Scholia

This chapter provides an introductory overview of early Christian scholia—i.e. brief, preliminary interpretative notes on select passages of Scripture, composed as isolated works or deployed as annotations in manuscript margins. After a cursory comparison with marginal, classical scholia, select Christian scholia are examined. A survey of scholia by Evagrius, Epiphanius, and Origen reveals that these notes had no necessary or fundamental connection to marginal deployment; yet because of their brevity, exegetical scholia were well suited for such deployment and were frequently arrayed in manuscript margins. But marginal scholia were not simply drawn from their previous exegetical counterparts; many writings could circumscribe the text as marginal scholia. Early Christian deployment of scholia in manuscript margins may have begun by the fourth century and may have anticipated the development of later catenae or classical scholia, even if they did not approach the extent of the latter.