Scholarly appreciation of the
Questions and Answers attributed to Anastasios of Sinai (CPG
7746) changed radically in 1969 with the publication by Marcel
Richard of his short, but very dense, article, "Les
véritables 'Questions et réponses' d'Anastase le
Sinaïte". By investigating the manuscript tradition Richard
was able to establish that the version published by the German
Jesuit, Jacob Gretser (1617), represented a revised version of the
original and could not be much earlier than the eleventh century,
whereas Anastasios had died shortly after 700. Richard further
suggested that various other versions had existed before this and
had been used by the later compiler, notably a collection of 88
questions. Gretser had also drawn on one of only 15 questions.
Richard identified one other collection that seemed indebted to the
original. Although Richard was the first to claim that he had
discovered the original collection, from the time of Gretser all
who had come across "Anastasian" quaestiones et responsiones
had been aware that the published collection did not reflect the
evidence of the manuscripts. Already in 1575 the French scholar
Gentianus Hervet had published a Latin translation of what was in
fact the collection of 88 questions. This collection had attracted
wide attention because of its presence - in translation - in the
Slavonic Izbornik of 1073.
The present editor, Joseph A.
Munitiz was asked by Richard shortly before his death in 1976 to
complete the edition of the original collection. One might have
hoped that since 1976, and in particular with the collation of the
manuscripts discovered by Richard - for he himself had not drawn up
any apparatus criticus for his proposed edition - it would have
been possible to establish a text that was reasonably close to that
first composed by the monk of Sinai. But it became clear over the
years that some uncertainty was likely to remain. The many
revisions and adaptations suffered by the original text meant that
very few uncontaminated witnesses had slipped through the sieve
created by Byzantine librarians and copyists. Only two manuscripts
preserving a large proportion of the original collection have
survived. Fortunately, a small number of partial manuscripts, and
the evidence of the other Collections, allows one to build up a
likely text. The haphazard nature of the content of the Original
Collection does suggest that the whole collection may have
originated after the death of Anastasios. A disciple or group of
admirers may have felt that it would be helpful to publish the
various questions and answers that had been composed during the
author's lifetime and found in a dossier among his papers. At
present this Original Collection contains the answers to certain
groups of answers (e.g. concerning providence, alms giving,
salvation of the non-baptised, wonders and prophecies, sexual
ethics, forgiveness of sins), but intercalated among them are
isolated problems with no obvious connection (e.g. concerning
capital punishment, Paradise, dreams, female infertility). They all
fall under the general heading of pastoral theology and are clearly
intended to deal with the preoccupations of a lay, rather than a
monastic, audience, even if their preservation was ensured by
largely monastic compilations.