The Bible In Slavic Tradition

This is the first English-language conference volume on the Bible tradition in medieval Slavdom. It covers the translation of the canonical, apocryphal and pseudepigraphical books of the Old and New Testaments, and issues relating to the activity of Cyril and Methodius.

'Slavic Scriptures' traces the development of the Church Slavonic Version of the Christian Bible, a version still in active use today by the Russian Orthodox Church and considered authoriatative by other Slavic Orthodox churches as well, from the very earliest translations by missionaries to the Slavs in the ninth century, through to the Slavic Bible controversies of the late twentieth century. It focusses particular attention on the work of the Byzantine saints Cyril and Methodius, the continuation of their initiatives in medieval Bulgaria, and the completion of their efforts in medieval and Enlightenment Russia. It provides basic information on Christian scriptures in general, and an extensive bibliography of works in a variety of languages, including English, which treat Church Slavonic Bible matters. The text of the study is aimed at a general readership interested in biblical issues as a whole, and particularly among the Slavs, while the apparatus explores scholarly ramifications and controversies of concern to those specializing in Slavic and biblical studies.

Pt. 1. Comparative Slavic studies--the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition--pt. 2. Medieval slavic studies.

Work presented in both English and the original Slavonic text.

Both Old Church Slavonic and the written culture of the Orthodox Slavs began with translations. In the Slavic beginning, it may be said, was a word translated, a word in transit, moved by the effort to "make Slavic" the Greek logos of Scripture and liturgical books. Translating texts remained a central cultural practice for the Orthodox Slavs throughout the medieval period. This volume brings together some of the most prominent medievalists in the Slavic field from Europe, Israel, and the US. The contributors reflect on translation as a transposition of textual, spiritual, and political authority, and consider it in a continuum with other strategies for appropriating an authoritative text. (Series: Slavische Sprachgeschichte - Vol. 5)

This first comprehensive history of the Russian Bible demonstrates how scriptural translation exposed serious divisions in modern Russian religious culture.

This Festschrift contains original essays in honour of Michael E. Stone on Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, in its broadest sense: apocryphal texts, traditions, and themes from Second-Temple times to the High Middle Ages, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Few alphabets in the world are actively celebrated, and none more so than the Slavonic. Annually across Eastern Europe, the alphabet and its inventors, Cyril and Methodios, are celebrated with parades, concerts, liturgical services, and public addresses by presidents, ministers, and mayors. Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing Between Rome and Constantinople offers a new reading of the invention of the Slavonic alphabet and its implications. Its premise is simple: namely, that the alphabet was not invented once, but that it continued to be contested and redefined in the century after its creation. However, Inventing Slavonic goes against the grain of modern scholarship and popular common sense, where a stable and fossilized story about Cyril, his brother and companion Methodios, and the alphabet still persists. Mirela Ivanova shows that this well-known story is, in fact, a Frankenstein's monster, bolted together from texts which originally attributed quite different and often conflicting meanings to the elements which make up this supposedly unified narrative. In this narrative's place, the book offers a series of new readings of our earliest sources for the alphabet's appearance. In doing so, it constructs a new social history of the early script's fragility, and the ways in which its existence was conditioned by changes in socio-political life between Rome and Constantinople.