Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.31745/s.73.2
Textual Transmission and Textual Criticism of the Old Church Slavonic Translation of Gregory of Nazianzus’ Homily for the New Sunday
Alessandro Maria Bruni
orcid.org/0000-0002-5439-8005
; Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Abstract
The present paper offers a text-critical study of the Old Church Slavonic version of Gregory of Nazianzus’ Homily for the New Sunday (Oratio XLIV Εἰς τὴν καινὴν Κυριακήν). The author aims at determining the textual relationship among the surviving manuscript evidence dating from the 13th–14th up to the 18th centuries, and at creating the first stemma codicum of this tradition. His approach is based on the stemmatic method, namely that of the significant errors (Leitfehler), which is widely acknowledged to be the most reliable in textual criticism. The study concludes that the Slavonic tradition of the Homily for the New Sunday derives from a single archetype (α) and that it divides into three branches of manuscript transmission. The first corresponds to hyparchetype β, an understanding of which may be reconstructed on the basis of the textual agreement of two Serbian testimonies. The second corresponds to hyparchetype γ, knowledge of which has been obtained by confronting a number of Old East Slavonic sources: a copy of the Toržestvennik triodnyj and the testimonies of the Slavonic Liturgical collection of Gregory of Nazianzus’ Sixteen Homilies with the Commentaries of Nicetas of Heraclea. The third branch, manuscript Q, is a very particular East Slavonic source, in which Nicetas’ Commentaries have been transcribed separately from the text of the Homilies. As a result, the examination of the tradition produced a tripartite stemma, thereby logically implying that a critical edition is to be based on the three variant carriers β, γ and Q (the latter in a number of cases preserves archetypal readings). As to the question of dating the translation’s origin, in all probability it first saw the light of day in Bulgaria no later than in the 10th century. This is above all supported by an abundance of revealing linguistic features (especially lexical archaisms). Moreover, the undertaken textual analysis provides evidence of the translator’s mastery of Greek, given that translation errors are indeed minimal. Hence, confirming the author’s recent studies of this tradition, the hitherto widely accepted 19th-century-opinion that the Slavonic translator of the Homilies was not up to the task is shown to be completely unsubstantiated.
Keywords
Gregory of Nazianzus; Old Church Slavonic translations; textual criticism; Slavonic manuscripts
Hrčak ID:
302660
URI
Publication date:
19.5.2023.
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