«Book of John, Archbishop of Thessalonica»
From “The Apocryphal Gospels”, Aurelio de Santos Otero (1956); original writing of the Book of John of Thessalonica, according to the critical edition of M. Jugie.
Aurelio de Santos Otero says:
Tischendorf believed that the so-called Transitus B, a venerable Latin apocryphal that dates back to the 4th century and is attributed to Melito, bishop of Sardis, was a tributary of the aforementioned book of John the Theologian. However, both the style and the content were calling for a different source for both, if not Ps Melito had to be considered already as a source of inspiration for many other apocryphal narratives.
Jugie thought this last when he offered us in 1926 the critical text of the Homily of John of Thessalonica, in which he saw nothing more than a simple corrected and amplified wording of Ps. Melito. For his part, A. Wilmart published his Transitus W in 1933, based on ten mss. from the 8th-13th century, whose background is closely related to the Assumptionist narratives of John of Thessaloniki and Ps. Melito.
We find, therefore, at least three analogous narratives, coming from the same apocryphal trunk, each of which claims primacy over the others. Wilmart thinks his Transitus W is the source of Ps. Melito.
Riviére abounds in the same sense, making Transitus W the source of Thessalonian and Ps. Melito.
Faller wants to claim the primacy of the Ps. Melito, whom he considers the predecessor of Transitus W and Thessalonian.
Jugie also leaves the Ps. Melito, on whom he makes the Thessalonian depend, considering the Transitus W as a mere summary of the latter.
Perhaps all of these researchers are somewhat right in their point of view; But it is urgent to delimit the issue, considering two different latent problems in it: first, the date of the documents that we have; second, the origin and priority of the apocryphal narrative contained in said documents.
In relation to the first problem, it is evident that the oldest document of the three that we consider is the Ps. Melito, which dates back to the late 4th or early 5th century, while the Thessalonian dates back to the early 7th century.
Regarding the second problem, we stick to the conclusions of Dom B. Capelle, which seem to be decisive.
This worthy researcher of apocryphal-assumptionist literature, after subjecting the Transitus W and the Thessalonian to a comparative study, deduces that the former, “simple épitomé en vue de l’usage liturgique,” cannot in any way be the model of the Thessalonian , and which, if not derived from it, is at least inspired by the apocrypha represented by it.
Subsequently subjecting the three aforementioned apocrypha to a comparative examination and noting that the marginal glosses of the Transitus W coincide almost exactly with the Thessalonian, also adding another testimony taken from the Latin manuscript 2672 of the National Library of Paris, analogous in every way to the Transitus W, one arrives , finally, to the conclusion that both the Ps. Melito like the Transitus W and the Latin manuscript 2672 from Paris only partially reflect the text of the document that John of Thessalonica used to compose his homily, and that only this has preserved for us the complete text of the apocrypha in question in its original language, only ignoring some details and the vision of the final miracle of the Assumption.