The Names of the Biblical Books in the Slavonic Excerpt from the Chronicle of Julius Africanus Cover Image
  • Price 25.00 €

Названията на библейските книги в славянски ексцерпт от Хрониката на Юлий Африкан
The Names of the Biblical Books in the Slavonic Excerpt from the Chronicle of Julius Africanus

Author(s): Anna-Maria Totomanova
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Кирило-Методиевски научен център при Българска академия на науките

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyses the names of the different biblical books in the excerpt from Julius Africanus' Chronography preserved in an early 9th c. Greek chronographic compilation that survived in a Slavonic translation known as the Chronicle of George Synkellos. The five Russian copies of the text come from 15-16th c. and represent the same textual redaction. The Glagolitic traces, the archaic morphology and the lexis similar to the vocabulary of the early Bulgarian writers allow us to conclude that the translation must have been made on Bulgarian soil during the first half of the 10th c. Africanus' excerpt contains a coherent narrative of the Old Testament history of the world complemented with notes about the Hellenistic world. The excerpt makes up two thirds of the compilation and covers a period of more than five and a half millennia from the Creation of the world up to the Resurrection of Christ. The names of the biblical books occur in Africanus' chronologies that are the backbone of his historical narrative and reflect his Christological conception of calculating the dates according to the Old Testament. Although similar to the terms used by John the Exarch and other Old Bulgarian translators the names of the biblical books do not completely agree with those attested in the OCS canonical manuscripts showing some unusual ways of transmitting biblical terms. That proves once again the early 10th c. origins of the Slavonic text.

  • Issue Year: 2014
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 45-53
  • Page Count: 9
  • Language: Bulgarian