherent 'original'. We consider each of his principal suggestions in our Discussion (below), and attempt a judgment as to how plausible they are. In Delehaye's extensive notes there are also other, more tentative, suggestions, which we have not discussed systematically.
The reason the Martyrologium Hieronymianum is such a difficult text is because it consists primarily of long lists of names (with no punctuation and no consistency in the use of capital letters), which were often unfamiliar to copyists and so easily garbled. Generally, we cannot get behind these garbled variants, but occasionally we can, allowing us to shed light on how the text evolved into its current, often confused, state. For instance, an entry for 9 March (E04711) probably originally read something like 'In Armenia minore Sebastia milit(um) XL', 'In Lesser Armenia, at Sebasteia, [the feast of] the Forty Soldiers' - in other words a commemoration of the 'Forty Martyrs of Sebaste' (S00103), prominent saints in the East, but less well-known in the Latin West. In one of our manuscripts (Weissenburg 81) this has become 'In arminia minore sabastiani et milia XL', 'In Lesser Armenia, [the feast of] Sebastianus and the forty-thousand'; somewhere in the process of transmission, the city of Sebasteia has become the martyr Sebastianus, and the 'soldiers' (militum) have become 'thousands' (milia).
Discussion
All four early manuscripts of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum record on 27 December commemoration of the assumption at Ephesus of *John, (the Apostle and Evangelist, S00042), and the ordination of *James, (the Brother of the Lord, S00058) as bishop of Jerusalem, with a brief account of his apostolic ordination and subsequent martyrdom at the time of Easter. BnF 10837 alone specifies that he died on the eighth day before the Kalends of April, i.e. on 25 March. (For his feast on that day in the Hieronymianum, see E04749).A number of biblical saints acquired feast-days in the Christmas period in the late fourth century (see the discussion of this phenomenon by Efthymios Rizos at E01830 and E01831), the feast of Stephen on 26 December persisting to the present day. John (the Apostle and Evangelist), as here, is frequently associated with 27 December; the James celebrated on this day is, however, more often *James (the Apostle, the son of Zebedee, S00108) – see, for instance E01397, E01831 and E02203 – rather than, as here, James, 'the brother of the Lord' and first bishop of Jerusalem. These two James were, and are, quite easily confused (and there is also a third, *James (the Apostle, the son of Alphaeus, E01801), who could be added to the mix).
Bibliography
Editions:De Rossi, G. B., and Duchesne, L., Martyrologium Hieronymianum ad finem codicum adiectis prolegomenis. Acta Sanctorum Nov.II.1 (Brussels, 1894).
Quentin, H. and Delehaye, H., Acta Sanctorum Nov.II.2 (Brussels, 1931).
On the Martyrologium Hieronymianum:
Duchesne, L., "A propos du martyrologe hiéronymien," Analecta Bollandiana 17 (1898), 421-447.
Lapidge, M., The Roman Martyrs. Introduction, Translations, and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Lapidge, M., "Acca of Hexham and the Origin of the Old English Martyrology," Analecta Bollandiana 123 (2005), 29-78.
Lifshitz, F., The Name of the Saint. The Martyrology of Jerome and Access to the Sacred in Francia, 627-827 (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
Ó Riain, P., "A Northumbrian Phase in the Formation of the Hieronymian Martyrology. The Evidence of the Martyrology of Tallaght," Analecta Bollandiana 120 (2002), 311-363.
On the manuscripts of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum:
Butzmann, H., Die Weissenburger Handschriften (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1964), 242-243.
Muller, J. C., "Trois manuscrits liturgiques de l'abbaye d'Echternach à Paris," in Abteistadt Echternach, éd. P. Schritz, A. Hoffmann (Luxembourg, 1981), 202-206.
Ó Cróinín, D., "Rath Melsigi, Willibrord, and the Earliest Echternach Manuscripts," Peritia 3 (1984), 17-49.
Libaert, P., "Notice sur 43 manuscrits d'Echternach conservés à la bibliothèque nationale de Paris," Hémecht 1 (1985), 53-73.
McKitterick, R., Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms, Sixth-Ninth Centuries (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994).
On saints and calendars:
Farmer, D. H., Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Nilles, N., Kalendarium Manuale utriusque Ecclesiae Orientalis et Occidentalis I-II (Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers Ltd, 1971).
Watkins, B., The Book of Saints: A Comprehensive Biographical Dictionary (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015).
Datum Table
| BnF 10837 | Bern 289 | Weissenburg 81 | BAV 238 | Other Mss | Quentin | Quentin | Delehaye |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VI. KL. Ianuar̃ adsumptio sc̃i iõh evang̃ apud ephesū et ordinatio episcopatus sc̃i iacobi f̃f̃ dñi. qui ab apostolis primus ex iudaeis hierosolimis est aepiscopus ordinatus et in medio paschæ martyrio coronatus hierosol cuius pas̃ VIII k ap̃ ∵ | VI KL. IANUAR.Adsumptio sc̃i iohannis euangel apud efesū. et ordinatio episcopatus sc̃i iacobi fratris dñi qui ab apostolis primus ex iudaeis hierusolimis est ep̃s ordinatus. et medio pascha martyrio coronatus. | VI KL. IAN. Adsumptio sc̃i iohannis evangelist̃ apud efesum et ordinatio episcopatus sc̃i iacobi fratris dñi Qui ab apostolis primus ex iudaeis hierusolimis est ep̃s ordinatus et medio. pascha martirio coronatus | VI. KL. Ianuar̃ VI k iañ Adsumptio sc̃i iohannis evangelistae apud ephesum et ordinatio episcopat' sc̃i iacobi fratris dñi qui ab apostolis primus ex iudaeis hierosolymis est ep̃s ordinatus et mediū pascha martyrio coronatus | Adsumptio sancti Iohannis evangelistae apud Ephesum. et ordinatio episcopatus sancti Iacobi fratris Domini qui ab apostolis primus ex Iudaeis Hierosolimis est episcopus ordinatus et medio pascha martyrio coronatus. | Adsumptio sancti Iohannis evangelistae apud Ephesum et ordinatio episcopatus sancti Iacobi fratris Domini, qui ab apostolis primus ex Iudaeis Hierosolimis est episcopus ordinatus et medio pascha martyrio coronatus. |
Record Created By
Marta Tycner; Marijana Vukovic
Date of Entry
24/02/2021
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00042 | John, the Apostle and Evangelist | Iohannes euangelista | Certain | S00058 | James, 'brother of the Lord' | Iacobus frater Domini | Certain |
|---|
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