Jean de Gaigny and the First Early Modern Discovery of Marius Victorinus’s Commentary on Galatians

Abstract Scholars have maintained that the first early modern discovery of Marius Victorinus’s Pauline commentaries took place somewhere around 1630. That year, Jacques Sirmond announced his discovery of various commentaries on the Pauline corpus attributed to Victorinus (ca. 280/290–365), the elderly scholar and convert to Christianity mentioned by Augustine in his Confessions . This study, however, invites scholars to go beyond the traditional view about the first discovery of Victorinus and consider the contribution of Jean de Gaigny (d. 1549). Jean discovered Victorinus’s Commentary on Galatians nearly 100 years before Sirmond. The Parisian scholar utilized this commentary of Victorinus mainly to respond to the challenges posed by Erasmus of Rotterdam’s new Latin translation of the New Testament. Because of this discovery, Jean accomplished many firsts with respect to Victorinus from being the first author in Christian history to quote from one of his commentaries on the Pauline Epistles to reintroducing his exegetical work on Galatians to all of Europe.