An interesting query arrived this morning in the email:
J.P. Migne mentions another Athanasius than Athanasius the Great in the footnotes of John of Damascus’ defense of images. Migne calls him “Athanasius Minor,” and claims that he lived around the 7th or 8th century, and wrote a letter to a man called Antiochus with 109 questions (?) that Athanasius answers. Do you have any idea where such an Athanasius Minor’s works could be found?
The work in question seems to be CPG 2257, the “Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducum” of pseudo-Athanasius, printed in the PG 28, columns 597-700, but extant in 233 Greek manuscripts and also in translations into every language of the region, including Armenian, Old Slavonic, Arabic and Ethiopic.
Dr Ilse de Vos appears to be the authority on this work, and has an article on the manuscript tradition in a 2015 journal, “The Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem’, in: R. Ceulemans & P. De Leemans (eds), On Good Authority” – The Construction of Authority which is LECTIO volume 3, Brepols (2015), pp. 43-66. She writes:
… I am preparing a critical edition of the Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem (CPG 2257).1 This erotapocritic text consists of 137 questions and answers that deal with several aspects of Christianity, such as ‘Why do we Christians worship icons and the cross: is that not idolatry?’ (Q 39); ‘Why did God appear to Moses in a thorn bush?’ (Q 59); ‘Does God prefer us to go to church or to give alms to the poor?’ (Q 86) etc. The great majority of the 233 manuscripts through which this text has come down to us attribute it to Athanasius of Alexandria (see below). We know that this attribution is false but remain in the dark as to the question when precisely the text was written. It has been dated as early as to the first half of the seventh century, between the Persian occupation (614-626/627) and the Arab invasion (638) of Palestine. The presence of numerous QA on icon worship, however, might just as well invite one to date it to the turbulent eighth century. Of no little importance to the question of our text’s dating, is the precise nature of its relationship with the Quaestiones et responsiones (CPG 7746). This text was written in the second half of the seventh century by Anastasius of Sinai and shares quite a number of QA with the text of Ps.-Athanasius.
In the course of its transmission, the Greek text of the Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem was translated into Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Church Slavonic and Latin….
According to the CPG, the Armenian text has been printed by E. Tayeci, At’anasi Alek’sandrwoy hayrapeti cark’, t’ult’k’ ew enddimasac’ut’iwnk [i.e. S. Athanasii patriarchae Alexandriae homiliae, epistulae et controuersiae,] Venetiis (1899), p.347-477.[1]
The proposed critical edition does not seem to have appeared, however, so Migne is still the latest text.
- [1]The Armenian title I transcribe badly from R. Thomson’s Classical Armenian Bibliography, 1995, p. 36, online here.↩