Monarchian Prologues
set of as Priscillianist Latin introductions to the four canonical gospels from the late fourth or early fifth century
The Monarchian Prologues are a set of Latin introductions to the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They were long thought to have been written in the second or third century from a Monarchian perspective, hence their name. Today they are generally regarded as Priscillianist compositions from the late fourth or early fifth century. They appear to be the work of a single author. John Chapman even concluded that they were the work of Priscillian himself, who died in 386.
The Latin style of the prologues is convoluted and difficult to understand. The prologues provide background on the traditional authors (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) and their theological purposes. Since Luke and John were also credited with the Acts of the Apostles and the Book of Revelation, respectively, information contained in their prologues was eventually spun out into separate prologues to Acts and Revelation. The earliest manuscript with these separate prologues is the Codex Fuldensis of 541–546.
The author was working with the Old Latin Bible, since he took the order of the gospels to be Matthew, John, Luke and Mark.
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This entry incorporates text from “Monarchian Prologues” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.