Tag: Old Slavonic

Identifying “an ancient homily for Holy Saturday”, on the Harrowing of Hell

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today is Easter Saturday.  I happened to see an interesting tweet from none other than Eduard Hapsburg, the Hungarian ambassador to the Vatican, here.

The link to the English translation is here.

This text is apparently the second reading for Easter Saturday in the Roman Catholic Church – not sure how I would verify that – but there is often no reference to the source.

Fortunately on this site I found a text: “PG 43, 439, 451, 462-463”.  This is the edition of the Greek text used for the homily.  The material in the reading is not the complete homily, but rather extracts.

Looking up this reference to the Patrologia Graeca, I find that these extracts are all taken from a homily attributed by the editor to Epiphanius of Salamis.

A look in the Clavis Patrum Graecorum shows that the text is listed there.  It’s CPG 3768, “Homilia in divini corporis sepulturam”; or, at more length in the Patrologia Graeca (=PG), “Epiphanii episcopi Cypri oratio in divini corporis sepulturam Domini et Servatoris nostri Jesu Christi, et in Josephum qui fuit ab Arimathaea, et in Domini in infernum descensum, post salutarem passionem admirabiliter factum. Sancto et magno Sabbato.”

The Greek text of the complete homily is printed in PG volume 43, columns 439-464, with a Latin translation.  As usual with the PG, this is a reprint of an older text, in this case the text of Petau (Paris, 1622).  A more modern edition of the Greek exists, by Dindorf, Epiphanii episcopi Constantiae opera, Leipzig (1859-62), vol. 4, part 2 (here); Pseudo-Epiphanii homiliae, p.9-29, and Annotationes p.90-101.  But this is not a critical edition: merely the Petau text, with improvements from a comparison with the 9th century Escorial manuscript.

But other ancient versions of the text also exist.  The text exists in Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian and Arabic; and in two different Old Slavonic versions.  The latter was edited, with parallel Greek, and a French translation of the Old Slavonic, by A. Vaillant, “L’homélie d’Épiphane sur l’ensevellissement du Christ, Texte vieux-slave,Texte grec et traduction française,” Radovi Staroslavenskog instituta 3 (Zagreb, 1958), pp.7-101, and is online at the journal website here and at Alin Suciu’s blog here.

The text is not by the very solid Epiphanius of Salamis, of course.  Vaillant identifies a later Archbishop of Cyprus, also named Epiphanius, who attended the 6th council of Trullo in 691, who is the most likely author.  The style of the work is witty, full of word-play, and characteristically Byzantine.  The content derives from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, composed in 424-5, in which Jesus, after his death and before his resurrection descends into hell, liberates the righteous, and rescues Adam and Eve.

Update: A kind correspondent has pointed me to the website of the Holy Cross Monastery where a complete English translation of the homily may be found here.  This states that it has been translated from the Greek text printed by Vaillant.

Vaillant’s Greek text is provided on facing pages only as a help to the Old Slavonic text.  The notes are concerned with additions and omissions in the Slavonic text, or with biblical passages.  No Greek apparatus is provided.  Vaillant himself does not indicate the source of his Greek text.

I compared the first page of Vaillant’s Greek with Dindorf’s text and with the PG text.  Vaillant follows the capitalisation, punctuation and sentence division, and the opening title of the PG fairly exactly.  I saw only one definite difference between Vaillant and both others, and this semed to me likely to be a typo or emendation.  From this limited comparison, I would infer that Vaillant mainly reprinted the standard PG text.

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Another AI Translation Experiment: Old Slavonic

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This post at Three Pillars Blog came to my attention yesterday.  Scott Cooper is experimenting with Google Translate and ChatGPT AI to see whether we can get anything useful out of Old Church Slavonic.

