Sibylline Oracles


The Sibylline Oracles are a collection of oracular utterances written in Greek hexameters ascribed to the Sibyls, 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 original Sibylline Books of the ancient Etruscans and Romans which were burned by order of the Roman general Flavius 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.
The Sibylline Oracles are a valuable source for information about classical mythology and early first millennium Gnostic, Hellenistic Jewish and Christian beliefs. Some apocalyptic passages scattered throughout seem to foreshadow themes of the Book of Revelation and other apocalyptic literature. The oracles have undergone extensive editing, re-writing, and redaction as they came to be exploited in wider circles.
One passage has an acrostic, spelling out a Christian code-phrase with the first letters of successive lines.

Introduction

The Sibylline Oracles in their existing form are a chaotic medley. They consist of 12 books of various authorship, date, and religious conception. The final arrangement, thought to be due to an unknown editor of the 6th century AD, does not determine identity of authorship, time, or religious belief; many of the books are merely arbitrary groupings of unrelated fragments.
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 Christians Σιβυλλισται because of prophecies preached among them, especially those in the book of Revelation. The preservation of the entire collection is due to Christian writers.

Manuscripts and editions

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 contains only books 1-8 and 11-14. The main manuscripts date to the 14th to 16th centuries :
To this may be added the ample quotations found in the writings of the early Church Fathers.
In 1545 Xystus Betuleius published at Basel 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 and by Andrea Gallandi in his Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum.
Books 11-14 were edited only in the 19th century. In 1817 Angelo Mai edited a further book, from a manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana at Milan and later he discovered four more books, in the Vatican 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.

Contents

The Sibylline Oracles are written in hexameter.
The 1913 Catholic 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:
  • Book 1: Christian revision of Jewish original
  • Book 2: Christian revision of Jewish original
  • Book 4: the oldest text; completely Jewish
  • Book 5: likely Jewish, though with controversy among critics
  • Book 6: Christian; likely 3rd century
  • Book 7: Christian
  • Book 8: first half likely 2nd century Jewish; second half Christian, likely 3rd century
  • Book 11: 3rd century, Christian at least in revision
  • Book 12: Christian revision of Jewish original
  • Book 13: Christian, at least in revision
  • Book 14: 4th century, Christian at least in revision