Liber Pontificalis - Authorship

Authorship

During the Middle Ages, Saint Jerome was considered the author of all the biographies up until those of Pope Damasus I (366–383), based on an apocryphal letter between Saint Jerome and Pope Damasus published as a preface to the Medieval manuscripts. The attribution originated with Rabanus Maurus and is repeated by Martin of Opava, who extended the work into the 13th century. Other sources attribute the early work to Hegesippus and Irenaeus, having been continued by Eusebius of Caesarea.

In the 16th century, Onofrio Panvinio attributed the biographies after Damasus until Pope Nicholas I (858–867) to Anastasius Bibliothecarius; Anastasius continued to be cited as the author into the 17th century, although this attribution was disputed by the scholarship of Caesar Baronius, Ciampini, Schelstrate and others.

The modern interpretation, following that of Louis Duchesne, who compiled the major scholarly edition, is that the Liber Pontificalis was gradually and unsystematically compiled, and that the authorship is impossible to determine, with a few exceptions (e.g. the biography of Pope Stephen II (752–757) to papal "Primicerius" Christopher; the biographies of Pope Nicholas I and Pope Adrian II (867–872) to Anastasius). Duchesne and others have viewed the beginning of the Liber Pontificalis up until the biographies of Pope Felix III (483–492) as the work of a single author, who was a contemporary of Pope Anastasius II (496-498), relying on Catalogus Liberianus, which in turn draws from the papal catalogue of Hippolytus of Rome, and the Leonine Catalogue, which is no longer extant. Most scholars believe the Liber Pontificalis was first compiled in the 5th or 6th century.

Because of the use of the vestiarium, the records of the papal treasury, some have hypothesized that the author of the early Liber Pontificalis was a clerk of the papal treasury. Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788) summarised the scholarly consensus as being that the Liber Pontificalis was composed by "apostolic librarians and notaries of the viiith and ixth centuries" with only the most recent portion being composed by Anastasius.

Duchesne and others believe that the author of the first addition to the Liber Pontificalis was a contemporary of Pope Silverius (536–537), and that the author of another (not necessarily the second) addition was a contemporary of Pope Conon (686–687), with later popes being added individually and during their reigns or shortly after their deaths.