The First Conversation of John Chrysostom on the Gospel of Matthew in Preslav Translation

Summary: 

The article examines a fragment entitled “St. John Archbishop Chrysostom, the prologue of the same Holy Gospel”, preserved in a parchment manuscript from the library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences (Vilnius) fund 19, № 6 of the first third of the 15th century. Based on the Greek manuscripts of the 9th – 11th centuries, containing the Conversations of John Chrysostom, it is concluded that it is the translation of the 1st conversation that has survived in this manuscript, and not the preface to the Gospel attributed to Chrysostom. This translation, as the study of her language has shown, has the linguistic features of the ancient Preslav translations and, together with another text included in the manuscript – the preface of Irenaeus of Lyons on the number of the Gospels, constitutes a single whole. The article suggests that a complete set of Conversations was translated in Preslav (for example, Conversations 89 and 78 were preserved in the Codex Suprasliensis and the Uspenski sbornik), but later they were not copied much, because the more popular and simple Explanatory Gospel of Theophylact of Bulgaria practically supplanted it out of circulation. A new translation of the Conversations was carried out only in 1524 by Maxim the Greek.

Tatiana Afanasyeva (Moscow, Russia)

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