The oldest vita of St. Paul of Xeropotamou

Abstract

Saint Paul of Xeropotamou is regarded as one of the most important ascetic figures of Mount Athos in the 10th century. Until now, it was considered that the oldest version of his vita was the one included in the Neon Eklogion of Nikodemos the Hagiorite, which was published in 1803. It was, however, overlooked that in 1967 the Soviet scholar Sigurd Schmidt published an article on four texts concerning Mount Athos from a Russian Slavonic codex of 1557/8, which was copied at the monastery of the Archangel Michael Skovorodskiy in Novgorod, with the fourth text being a brief account of the life of Paul of Xeropotamou. This proves the existence of a vita considerably older than that of the 18th-century version. In this paper, I compare the two versions, suggesting that the original form of the vita, as it is found in the Novgorod manuscript, may have been formed during the early 15th century and written in the milieu of two Protoi of Mount Athos, Serapheim and Gabriel, after 1500 in Karyes.