Apophthegmata Patrum - History of The Text

History of The Text

The Desert Fathers spoke Coptic, a language related to ancient Egyptian. The sayings were originally passed on orally in that language. The earliest written record of the sayings appears to be from the end of the 4th century CE. Two versions from the 5th century, the Collectio Monastica, written in Ethiopic, and the Asceticon of Abba Isaiah, written in Greek, show how the oral tradition became the written collections.

Pelagius and John the Deacon made the first translations of the Sayings into Latin. Martin of Braga also translated some of the sayings into Latin, followed by a more extensive translation by Paschasius of Dumium in approximately 555 CE. That work may contain only one-fifth of the original Greek text. In the 17th century, the Dutch Jesuit Heribert Rosweyde compiled and translated all the available sources on the Desert Fathers and published them in Latin as the Vitae patrum.

Helen Waddell translated a selection of elements from the Vitae Patrum into English in the early 20th century. The first complete translation of the "apothegmata" into English is that of Benedicta Ward (1975).