As you can see, Google’s language detection isn’t entirely useless with OCS. Apparently early Cyrillic and it’s modern Bulgarian equivalent, as well as some of the vocabulary, are similar enough that Google “detects” Bulgarian and renders both individual words and some complete sentences. In a pinch, it seems there are OCS dictionaries one could slog through, cobbling together what Google can’t. That sounds rather miserable. ChatGPT, as we’ll see, was able to use my description of the text as Old Church Slavonic, and produce a full translation. What follows is information on the source text, an of outline the results, and a comparison to an actual human translation.

He’s picked an Old Slavonic text which is online, and indeed already has an English translation online, and run ChatGPT against it.

Obviously we have to ask – is that translation already in the ChatGPT database?  If so, the AI translation will not in fact be doing anything much.  What we need is some u untranslated Old Slavonic.

But very interesting!

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Methodius of Olympus, De Cibis – critical edition in progress

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Most of the works of the Ante-Nicene writer Methodius of Olympus (ca. 300 AD) do not survive in Greek.  Instead they are preserved only in Old Slavonic –  a language known to very few in the west -, plus a few catena fragments.  I became aware of this a few years ago, and Ralph Cleminson very kindly translated some of them for us, such as De Cibis.  The text used was a couple of digitised manuscripts which I accidentally became aware of.

So I was really delighted to read the following from George Mitov on Twitter a couple of days ago:

The first chapter of my MRes thesis already submitted (with an extensive section on the Slavonic reception of Methodius of Olympus). Next step: a critical edition of the Slavonic text of the De cibis ad Chilonam and an English translation of it.

I have already obtained digital copies of the manuscripts, about 20 in total, and have already started preparing the critical edition. It is fascinating that this text by Methodius is preserved only in Slavonic and yet no critical edition so far.  What we have so far is the German translation of the Slavonic text, based mainly on two mss, and published by G. Bontwesch and the English translation of Cleminson.

Hope I will be done with the critical edition by the end of the summer.

This is excellent news.  It sounds as if a whole load more manuscripts have become available.  Mr. Mitov gives his biography as:

MRes at @KU_Leuven; BA and MA – Sofia University (Bulgaria); Durham University (UK); Byzantine and Paleoslavic Studies, History, and Greek Patristics

Which sounds ideal.  Indeed an earlier tweet shows him:

Presenting a paper on a newly discovered Slavonic translation of a letter (Ep. 1959) by Isidore of Pelusium at the International Conference “Constantine of Preslav’s Uchitel’noe Evangelie and the South Slavonic Homiletic Texts (9th-13th century)” (Sofia, 25-27 April 2023).

All of this is excellent stuff.  Patristic texts in Old Slavonic translation is something that we all need to know more about.  Looking forward to whatever he produces!

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A fragment of De Pythonissa by Methodius of Olympus (d. ca. 300), and more, discovered in Old Slavonic

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Every so often I come across a splendid piece of scholarly work; work that makes me want to stand up, and cheer, and shout “look at this!!!”. I’m thinking of work that could only be done by a professional scholar of great skill, great linguistic ability, and massive determination.

Such an experience came my way today with an 2020 article by Alexey A. Morozov, in Russian, who is preparing to edit for the first time the De Resurrectione of Methodius of Olympus, composed in three books and attacking some of the dafter ideas of Origen.  This work is probably the largest ante-Nicene text still unpublished.  Dr Morozov is based at the university of Fribourg in Switzerland, from where some very excellent philological work has emerged in recent years.

The article citation is:

Морозов А. А. Диалог Мефодия Олимпийского «О воскресении» (CPG 1812) и методология критического издания славянских текстов // Библия и христианская древность. 2020. № 3 (7). С. 80–125. DOI: 10.31802/BCA.2020.7.3.003

Morozov, Alexey A. “Dialogue of Methodius of Olympus ‘On the Resurrection’ (CPG 1812) and the Methodology of Critical Edition of the Slavonic Texts”. Bible and Christian Antiquity, № 3 (7), 2020, pp. 80–125 (in Russian). DOI: 10.31802/BCA.2020.7.3.003

The original Russian can be downloaded in PDF from here.  I’m sure everyone realises that I had to pass it through Google translate in order to read it.  To save others having to do the same, I have pasted the raw output into a Word .docx file, which is here.

