The current edition of Paul the Deacon’s Versus in laude Sancti Benedicti is that of Karl Neff (1908). It is based on five manuscripts and on previous editions by Georg Waitz and Ernest Dümmler. Neff detected three recensions of the poem. The first version (vv. 1-138) was conceived as an independent poem (α). After that, Paul reworked the text (creating some variants and cutting off vv. 127-130 and 134-138) and included it in his Historia Langobardorum (β). Later, an anonymous Cassinese monk created the γ-version, conflating α and β, and adding vv. 139-154 (that would thus be an interpolation, not a part of Paul’s original poem). A reexamination of the manuscript tradition (based on collations of 44 manuscripts) leads to a rearrangement of Neff’s hypothesis. It is probable that vv. 139-154 are not an interpolation of γ but an authentic portion of the text, lost in α, intentionally omitted in β, and recovered by γ through contamination with an α-witness independent from the archetype of this class. New evidence is adduced in support of Neff’s theory that some discrepancies between α and β may be regarded as authorial variants. A stemma codicum in the end of the article represents the relationships between the different branches of the tradition.