In undertaking the preparation of a new critical edition of the Greek Psalter, it is crucial to recognise that methodology and editorial strategies cannot be divorced from the historical and cultural circumstances in which a text has been transmitted. This transmission-sensitive perspective lies at the heart of our approach in the Göttingen Psalter Project, reflecting an awareness that understanding the context of a text’s development is essential for capturing its nuances. Building on insights gleaned from Theodoret’s commentary, our work involves not only a meticulous collation of manuscripts but also a rigorous examination of variant readings, ensuring that we situate the Lucianic-Antiochene text firmly within the broader family of Septuagint traditions. By illuminating connections between textual witnesses, we avoid flattening out their diversity, thereby preserving evidence of their evolving tradition and encouraging ongoing scholarly engagement with how best to interpret the long history of textual transmission.

A major shift in recent research, which I observe becoming increasingly widespread, is a more holistic way of handling textual witnesses. Previously, scholars often focused narrowly on whichever portion of a manuscript pertained to their specific subdiscipline, frequently overlooking the rich contents these codices could offer for broader textual and historical study. Pandects furnish a clear illustration of this phenomenon, where New Testament specialists directed their energies towards the New Testament section and Old Testament experts concentrated on the Old Testament portion, leaving cross-book relationships and overarching manuscript features largely unexamined. Recent endeavours, such as the ParaTexBib Project led by Martin Wallraff and Patrick Andrist, exemplify how this perspective is changing, heralding more integrated analyses that encompass both biblical texts and the supplementary materials that accompany them. In a similar vein, from 2020 and 2021 onwards, we in Göttingen have been expanding our descriptions of Septuagint manuscripts to account for the entirety of the codices, looking beyond the biblical text to investigate additional or marginal writings that are often bound up in the same volume. One particularly striking example is a Sinai manuscript containing divinatory texts, discovered and deciphered by Maria Tomadaki, which underscores the variety of materials that can be found alongside core biblical content.

In the specific case of Theodoret’s Psalms commentary, this holistic approach reveals that a significant number of witnesses preserve the commentary followed immediately by an Odes catena.[1]

Theodoret’s Psalms Commentary (CPG 6202) plus Odes Catena (CPG C46):[2]

Indeed, the oldest attainable Greek form of Theodoret’s commentary appears precisely in this format, illustrating a vital contextual link that enhances our understanding of how his exegesis was transmitted and recontextualised. This association bears directly on the reconstruction of stemmatic relationships among the manuscripts, because recognising the presence of the Odes catena clarifies how certain textual branches may have evolved. Moreover, identifying the particular type of Odes catena can shed light on the likely archetype from which the entire compilation originated, thus informing our editorial decisions.[6] By weaving these strands together—ranging from painstaking manuscript collation to the exploration of paratextual materials—we aim not only to present a faithfully reconstructed text but also to emphasise the dynamic, centuries-long journey by which Theodoret’s commentary (and the Psalter tradition more broadly) has been shaped and reshaped. Such an approach aspires to move beyond offering a polished final product, inviting instead an ongoing and lively dialogue among scholars who seek to apprehend the full richness of these ancient texts, their diverse manuscript contexts, and the living traditions they continue to represent.

Equally revealing is the later history of the Munich manuscript Ra 9038 (twelfth century; codex 1 in Schulze’s edition), which generated an entire cluster of Early-Modern descendants—Ra 9041-9063 and 9065—during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Ra 9038 is a composite witness: at its outset it incorporates a Psalms catena of Type III (CPG C16). The codex must already have been defective—hence the lacuna in its commentary between Ps 75 and 78—so that its opening was reconstituted in the thirteenth century directly from this catena tradition. Until the 1540s Ra 9038 was in the possession of the Corfiot humanist Ἀντώνιος Ἔπαρχος (1492–1571).[7] In the second half of the sixteenth century at least three copies were made from it, namely Ra 9041, 9063[8] and 9065[9]; the first two are effectively ‘twins’, penned by the same scribe, Κωνσταντῖνος Ῥεσινός[10], and all three preserve the distinctive readings of their parent. Charting this micro-stemma not only clarifies the diffusion of the Type-III catena within an early-modern workshop milieu, but also sharpens our sense of how a single, partly defective exemplar could imprint its textual character on multiple subsequent lineages.

Theodoret's Psalms Commentary Only

Finally, a number of manuscripts are so incomplete that, owing to their fragmentary state, it remains uncertain whether they originally concluded with the Odes catena. The witnesses in question are Ra 9003 (Ps 49:11–144:1), 9012 (fragm.), 9013 (fragm.), 9022 (Ps 39:2–145:1), 9023 (fragm.), 9054 (fragm.), and 9075 (mutilated at the end).

Only for a very small group of codices can we state with confidence that they did not, or could not, have contained the Odes catena: Ra 9017, 9027, and 9074. A special case, which cannot be discussed here, is Ra 9052.

Outlook

From the perspective of Septuagint research, our primary concern is to establish the precise form of the biblical text that underlies Theodoret’s exegesis. Once identified, this text represents the Antiochene Psalter of the first half of the fifth century CE—the very wording Theodoret commented upon. While the members of the Göttingen Psalter project continue to prepare a critical edition of Theodoret’s commentary, I am concurrently producing a critical edition of the Antiochene Psalter itself. This undertaking evaluates the entire Theodoret tradition, including the Armenian, Georgian, and Church-Slavonic translations, and, wherever extant, draws upon the commentaries of Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and John Chrysostom. In so doing, it seeks to furnish both editors and textual critics with a securely reconstructed base-text that will anchor future work on the Psalter and its exegetical heritage.