Only fragments of the original Greek text of De Resurrectione still exist.  But the complete text is preserved in Old Slavonic (or “Old Slavic” as our American friends seem to want to call it).  This, like most Old Slavonic texts, has never been published.  In fact, before the fall of the Soviet Union, it was simply impossible to access the manuscripts anyway.  A complete Italian translation exists, but this was made directly from a random manuscript.  This is a hard area in which to work.

The article itself is an example of hard, painstaking, grinding labour.  It is the product of assembling copies of all the manuscripts in every archive in Eastern Europe –  nineteen -, and collating the lot in order to produce a stemma.  It must have taken him ages.  Just locating manuscripts alone involved wading through bad catalogues.  Most people in the past just wimped out and worked from whatever manuscript they were able to locate, just as people did back with classical texts at the renaissance.  There was nothing else you could do.  So in one article he has opened up the whole field.  Nobody will ever thank him, I fear.  But this paper will form the basis for all subsequent work on the Old Slavonic text of Methodius.  It is simply excellent stuff.

Likewise he sits down and addresses the fundamental question: how should Old Slavonic texts be published?  He reviews past work, and produces a list of bullet points with the principles to be followed.  This is fundamental stuff, and ought to be very influential.

There is more.  Reward comes to the selfless scholar who buries himself in such a dry task.  Dr Morozov’s reward is to make discoveries.  First he has found some substantial portions of the text which are missing from most manuscripts of the text.  Even better, he has discovered a fragments of a lost work of Methodius, mentioned by Jerome but lost since antiquity!  He gives a diplomatic transcription of the short section of De Pythonissa, which I think was headed “On the demise of magic” in his manuscript.  Sadly he does not give a translation, and not even Google Translate can handle Old Slavonic.  He has also discovered an Old Slavonic translation of the Symposium of Methodius, the only work preserved in Greek, but not previously known in Old Slavonic.  This is likely to clarify the text in some particulars.

Dr Morozov’s findings run to 40 pages.   They promise very well for his forthcoming edition of the work.  I hope that it will be accompanied by a translation in French.

Magical stuff in a neglected field!  More please!

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What patristic authors are extant in Old Slavonic?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting volume came into my hands lately:

Regarding your question as to what patristic works have been translated into Old Slavonic, the best resource to check with is a catalogue of the Old Slavonic texts prepared by a group of Russian scholars two years ago: Katalog Pam’jatnikov drevnerusskoj pismennosti XI-XIV vv. (rukopisnyje knigi), Studiorum Slavicorum Orbis (Saint Petersburg: Bulanin, 2014). This work covers XI-XIV centuries and includes one section on Scripture and one section on patristic texts with a list of MSS for each particular writing. …

The section on patristic writers is on pages 98-280, preceeded by translations of Scripture and followed by hagiographic (mostly Byzantine) works, homilies and other things.

The work is, of course, in Russian, which makes it rather difficult for the rest of us.  But I thought that I would have a go at seeing what Google Translate could make of it.  The results were less good than I had hoped, but better than I had feared.  Here is what I could make of the list of authors:

