Проблемът за автентичността на Завета на св. Йоан Рилски (Обзор на мненията)
The Problem of the Authenticity of the Testament of St. John of Rila (A Review of the Opinions)

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the problem of the authenticity of the historical source, known as The Testament of St. John of Rila, and more accurately the study of the document in scholarly works. The authenticity of The Testament has been an object of ongoing discussions since the end of the nineteenth century. The aim of this study is not to impose a certain hypothesis over other, but the goal is to make a survey through the different propositions and to point out the most probable opinion. After analyzing the different scholarly studies over the years, the author comes to the conclusion that there is an insufficient amount of arguments proving that The Testament of St. John of Rila is a later forgery. The scholars that support the opinion of the fakeness of the document use primarily linguistic arguments (the language of the historical source is late) or suppositions, which cannot be regarded as unconditional for a later forgery. The inference is that The Testament of St. John of Rila has an obvious middle-age textual base and the late copies of the document, which are in presence today, are adaptations (“translations“ from Old-Bulgarian to Church-Slavonic) of an original tenth century text.

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