Inovativni posoki v izsledvaneto na starobălgarskite prevodi na starozavetnite knigi [= New Approaches to the Study of Old Church Slavonic Translations of the Old Testament]

The present paper aims to foster new understanding and new approaches to the study of the Old Bulgarian translations of the Old Testament. Although over the last thirty years, Slavic Biblical philology has been enjoying a certain revival, it remains in a state of relative conceptual and methodological backwardness if compared to the ground-breaking achievements that have been made in Biblical scholarship since the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. This seems to have two main causes which are related one to another. First, Old Church Slavonic translations continue to be studied on the oldest available manuscripts, rather than on an exhaustive and rigorous analysis of the entire tradition. The resulting shortage of critical editions and studies on textual history is therefore particularly conspicuous. Secondly, their philological inquiry has almost always remained detached from that of the Septuagint and of the Hebrew Bible with the consequence that models were not always correctly identified, and the textcritical value has not been properly assessed. Rethinking research strategies in Slavic philology is logically required in order to guarantee a methodological alignment with research undertaken in Biblical Studies. This implies, on the one hand, a focus on issues surrounding the matter of textual transmission as well as on producing reliable critical editions. On the other hand, the investigation should be put in the broader context of the textual history and the textual criticism of their originals as well as of other secondary versions of the Hebrew Bible. Such an integrate approach allows opening up fascinating new research perspectives, thereby showing the relevance of the Old Bulgarian Old Testament for investigating textual stages and variant literary editions not attested in the surviving Greek tradition.