  • Augustine
  • Agapetus
  • Abba Ammon
  • Amphilochius of Iconium
  • Anastasius of Antioch
  • Anastasius Sinaiticus – a lot of this
  • Andrew of Crete
  • Anthony
  • Athanasius of Alexandria – lots
  • Basil of Amasea
  • Basil of Ancyra – lots
  • Gennadius of Constantinople
  • Gennadius of Jerusalem
  • George of Nicomedia
  • Patriarch Germanus I of Constantinople
  • Gregory of Antioch
  • Gregory the Dialogist (Pope Gregory the Great)
  • Gregory of Nyssa
  • Gregory of Sinai
  • Gregory Thaumaturgus
  • Diadochus of Photiki (?)
  • Dionysius of Alexandria
  • Dionysius the Areopagite
  • Dorotheus of Gaza
  • Dorotheus of Tyre
  • Evagrius
  • Eusebius of Alexandria
  • Eusebius of Caesarea – looks like bits of the Quaestiones ad Marinum
  • Epiphanius
  • Ephrem the Syrian
  • John Damascene
  • John Chrysostom – an awful lot of this
  • John the Faster, patriarch of Constantinople
  • John Philoponus
  • Hippolytus of Rome
  • Irenaeus of Lyons
  • Isaac the Syrian
  • Isidore of Pelusium – more than you’d expect
  • Hesychius
  • Justin the Philosopher (i.e. Justin Martyr)
  • Cyril of Alexandria
  • Cyril of Jerusalem
  • Clement of Alexandria
  • Clement of Ohrid
  • Pope Leo I – Tome to Flavian
  • Macarius the Great
  • Maximus the Confessor
  • Nemesius
  • Nicetas of Heraclea
  • Nilus of Sinai
  • Olympiodorus
  • Palladius
  • Peter of Alexandria
  • Peter of Antioch
  • Peter of Damascus
  • Saba
  • Symeon the New Theologian
  • Sosipater
  • Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem
  • Timothy, Archbishop of Alexandria
  • Timothy, Presbyter of Constantinople
  • Theodoret of Cyrrhus – a fair amount
  • Theophanes
  • Theophilus of Alexandria
  • Epictetus the Philosopher

The section ends with anonymous homilies.  I’ve left the order above as it is in the Russian, for ease of location.

Happy fishing!

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HMML microfilmed manuscripts in Syriac and Christian Arabic

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, under Fr Columba Stewart, has been photographing manuscripts in the East for quite a few years now, and creating microfilms of them.  How necessary this work is, has been shown graphically in recent weeks by the barbaric destruction of Assyrian monuments in Iraq by Muslim thugs, apparently out of sheer savagery.

This evening I learned by accident that the microfilms are being uploaded to Archive.org, as the Center for the Preservation of Ancient Texts, complete with catalogues.  For instance, the catalogue of microfilms of manuscripts from the Coptic Patriarchate is here:

Unfortunately the collection is very badly organised, at least to a newcomer.  Thus I know that manuscripts of the 13th century Christian Arabic writer al-Makin’s History are in this collection.  And indeed a search of the PDF – the online reader is unusable for black and white – reveals a mention of al-Makin, and some mysterious references:

Jirjis aI-Makin Ibn al-‘Amid:

Excerpts from the history of Agapius of Manbij falsely ascribed to him: CMA 7-13-12.
Kitab al-ta’rikh: CMB 8-15; 12-5; 13-3.
Ta’rikh al-Muslimin: CMB 12-16.

Erm, right.  I think we want the second one, the Kitab al-Tarikh.  So what is CMB 8-15?  More to the point, how do I find the microfilm of this on Archive.org?  Here I ran into difficulty.

I learned from the catalogue that CMB means volume B of some other catalogue of the mss of the Coptic Museum.  So far so good.  It looks as if this is connected to the name of the uploaded PDF.  CMD10-8 is https://archive.org/details/CMB10-8, for instance.  So …  no luck with al-Makin, then.

But perhaps it will come.  In the mean time, look around.  There are also Slavonic texts up there.  It is a huge treasure chest – if we can find anything.

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Versiones Slavicae: Greek texts extant in translation in Slavonic

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A really important project is announced at Alin Suciu today.

In May 2012, Dr. Yavor Miltenov introduced on this blog a new project titled The Versiones Slavicae. A Corpus of Medieval Slavonic Translations and Their Greek Sources. You can read his post here.

