Not to be confused with the Cave of Treasures is the Paradise. The latter will do a fine job doing the confusionment for you. One step toward lightening that confusion is Adrian Pertea's job.
Paradise is the title ʿEnānīšōʿ dropped upon his edition, under the Caliphate; this seems to be what Budge edited. ʿEnānīšōʿ's base text was called Sayings of the Elders, before him. ʿEnānīšōʿ worked at, where else, Bēt-ʿĀbē.
The Sayings of the Elders as a title really only refers to the fourth - which may be the first collection. The first two parts, ascribed to Palladius, are lives of said elder saints; so is the third, which is mah boi Jerome's. I expect Palladius aimed to introduce it all with some clue as to who these guys even were. I don't blame ʿEnānīšōʿ for renaming it. As to why Jerome is here... maybe Palladius injected it and then prefaced it with saints he couldn't find in Jerome.
This divers grouping spread from Egypt to Syria where copies were made, without much reference to other copies, accumulating sayings from later saints somewhat-independently of one another. So the core text is, as noted, a mess. Bedjan and then Budge made editions of manuscripts those two liked. As usual for Budge, he jumped ahead of more-careful scholars... but also as usual for Budge, those more-careful scholars weren't doing their job at the time.
Hence, the mess. Although as a mess, the collection is diachronic. It spans centuries. Some of the later "bad" editions might hold lore deep into late-antiquity, like Anastasius of Sinai. The parallel which Pertea brings is the Pratum Spirituale, which also has deep additions, in its case a somewhat-famous (ie. Hoyland) Georgian edition as might witness to Islam.
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