Transmisijata na starobălgarskija prevod na Slovo 41 “Za Petdesetnica” na Grigorij Nazianzin [“The Transmission of the Old Church Slavonic Translation of Gregory of Nazianzus’ Homily 41 On Pentecost]

This work represents the first attempt in Palaeoslavistics to undertake a comprehensive text-critical study of the textual transmission of the anonymous Old Church Slavonic translation of Gregory of Nazianzus’ Homily 41 On Pentecost (Λόγος εἰς τὴν Πεντηκοστήν, CPG 3010.41). The article begins with the recensio of the manuscript tradition, which is shown to consist of 17 East Slavic witnesses dating from the 11th to the 17th centuries. The author discusses the different types of collections against the background of the Byzantine and Eastern Christian traditions and demonstrates that the surviving Church Slavonic Cyrillic evidence can be traced back to a single archetype (α). The tradition is shown to be bipartite: one branch (P) is represented by the codex unicus of the 13 Homilies (St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Q.п.I.16, late 11th century), and the other (β) by the various codices of the so-called Liturgical collection of the 16 Homilies (14th–17th centuries). The analysis of the text’s linguistic features reveals the presence of several significant lexical and grammatical archaisms, while the investigation of some aspects of the translation technique examines a remarkable parallel with the Didactic Gospel of Constantine, Bishop of Preslav. As a result, the study provides compelling evidence for an early origin of the translation, which can therefore safely be ascribed to the late 9th or early 10th century, namely to the Golden Age of Old Bulgarian literature. The findings of the present study open new avenues of research into the complex problem of the transmission of the Church Slavonic corpus of Gregory of Nazianzus and pave the way for the creation of the first critical edition of the Old Church Slavonic version of Homily 41.