La lettre de Denys l’Aréopagite à Timothée sur la mort des apôtres Pierre et Paul: L’apport de la version géorgienne

Abstract

The letter from Dionysius the Areopagite to Timothy, a disciple of St Paul, reporting the death of the apostles Peter and Paul, is preserved in Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopian, Georgian, Latin and Syriac. This apocryphal work, which is an important source for our knowledge of the legends concerning the martyrdom of St Paul in Rome and which had a significant influence in the Latin world, remains poorly studied. The comparison of the different versions enables us to determine that they were translated from two separate Greek recensions, both of them now lost. The study of the Georgian version, here for the first time translated into French on the basis of the critical edition, sheds new light on the transmission history of the letter. The analysis of the miseen- scène around the character of Timothy and the comparison of some motifs that are found in other accounts of the same event allow us to offer some hypotheses regarding the dating and the milieu in which the two Greek recensions were composed.