And do we know that Mar Saba owned the Clement edition in that time? Morton Smith wrote (Clement of Alexandria, p. 289):StephenGoranson wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2024 4:53 am If a monk wanted to record "Clement" why not do it instead in the Clement edition owned in Mar Saba?
As to the ultimate fate of the collection of Clement's letters, the likelihood is that it perished in the great fire which Phokylides, Laura 477, dates in the early years of the eighteenth century.
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Therefore it is presumable that after the fire a large number of loose leaves, almost undamaged, were salvaged from the unburned centers of old MSS.
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The fragmentary state of the present letter is best explained by supposing it a copy of such an isolated leaf. Ehrhard (Kloster 67) remarks on the large amount of copying of older MSS which went on at Mar Saba in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. No doubt someone's attention was attracted by the surprising content of this isolated folio. He studied the text, corrected it to the best of his ability, and then copied it into the back of the monastery's edition of the letters of Ignatius, since it resembled them in being a letter from an early father, attacking gnostic heretics. For analogies reference may be made to the loss in a fire at Strassburg of the only MS of the Epistle to Diognetus, to the preservation of the Muratorian Canon (also a fragment) on the last pages of a volume of Ambrose, and to the insertion of the Syriac translations of the apocryphal psalms into an empty space in the middle of a MS of the Ketaba de durrasha (Noth, Fünf 3).
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Therefore it is presumable that after the fire a large number of loose leaves, almost undamaged, were salvaged from the unburned centers of old MSS.
...
The fragmentary state of the present letter is best explained by supposing it a copy of such an isolated leaf. Ehrhard (Kloster 67) remarks on the large amount of copying of older MSS which went on at Mar Saba in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. No doubt someone's attention was attracted by the surprising content of this isolated folio. He studied the text, corrected it to the best of his ability, and then copied it into the back of the monastery's edition of the letters of Ignatius, since it resembled them in being a letter from an early father, attacking gnostic heretics. For analogies reference may be made to the loss in a fire at Strassburg of the only MS of the Epistle to Diognetus, to the preservation of the Muratorian Canon (also a fragment) on the last pages of a volume of Ambrose, and to the insertion of the Syriac translations of the apocryphal psalms into an empty space in the middle of a MS of the Ketaba de durrasha (Noth, Fünf 3).