John of Antioch reloaded

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colour coding to distinguish between “genuine” and “spurious” material, this illustra-
tion is black and white, as the inventory does not yet imply any critical decisions about
this material. The abbreviations on this and subsequent illustrations should be read as
following: ELR - Excerpta de Legationibus Romanorum; Iv - Cod. Iviron 812; WT -
Viener Troica; HO - Hypothesis to the Odyssey.5
IL Critical Examination of the “Maximalbestand”
Critical examination of the “Maximalbestand” leads inevitably to the conclusion that
all of this material in its entirety cannot possibly belong to one and the same work.
Internal discrepancies, contradictions, repetitions and also very different language and
style make it necessary to draw a dividing line: all of it cannot be taken as belonging
to one and the same work, compilation or even a dossier. A hypothetical decision
to declare all of this material as reflecting a work by “John of Antioch” amounts to
nothing less than an open capitulation of a philologist or historian in the face of the
complexity of the problem. In fact, neither Müller nor any other scholar after him was
ever of the opinion that all this material should constitute the corpus of our author.
The core of the “Johannine Question” has always comprised two questions: 1) where to
draw the dividing line and 2) which of the two parts to take as a “genuine” and which
as a “spurious” John of Antioch, whereby the terms “genuine” and “spurious” in this
context simply mean “x” and “not-x”, or one and the other.
II.i Patzigs Proposal
Patzig’s solution, which he defended in numerous articles on this subject,6 is graphi-
cally represented in Illustration 2. Here green indicates what Patzig believed to be
“genuine” John of Antioch and red what he believed to be “spurious”. At the time of
publication of most of these articles, the Iviron fragment (grey in this diagram) was
yet unknown and so Patzig was not in a position to see its correspondence with several
sections in the Excerpta de insidiis and Excerpta de virtutibus that are also shown as
grey in Illustration 2. In order to do justice to Patzig, one should keep in mind that his
proposal consisted of three elements. The first was his decision concerning where to
draw the “dividing line” through the “Maximalbestand” known at the time. As shown
in Illustration 2, he saw that the initial sections of the collection in Cod. par. gr. 1630,
the initial sections of the Excerpta de insidiis and de virtutibus, Salmasiana II, the final
5 Cf. Mariev, John of Antioch, 3 *-43* for further references.
6 Patzig, „Dictys Cretensis”; “Unerkannt und unbekannt gebliebene Malalas-Fragmente”; “Johannes An-
tiochenus und Johannes Malalas”; “Die Hypothesis in Dindorfs Ausgabe der Odysseescholien”; “Jo-
hannes Antiochenus Fr. 200 Salm, und Prokop”; “Die Troica des Johannes Antiochenus”; “Über einige
Quellen des Zonaras (I)”; “Über einige Quellen des Zonaras (II)”; „Die έτέρα αρχαιολογία der
Excerpta Salmasiana”; “Malalas und Tzetzes”; “Die Abhängigkeit des Jo. Antiochenus von Jo. Malalas”.