Birmingham, England, Aug 29, 2017 / 05:02 am
Missing for more than 1,500 years, the earliest known Latin commentary on the Gospels has been rediscovered at the Cologne Cathedral Library and was published in English this week.
The biblical commentary, penned by the fourth century Italian bishop Fortunatianus of Aquileia, was originally rediscovered in 2012 by Dr. Lukas Dorfbauer, a researcher from the University of Salzburg.
Fortunatianus' manuscript was widely known to have existed, although many scholars believed it had either been destroyed or permanently lost. St. Jerome had also pointed to the existence of this commentary in his work, Lives of Famous Men.
Dorfbauer found the 100-page document in an unmarked manuscript dating back to about 800 at the Cologne Cathedral Library, which had been digitized in 2002. While other scholars were aware of the document, the majority of its biblical content was overlooked.