But instead of this passage deserving the name of
Eusebius as its author, it is now on all sides acknowledged to be
altogether a palpable interpolation. Suspicions, one would suppose, must
have been at a very remote date suggested as to the genuineness of this
sentence. Many manuscripts, especially the seven in the Vatican, were
known to contain nothing of the kind; and the Roman Catholic editor of
the Chronicon at Bordeaux, A.D. 1604, tells us that he was restrained
from expunging it, only because nothing certain as to the assumption of
the Virgin could be substituted in its stead. [P. 566.] Its spuriousness
however can no longer be a question of dispute or doubt; it is excluded
from the Milan edition of 1818, by Angelo Maio and John Zohrab; and no
trace of it is to be found in the Armenian[110] version, published by
the monks of the Armenian convent at Venice, in 1818.
[Footnote 110: The author visited that convent whilst this
edition of the Chronicon of Eusebius was going through the
press, and can testify to the apparent anxiety of the monks to
make it worthy of the patronage of Christians.]
The next authority, to which we are referred, is a letter[111] said to
have been written by Sophronius the {305} presbyter, about the
commencement of the fifth century. The letter used to be ascribed to
Jerome; Erasmus referred it to Sophronius; but Baronius says it was
written "by an egregious forger of lies," ("egregius mendaciorum
concinnator,") who lived after the heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches
had been condemned.
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