Kulik, A., MacRobert, C. M., Nikolova, S., Taube, M., Vakareliyska C. M. (eds.), The Bible in Slavic Tradition, Leiden—Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2016 (original) (raw)

This book is a product of an international conference of scholars held 11–16 September 2009 in Varna, Bulgaria, within the framework of a joint project of the same title made possible by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Cyrillo-Methodian Research Centre of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia. The book contains 24 artic- les by participants in the conference, including both senior scholars of distinction and young researchers from Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, and United States. The authors come not only from the institutions that organized the conference but also from renowned and important centers of Slavic studies such as the universities of Vienna, Oxford, Rome (La Sapienza), Bologna, Antwerp, Salerno, the University of Oregon (USA), Sofia St. Kliment of Ohrid University and the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University in Greifswald (Germany). The thematic focus of the research includes various aspects of Bible translation in the Slavic Glagolitic and Cyrillic traditions beginning in the ninth century. The analyses mostly cover aspects of Slavic Bible translations during the Middle Ages that have not been studied or that have been the object of insufficient scholarly research, both in the canonical Old and New Testament and in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. An important place has been given to the first trans- lations of the books of the Bible from Greek into Slavonic by SS. Cyril and Methodius, creators of the first Slavonic alphabet in the ninth century, and to the development of these translations during the Middle Ages, on the basis of research into medieval Slavic manuscripts from the tenth to the sixteenth century. The papers present analyses of Exodus, the Psalms, the Book of Jeremiah, the Book of Job, the Book of Jesus Son of Sirach, the Story of Adam, and the Story of Melchizedek. Attention has also been paid to later fourteenth- and fifteenth-century translations of Old Testament books into Slavonic, not only from Greek texts, but also from the Hebrew Massoretic text (the Song of Songs, the Proverbs of Solomon). Several of the articles discuss issues in translation of the New Testament, mainly of the Gospels, and its textual tradition during the Middle Ages, elucidating the links between the Slavonic translation and the Greek textual radition. The articles also raise theoretical questions concerning the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint, the source of the oldest translation into Slavonic by SS. Cyril and Methodius. The volume also includes several articles on key issues concerning the work of Cyril and Methodius that are closely linked to the interpretation of their Bible translations, such as the Church Council at Preslav in 893, which provided a strong impetus for the development of the Cyrillo-Methodian translations in medieval Slavdom; the main primary Slavonic sources for the work and lives of SS. Cyril and Methodius, including Vita Constantini and its critical edition, and other previously unstudied issues. The articles are informed by methodologies from various fields of research, and their analytical approach is frequently interdisciplinary, applying approaches from the standpoints of textual criticism, philo- logy (linguistics, literary history, palaeography), cultural and political history, and theology (biblical studies and exegesis) to issues in Heb- raic, Byzantine, and Slavic studies.