3. We now approach the difficult questions of date and authorship. Much of the material has been quite recently brought to light, and criticism has not had time to investigate and pronounce upon it. Some provisional remarks, therefore, are all that can prudently be made. It seems plain that we have two lines of tradition: (1) The Canons of Hippolytus, followed by the Canons of Basil; (2) the Egyptian Church Order, itself represented (a) by the Latin version, the Testament of the Lord, and the Apostolic Constitutions, which are linked together by the same preface (or portions of it); (b) by the Coptic and Aethiopic versions. Now, the preface of the Latin version points to a time when the canons were embodied in a _corpus_ of similar materials, or, at the least, were preceded by a work on "Spiritual Gifts." The Canons of Hippolytus have a wholly different preface, and also a long exhortation at the close. The question which criticism must endeavour to answer is, whether the Canons of Hippolytus are the original from which the Egyptian Church Order is derived, or whether an earlier body of canons lies behind them both. At present it is probably wise to assume that the latter is the true explanation. For the Canons of Hippolytus appear to contain contradictory regulations (e.g. cc. 2 and 4 of the presbyters), and also suggest that they have received a considerable supplement (after c. 23). There is, however, no doubt that they present us with a more primitive stage of Church life than we find in the Egyptian Church Order. The mention of sub-deacons (which, after Riedel's fresh manuscript evidence, cannot now be dismissed as due to interpolation) makes it difficult to assign a date much earlier than the middle of the 3rd century.