TheSibylline Oracles (Latin:Oracula Sibyllina; sometimes called thepseudo-Sibylline Oracles)[citation needed] are a collection of oracular utterances written inGreek hexameters ascribed to theSibyls, prophetesses who uttered divine revelations in a frenzied state. Fourteen books and eight fragments of Sibylline Oracles survive, in an edition of the 6th or 7th century AD. They are not to be confused with the originalSibylline Books of the ancientEtruscans andRomans which were burned by order of the Roman generalFlavius Stilicho in the 4th century AD. Instead, the text is an "odd pastiche" of Hellenistic and Roman mythology interspersed with Jewish,Gnostic and early Christian legend.[1]
TheSibylline Oracles are a valuable source for information aboutclassical mythology and early first millenniumGnostic,Hellenistic Jewish andChristian beliefs. Someapocalyptic passages scattered throughout seem to foreshadow themes of theBook of Revelation and otherapocalyptic literature. The oracles have undergone extensive editing, re-writing, and redaction as they came to be exploited in wider circles.
One passage has anacrostic, spelling out a Christian code-phrase with the first letters of successive lines.
TheSibylline Oracles in their existing form are a chaotic medley. They consist of 12 books (or 14) of various authorship, date, and religious conception. The final arrangement, thought to be due to an unknown editor of the 6th century AD (Alexandre), does not determine identity of authorship, time, or religious belief; many of the books are merely arbitrary groupings of unrelated fragments.[2]
These oracles were anonymous in origin and as such were apt to modification and enlargement at pleasure by Hellenistic Jews and by Christians for missionary purposes.Celsus called ChristiansΣιβυλλισται ('sibyl-mongers' or 'believers in sibyls') because of prophecies preached among them, especially those in the book of Revelation. The preservation of the entire collection is due to Christian writers.[2]
The oldest of the surviving Sibylline oracles seem to be books 3–5, which were composed partly byJews in Alexandria. The third oracle seems to have been composed in the reign ofPtolemy VI Philometor. Books 1–2 may have been written by Christians, though again there may have been a Jewish original that was adapted to Christian purposes.
All the oracles seem to have undergone later revision, enrichment, and adaptation by editors and authors of different religions, who added similar texts, all in the interests of their respective religions. The Sibylline oracles are therefore apastiche of Greek and Romanpaganmythology, employing motifs ofHomer andHesiod; Judeo-Christian legends such as theGarden of Eden,Noah and theTower of Babel;Gnostic and early Christianhomilies andeschatological writings; thinly veiled references to historical figures such asAlexander the Great andCleopatra, as well as many allusions to the events of the later Roman Empire, often portraying Rome in a negative light.
Some have suggested that the surviving texts may include some fragments or remnants of theSibylline Books with a legendary provenance from theCumaean Sibyl, which had been kept in temples in Rome. The original oracular books, kept in Rome, were accidentally destroyed in a fire in 83 BC, which resulted in an attempt in 76 BC to recollect them when the Roman senate sent envoys throughout the world to discover copies. This official copy existed until at least AD 405, but little is known of their contents.
That the use of the Sibylline Oracles was not always exclusive to Christians is shown by an extract from Book III concerning theTower of Babel as quoted by the Jewish historianFlavius Josephus, in the late 1st century AD.[citation needed]
The Christian apologistAthenagoras of Athens, writingA Plea for the Christians toMarcus Aurelius inc. 176 AD, quoted the same section of the extant Oracles verbatim, in the midst of a lengthy series of classical and pagan references includingHomer andHesiod, and stated several times that all these works should already be familiar to the Roman Emperor.
Varro enumerated ten Sibyls:Persian,Libyan,Delphic,Cimmerian, Erythrean,Samian,Cumean, Hellospontian,Phrygian, and Tiburtine. The list omits theHebrew,Chaldean, andEgyptian Sibyls.[3] TheSuda repeats this list but identifies the Persian Sibyl with the Hebrew.[3]
TheSibyls themselves, and the so-called Sibylline oracles, were often referred to by other early Church fathers;Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch (c. 180),Clement of Alexandria (c. 200),Lactantius (c. 305), andAugustine (c. 400), all knew various versions of the pseudo-Sibylline collections, quoted them or referred to them in paraphrase, and were willing to Christianize them, by as simple means as inserting "Son of God" into a passage, as Lactantius:
"TheErythraean Sibyl" in the beginning of her song, which she commenced by the help of the Most High God, proclaims the Son of God as leader and commander of all in these verses:
All-nourishing Creator, who in all
Sweet breath implanted, and made God the guide of all.
Some fragmentary verses that do not appear in the collections that survive are only known because they were quoted by a Church Father.Justin Martyr (c. 150), if he is truly the author of theExhortation to the Greeks, gives such a circumstantial account of the Cumaean Sibyl that theAddress is quoted here at theCumaean Sibyl's entry. TheCatholic Encyclopedia states, "Through the decline and disappearance of paganism, however, interest in them gradually diminished and they ceased to be widely read or circulated, though they were known and used during theMiddle Ages in both the East and the West." [Need edition] Thus, a student may find echoes of their imagery and style in much early medieval literature.
These books, in spite of their pagan content, have sometimes been described as part of thePseudepigrapha. They do not appear in the canonical lists of any Church.
The text has been transmitted in fourteen "books", preserved in two distinct manuscript traditions, one containing books 1–8, the other 9–14. However, "book 9" consists of material from books 1–8 and "book 10" is identical to "book 4", so that the edition by Collins (1983) contains only books 1–8 and 11–14. The main manuscripts date to the 14th to 16th centuries (Collins 1983:321):
To this may be added the ample quotations found in the writings of the early Church Fathers.
In 1545 Xystus Betuleius (Sixt Birck ofAugsburg) published atBasel an edition based on manuscript P, and the next year a version set in Latin verse appeared. Better manuscripts were used by Johannes Opsopaeus, whose edition appeared at Paris in 1599. Later editions include those by Servaas Galle (Servatius: Amsterdam 1689) and byAndrea Gallandi in hisBibliotheca Veterum Patrum (Venice, 1765, 1788).
Books 11–14 were edited only in the 19th century. In 1817Angelo Mai edited a further book, from a manuscript in theBiblioteca Ambrosiana atMilan (Codex Ambrosianus) and later he discovered four more books, in theVatican Library, none of which were continuations of the eight previously printed, but an independent collection. These are numbered XI to XIV in later editions. Several fragments of oracles taken from the works of Theophilus and Lactantius, printed in the later editions, show that even more Sibylline oracles formerly existed. In the course of the 19th century, better texts also became available for the parts previously published.
The Sibylline Oracles are written inhexameter.
The 1913Catholic Encyclopedia characterizes the Oracles as an eclectic mixture of texts of unclear origin and largely middling quality. Its speculations on the most likely provenances of the various books are as follows:[4]
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) The content of the individual books is probably of different age, dated to anywhere between the 1st and 7th centuries AD.Collins, J. J. (1983). "Sibylline Oracles (Second Century B.C.–Seventh Century A.D)". In Charlesworth (ed.).Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Vol. 1. Hendrickson. pp. 317–472.
Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1905)."Sibyl".The Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol. 11. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. pp. 319–323.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Healy, Patrick Joseph (1912). "Sibylline Oracles". In Herbermann, Charles (ed.).Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 13. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
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