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The Church Fathers · c. 550, before his patriarchate
The Collection in Fifty Titles
John Scholasticus · d. 577
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What it is
The canons of the councils and the fathers rearranged out of chronological order and under fifty subject headings, so that a bishop with a question could look it up instead of reading everything.
Why it lasted
The beginning of Eastern canon law as a system rather than an archive, and the direct ancestor of the nomocanons that governed the Byzantine and Slavic churches for a thousand years.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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