The aim of VERSIONES SLAVICAE initiative is to elaborate a freely accessible Internet-based electronic corpus of medieval Slavic translations and their corresponding Byzantine sources. By adding more and more data it would hopefully expand to Clavis versionum slavorum Medii Aevi – a unique research tool with no analogue in its field (Byzantine and Slavic medieval studies).

The first task during this 2-years project is to start cataloguing the works of John Chrysostom in order to test and develop our software and metadata. Chrysostomian homilies have very rich Slavonic tradition that is only partly investigated so there is also much of research to be done. We’ll add soon other texts too – hagiographical, homiletic, hymnographical, among others. Our ambiton is to represent exhaustively and bring together all the texts with their Greek parallels identified in different articles, studies, monographs and indices.

The website of the project was launched yesterday. You can find it at http://www.versiones-slavicae.com/en/

It’s really hard for ordinary chaps to get any idea of what exists in this language.  This is a very welcome initiative!

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A Clavis for Old Slavic, and a site for Slavic Chrysostom material

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Alin Suciu is rapidly becoming one of the most important patristic bloggers.  His blog regularly announces finds of new material for Coptic.   But today’s post — a guest post by Yavor Miltenov — relates to Old Slavonic / Old Slavic.  It’s very exciting indeed!

As a result of the work of generations of philologists, the researchers in the field of Byzantine studies have at hand numerous index-catalogues dealing with classification of texts. The most recent and significant of them are, of course, Clavis patrum Graecorum, Bibliotheca hagiographica Graeca, Clavis apocryphorum Veteri Testamenti, Clavis apocryphorum Novi Testamenti, and many others – a centuries-old tradition, that serves as a base for these exceptional reference books. Any study on (or even related to) certain medieval literary monuments must as a rule consult them, as they cover an enormous material, facilitate identifications of certain works, offer standardization, unification and classification, contain the primary bibliography, and represent not only the basics of our knowledge about one particular text, but also give an opportunity to study groups of texts and corpora. Recently, the intensive research has even brought the process to further development – an online Clavis Clavium will be built upon the base of previous indexes[1].

Now this last snippet is itself very interesting!  The reference states:

[1] As announced by Caroline Macé and Gert Partoens from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven at a recent meeting in Sofia.

That is something that I would like to know more about!  But the article continues:

It is a well-known fact, that almost all medieval Slavic literary monuments (9th–16th c.) are translations from Byzantine works: whole miscellanies, single texts, excerpts used in compilations. In this sense, their adequate study is possible only if a comparison with the Byzantine originals is made. In Slavic medieval studies, however, there is no such instrumentum studiorum that contains a) classification of the translated texts and b) reference to their Greek originals[2]. For this main reason the Slavic tradition, unlike the Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, Coptic, is not “visible” to the researchers of the Byzantine cultural commonwealth, it is not fully reflected in the above-mentioned and other Claves[3], and, finally, remains isolated and thought more as a subject to be researched by the “national philologies”, than as a full member of the Byzantine-Slavic cultural space in the Middle Ages.

This is sound thinking.  And it is quite impossible for an interested amateur like myself to get any idea of what exists in this language group.  It’s like a different discipline, like trying to  go surfing on Mars!  And this should not be.

In 2011 the Bulgarian Science Fund announced a call for Young Scientists Program. I and four other colleagues decided to apply with a project entitled “Electronic database Operum patrum Graecorum versiones slavicae: cataloguing and study of the writings of John Chrysostom in Old Church Slavonic” with the kind institutional support of Central Library of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Surprisingly, we won a grant and the project has started in the beginning of 2012!

The aim of our initiative is to elaborate a freely accessible Internet-based electronic corpus of medieval Slavic translations and their corresponding Byzantine sources.

