Textual witnesses

The long form of the Paraleipomena Jeremiou (PJ) was first published in 1868 by A.-M. Ceriani, who discovered the text in a manuscript of the fifteenth century, preserved in the Brera Museum of Milan.

Some years later, in 1889, J. Rendel Harris brought out the same long version in a critical edition. But to the manuscripts of Ceriani he added five new witnesses: the Ethiopic version according to the edition of A. Dillmann and the German translations of F. Prätorius and E. König, and four Greek manuscripts preserved in Jerusalem. (For bibliographical details see below.)

Since the publication of Harris's critical edition a great number of manuscripts has been discovered. In the provisional eclectic edition published in 1972, Robert A. Kraft and Ann-Elizabeth Purintun counted no fewer than twenty-three Greek texts of this category, to which they added, apart from the Rumanian, Armenian and Ethiopic versions, the numerous manuscripts of the rewritten or short version of the Paraleipomena (pp. 4–5). Clearly, a new critical edition of the Paraleipomena Jeremiou is called for. Since this has as yet not been realized, the translation of the fragments given here is based on the edition of J. Rendel Harris. The important variants of the Kraft–Purintun edition are indicated in the notes accompanying the translation, which follows theirs as closely as possible.