Anna Persig: The citations of the ‘Pelagians’ from the Catholic Epistles: disunity of thought as well as of biblical text?

When investigating the earliest attestations of the Vulgate New Testament outside the Gospels, the editors of the Vetus Latina series underlined the central role played by the circle of Pelagius in the diffusion, and perhaps in the composition, of the Vulgate: the ‘Pelagians’ are deemed to be the first authors who quoted the new revision. However, it is surprising that no specific studies on the character of their biblical text have been undertaken apart from brief observations in the introduction to Thiele's edition of the Vetus Latina Catholic Epistles. This paper aims to assess their use of the Vulgate through a collection and analysis of around five hundred citations from the Catholic Epistles. The identification of ‘distinctive’ Vulgate readings and renderings, i.e. readings attested in the Vulgate against the direct and indirect tradition of the Vetus Latina, will permit to distinguish the cases in which the citations apparently agree with the Vulgate but actually have an Old Latin substratum. Although the ‘Pelagians’ differ from each other and Pelagius from the point of view of doctrine, they have been traditionally labelled as a unitary group. This paper will demonstrate that saying in general that the ‘Pelagians’ are the first who cite the Vulgate is also an over-simplification in that the affiliation of their biblical text varies according to the different authors, passages and writings in which the citations are contained.