Category: Church Slavonic

For the second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures I decided to include as much information as possible on what we call “versions”—a term designating translations of the texts into other languages. Such attention is a given if the text is not available in its original language, but far too often in Christian apocrypha scholarship there is a neglect of those languages outside of Greek and Latin, and perhaps Coptic and Syriac, that few of us can claim some proficiency. One of these neglected language groups is Church Slavonic (CS). There are plenty of experts in Slavistics, and some work on Jewish and Christian apocrypha, but there seems to be little interaction between the two groups of scholars. Unfortunately, I have no training in the language nor its history but I am working on some texts for MNTA that are plentiful in CS manuscripts. So this past weekend I went to work with my frequent research partner Slavomír Céplö (whose language knowledge is enviable) to fill in the details about the CS tradition of four apocryphal Johannine apocalypses. The work was fruitful but frequently frustrating.

First, a little background on the texts. I described many of them in a previous post on erotapokriseis (question-and-answer) literature, but I will give some brief details here also. 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John, the most well-known of the texts, is a sequel of sorts to the canonical Revelation. Jesus appears to John on Mount Tabor and John asks him a …