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Transylvania and that he should have sent it to Gyulafehérvár to be printed. (The publishing date of
August 1568 is made probable by the fact that Refutatio propositionum Petri Melii, bound to which the
greatest number of copies have survived, appeared at that time.) Pirnát also says that the style of the work,
more verbose than in the other works of the Italian philosopher, also argues against the authorship of
Fausto Sozzini. In addition, the method of the treatise, using logical and historical arguments, is also alien
to the later works of Sozzini. Thus firmly denying that the author is Fausto Sozzini, he suggests Johann
Sommer and/or Ferenc Dávid from among the Transylvanians as the author.
On the other hand, since Lech Szczucki drew attention to the Warsaw copy, most of the specialists
are of the opinion that the Transylvanian edition is the first publication of Fausto Sozzini's
work.131 Szczucki's conclusions even further confirm the notion that the earlier version of the text is the
one that Franciscus Iunius published in 1591. According to that view, this version was written much
earlier, sometime in 1562-63 in Basle or in Zürich. Its existence would seem to be indicated most clearly
by the dialogues of Bernardino Ochino, published in Basle in 1563, since these contain the argument that
John the Apostle did not write his gospel against Ebion and Cerinthus. Then again, its existence is further
proved by letters from the 1560s in which Fausto Sozzini asks his friends to send him the text. This text
was then, somewhere in the late sixties, complemented with a dedication adjusted to the conditions in
Transylvania and, after the stylistic changes of Celio Secundo Curione, was published in Transylvania.
Opinions, however, differ on the date of the Gyulafehérvár edition. Marchetti holds that the first
edition was published bound together with Refutatio propositionum Petri Melii and because this work
contains the theses intended for the Synod at Torda, formulated at Várad on August 22, 1568, it was, he
believes, published after August 22, 1568. The fact that the publication does not respond to the Synod at
Torda would indicate the terminus ante quem (November 14). According to Marchetti, printing the work
in the autumn of 1568 was made actual by the fact that Fausto Sozzini was expected in Transylvania for
1569. Thus he also can explain why Explicatio did not get into De falsa et vera published in July 1569:
obviously arriving too late, there was no time for it to be included in that book.
Giving no closer date in the first +report", Lech Szczucki dated the work to 1567-68. Later he
would move this date nearer to 1567.132 For he noticed that Jan Lasicki wrote the following to Béze on
April 20, 1568 from Heidelberg: +Let the Lord give you, the interpreter of the Scripture, the same spirit
filled with which the Apostle John wrote his gospel about Christ's eternal divinity. Ours deny this and say
that the entire first chapter of John's gospel is about the Man Christ. I have amply shown how truly they
teach this in my writing that I wrote against Grzegorz Pawel, the prince of the Sarmata heretics."133 The
Polish scholar assumes that in this lost work of his, Lasicki differed with the Polish translation based on
the version of Explicatio issued at Gyulafehérvár and which appeared after the Latin version, according to
a later statement of Fausto Sozzini. Thus the Latin text naturally must have left the printing press
considerably earlier.
Antonio Rotondo134 starts from another observation, making use of the following passage in the
preface dated to August 1568 of the work entitled De aeterno dei filio of Josias Simler, a theologian from
Zürich: +This book of mine might have been published perhaps in a clearer and ampler form if, due to the
great distance, on the one hand, and, on the other, the shrewdness of the enemy because they hardly suffer
that their works fall into our hands, the books through which these impious doctrines are propagated had
not come to me after long delays. For my three books on the eternal son had been printed when I received
at last Ferenc Dávid's book against Péter Melius, and certain writings by Petrus Gonesius, and an
anonymous explication of the first chapter of John's gospel, a hand-copied part of which a good man had
sent me previously."135 According to Rotondo, since book one of the work contains the refusal of the
Lelio Sozzini version, the anonymous interpretation of John's gospel can be the work of Fausto Sozzini
only. Simler's work certainly left the printing shop in August 1568 since in one of his letters early in
September he mentions it as just published. We can add that Bullinger sent the work, complete and ready,
to Béze on August 24, 1568.136 So, according to this line of reasoning, Explicatio must have been
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