This is good news, and the online aspect is very good news!  This will certainly help Chrysostom scholars to engage with the Slavic versions.  But Dr Miltenov continues:

I should admit that the inspiration of our idea is the Pinakes database, worked out by the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes on the base of a card-index, developed for two decades in the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies in Toronto. So we have the model, we have some sources we may use[4], we know it will take years to input sufficient material and much more time to make text identifications of our own. We have in mind also that we have almost no base to build upon: most of the descriptions of Slavic manuscripts lack identifications of texts’ Byzantine originals, we do not have Patrologiae or series of critical editions (such as Sources Chrétiennes, Corpus Christianorum, etc.), and we have no previous experience with medieval Slavic text databases that are similar to ours.

This is why, being still in the beginning, we have to think about technical solutions and scientific criteria which will last. Our Clavis has to be supplied with bibliographic and specialized data, to be user friendly, to include opportunities for expansion, permanent upgrade and publication of various types of materials (Greek and Old Church Slavonic works, manuscript catalogues, articles, books, iconographic images, etc.). In this sense it is important to prepare carefully the appropriate software and to build a model for texts description that has all the necessary metadata. We are working on these methodological issues now and I hope I’ll be able to tell you more about the development of the project soon, here on Alin’s blog.

I’m looking forward to it.  A Clavis itself would be a wonderful thing.

The main enemy of this project will be the urge to be “perfect”.  This urge, to publish nothing until it is “just so”, has caused many a promising initiative to disappear.  I hope that they will remember that the best way to eat an elephant is to do so a little at a time!

Well done, Yavor, and thank you so much Alin for hosting it!

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Google translate, on the Slavonic manuscripts of the Russian State Library

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m having some fun using Google translate to allow me to browse the online Slavonic manuscripts of the Russian State Library.  Occasionally the results are comic: “Number 140. The Psalter of St. sensible” made me smile, although it is combined with a text by Athanasius.

The manuscripts are those of the Moscow Theological Seminary, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra.  I think we should thank the RSL for putting all these images online!

The start of the collection is here, starting with 3 mss called “Gospel” and then 4 more labelled “Apostle”.  The next 3 are Psalms.  A bit further on are three copies in Slavic of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, closely followed by some copies of Basil the Great on Fasting.

Number 32 looks interesting — is that actually Severian of Gaballa on the six days of creation? “Six days Severian bishop Gavalskogo”?  That must be his sermons on Genesis.  Who knew that these existed in Slavic?

Then the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, a John Damascene, Ephraim Syrus, and the Ladder of John Climacus. 

No. 63 is also Severian.  No 75 is Cosmas Indicopleustes.  No. 100 is the Annals of George Hamartolus.  No 102 is Cosmas Indicopleustes again.  Isaac the Syrian appears as 151.  167 is The Imitation of Christ by a certain Thomas Kempiyskago.

Later on the items of interest — interesting to us here, anyway, for I suspect much of this is of the highest interest to students of Russian history — grow fewer.  I notice the occasional 18th century text, and the odd one in Greek or Latin.  No. 338 is “collected works of the Fathers and Lucian” (?) which sounds interesting.  There are Greek and Latin dictionaries. No. 351 (Gr. 188) is by Theodoret of Cyrhus, “On the fishery of God”.

It is, truly, a marvellous collection.  I am deeply grateful that they have set up the website in such a web that those of us who know no Russian can still use it, and learn more than one could possibly imagine.

The entry point, in case you want to browse, is:

http://www.stsl.ru/manuscripts/index.php?col=5&gotomanuscript=01

 And there is a marvellous aerial picture of the St. Sergius Lavra here at the English language site:

http://www.stsl.ru/languages/en/index.php

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Manuscripts of the Old Slavonic Methodius online!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A commenter has discovered two manuscripts of the Old Slavonic Methodius online!  The manuscripts used by Michael Chub, when he edited some of the works, are apparently accessible:

Some good news. I found the scans of two Old Slavic manuscripts used by Archbishop Mikhail.

See http://www.stsl.ru/manuscripts/index.php?col=5&gotomanuscript=040, the first two manuscripts (40 and 41) from the list.

Sadly one can’t download the things as PDF’s — they’d be much easier to look at in that form!

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