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If we exclude those psalms that can be classed as Wisdom psalms, little formal commentary by the Fathers has come down to us on the sapiential books of the Old Testament. Michael Faulhaber could claim in 1902 that, despite evidence of such works by Hippolytus, Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius, "for Proverbs not a single complete commentary of the patristic era has come down to us."1 And though in this case a fortunate visit in 1959 to the monastery of St. John the Theologian on Patmos by Marcel Richard, allowing him to copy a manuscript of works on both Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (bearing the name of John Chrysostom, in fact), has invalidated that claim,2 the paucity of sapiential commentaries particularly in the East is a regrettable fact. Ecclesiastes fared little better; though no mention had previously been made of a work by Chrysostom specifically on the sayings of Qoheleth,' homilies by Gregory of Nyssa on Eccl 1:1-3:13 are extant4 as well as remains in the catenae of commentaries by Gregory Thaumaturgus, Procopius,5 Olympiodorus, and Gregory of Agrigentum.6
Likewise, when Marie-Louise Guillaumin spoke at the 1971 Oxford conference on patristic exegesis of Job,7 and was able to document interest in the character of Job as a paradigm of patience under testing by Western fathers like Augustine, Julian of Eclanum, Caesarius of Aries, and of course Gregory the Great in his Moralia in Job, she could not cite a single authentic Eastern commentary on the biblical text. Only in a final footnote did she refer to the critical edition then being prepared by Henri Sorlin of the work on Job "attributed to John Chrysostom," which appeared seventeen years later,8 though she might have made mention of works by Didymus on Job and Ecclesiastes discovered in 1941 outside Cairo.9
MATURING JUDGMENT ON AUTHENTICITY
If we may take the 1988 publication of the Job commentary of Chrysostom by Sorlin in the Sources chrétiennes series to betoken a maturation of judgment in the course of those seventeen years after expressions of uncertainty, the question of authenticity may also have undergone a similar maturation in regard to the works accessed and copied by Richard in 1959. As noted above, Richard's admirer Sandro Leanza published the Ecclesiastes commentary in 1978; but following...