THE OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC TRANSLATION OF GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS’ ORATION 44: THE HOMILIARY OF MIHANOVI？ AND THE OLD RUSSIAN COPIES (PRELIMINARY TEXT-CRITICAL REMARKS)

Sa？etak The paper focuses on the textual criticism of the earliest Slavonic version of Gregory of Nazianzus’ Oration 44 on New Sunday (Sunday of Thomas). This translation has come down to us in a number of Old Russian copies dating from the 14th to the 17th century, as well as in the so-called Homiliary of Mihanovi？, a Serbian codex of the late 13th – early 14th centuries, kept in the Archive of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb. The present work represents the first attempt to comprehensively undertake a text-critical analysis of the oldest Slavonic translation of this homily. The research is based on all available manuscript evidence, belonging to different typologies of collections of both East and South Slavic origin. On the basis of the textual comparison of the witnesses, the author provides evidence for a common origin of the Serbian and Russian traditions. The conclusion is reached that the origin of the corpus must be traced back to the earliest periods of Old Church Slavonic literature. Moreover, the primary textual layer of the translation appears to have originated prior to its inclusion in the Liturgical collection of the Sixteen Homilies, and long before Nicetas of Heraclea’s Commentaries were translated from Greek and appended to the Slavonic version of Gregory of Nazianzus’ works