1 Clement and Chapter headings

[Doubtfizzle]

I’m not sure where to post this, as there doesn’t seem to be a patristics board, but here’s my question.

I was looking through different translations of 1 Clement here:

earlychristianwritings.com/1clement.html

I noticed that while the Roberts-Donaldson translation has headings for each chapter, the other translations don’t. I’ve been trying to find an explanation for why this is, but no dice. Were the headings written by the translators? Is it a manuscript issue?

 

[MarkThompson]

I’m not sure where to post this, as there doesn’t seem to be a patristics board, but here’s my question.

I was looking through different translations of 1 Clement here:

earlychristianwritings.com/1clement.html

I noticed that while the Roberts-Donaldson translation has headings for each chapter, the other translations don’t. I’ve been trying to find an explanation for why this is, but no dice. Were the headings written by the translators? Is it a manuscript issue?

Those headings are an editorial gloss.

 

[dmar198]

I was looking through different translations of 1 Clement here… [and] I noticed that while the Roberts-Donaldson translation has headings for each chapter, the other translations don’t. I’ve been trying to find an explanation for why this is, but no dice. Were the headings written by the translators? Is it a manuscript issue?

Those headings are an editorial gloss.

That means the headings were written by medieval translators or by early school masters. The method of teaching in the early Church (and the medieval period) was to have a school master dictate a text to his students, who would copy it down, and after dictating a certain portion of text he would give his commentary, which his students would either write down or not, depending on what he wanted them to do. That helped them learn the Bible and the Church Fathers but it also resulted in some occasional textual corruption, where the students would mistake the commentary for the text, or add the commentary to the margin of the text or in between the lines of the text. Chapter headings were obviously added intentionally by the school masters, who wanted to make the chapters easier to look through for specific parts. Chapter headings served for them a similar purpose to indexes as they appear in modern books.