Cyril of Jerusalem catechetical lectures: To linguistic and textual history of the 13th century Tolstovskii manuscript

Abstract

The article presents a study of catechetical lectures by Cyril of Jerusalem in the Tolstovskii sbornik (collection) from the 13th century (RNB, F.p.I.39) in comparison with four manuscripts from the 11th–17th centuries. Considering lexical, derivational, and grammatical variations, the authors conclude that the Tolstovskii manuscript has much more archaic features in common with three representatives of the MSS from the “family Sin” (they are three MSS from 11th–16th centuries). At the same time, it looks closer to the manuscript from the 16th–17th centuries (RSL, f. 256, N.P.Rumiantsev collection, no. 194) at the grammatical level. Simultaneously, the grammatical commonality of the Tolstovskii and Rumiantsev manuscripts is also not associated with the later editing but better reflects the original readings of translation than the manuscripts from the “family Sin.” Along with general readings, the Tolstovskii copy is characterized by many special readings that do not coincide with any MSS involved in the analysis. Some of these readings better convey the Greek original text, while others, on the contrary, reflect the result of later distortions. The manuscript does not contain consistent “Preslav” revision traces, although one can sporadically find some East Bulgarian lexemes in it (since many of them are also present in other copies, one cannot consider them as a result of later revisions). Nevertheless, the archaic Cyril and Methodius’ translation layer, both in vocabulary and grammar, turns out to be predominant. Thus, the Tolstovskii manuscript should be recognized as the representative of a particular tradition of Cyril’s catechetical text, far from both the “family Sin” and the Rumiantsev copy, as far as it preserves a large number of archaic features in its language.