redactor

At first sight such a work seems to be a miscellany of myths, technical advice, moral precepts, and folklore maxims without any unifying principle; and critics have readily taken the view that the whole is a canto of fragments or short poems worked up by a redactor. Very probably Hesiod used much material of a far older date, just as Shakespeare used the "Gesta Romanorum", old chronicles, and old plays; but close inspection will show that the "Works and Days" has a real unity and that the picturesque title is somewhat misleading.

Casaubon had been slow and hesitating, oppressed in the plan of transmitting his work, as he had been in executing it, by the sense of moving heavily in a dim and clogging medium: distrust of Dorothea's competence to arrange what he had prepared was subdued only by distrust of any other redactor. But he had come at last to create a trust for himself out of Dorothea's nature: she could do what she resolved to do: and he willingly imagined her toiling under the fetters of a promise to erect a tomb with his name upon it.

The text is newly translated from the extant Syriac (with an eye to Ethiopic manuscripts) into English by Alistair Stewart, and the introduction makes the case for a fourth century Cappadocian redactor who gave the work its present shape, though much of its material goes back at least to the third century.

To dispel the lingering doubts among the disciples and the Eleven Apostles, a later redactor (with a different literary style) added a section (Mk 16:9-20) to include the appearances of the risen Jesus to the disciples, his ascension into heaven, with the divine mandate to preach the Good News to everyone.

Piero Doria es oficial del Archivo Secreto Vaticano, ha sido redactor jefe de la revista Notes et documents, del Instituto Jacques Maritain, y es miembro de la redaccion de la Revista CVII del Centro de Estudios sobre el Concilio Vaticano II (Universidad Lateranense) y del Comite asesor del Cardinal Willebrands Research Center de Utrecht (Holanda).

The oracles seek to rein in and restrict the meaning of the images, she contends, and they aim at making the earlier visionary impressions relevant to and applicable to the redactor's contemporary time.