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The Soterios Project revisited: Status quaestionis and the future edition
Abstract
Not until 2006 could the scholarly community welcome the first critical edition of the 103 Quaestiones et responsiones ascribed to Anastasius of Sinai (CPG 7746; M. Richard / J.A. Munitiz. CCSG, 59). However, this publication did not solve all topics surrounding Anastasius’s work, because 21 Greek manuscripts contain still another florilegium, the so-called Σωτήριος dating from before 900 AD, whose core is formed by 88 ἐρωταποκρίσεις. Between 914 and 927 a Slavonic translation thereof was made which has been preserved in the so-called Изборник, a codex from 1073. The first and sole critical edition of the Slavonic text was made by O.M. Bodjanskij (1845). The 900th anniversary of the Изборник in 1973 incited the interest in the Greek original. Eventually, in 1996 the decision to edit the Greek text was made, mainly under the impetus of Prof. em. Dr F. J. Thomson. This edition, originally started by Dr D.Tj. Sieswerda, will be continued by the author of this article in close cooperation with Dr L. Sels, specialist in Church Slavonic.
The essay proposes an interpretation of the eulogy of Symeon’s Miscellany considering not only the cultural context of the First Bulgarian Empire at the beginning of the tenth century, but also the historical situation and the literary production of the seventies and eighties of the previous century when the Greek original of the Miscellany known by the name of the Soterios was conceived in Constantinople. This eulogy helps us to better understand the reasons that led to the creation of the Slavic version of this anthology at the time of Symeon. In the Constantinopolitan environment, this anthology was conceived as an adequate tool of the kind required by monks and priests engaged in the education of the laity, with particular focus on the foundations of orthodox doctrine. In the new environment the initiative was taken by Tsar Symeon, who – on the strength of his theological training – assumed a decisive role while occupying the throne by taking responsibility for directly instructing the Bulgarian aristocracy, fully exploiting a tool in the Slavic language that would have been very useful.
Le genre des questions-et-réponses dans la littérature grecque chrétienne se laisse mieux comprendre si l'on le définit comme une série de questions-et-réponses, présentées comme telles (et non comme des lettres ou des dialogues, par exemple) abordant des sujets variés et qui ne se réduisent pas à une seule catégorie de contenu (exégèse biblique ou explications scientifiques, par exemple). Ainsi restreint, le genre des questions-et-réponses dans la littérature grecque chrétienne connaît sa période la plus faste aux Ve-VIIIe s. dans des milieux monastiques ouverts sur les problèmes et les interrogations du monde. Ce genre, d'une grande souplesse et d'une grande vitalité, permet de traiter des questions d'une façon plus accessible et plus libre qu'il ne serait possible de le faire dans une homélie ou un traité théologique.
The significant role which erotapocritic literature played in the reception of Byzantine culture by the Slavs is shown by a survey of the Slavonic translations in the fields of theology, both doctrinal and polemic, exegesis, monasticism, spirituality, morality, hagiography. Because of their importance special attention is paid to the translations of collections of both Anastasius Sinaita's Interrogationes and responsiones and pseudo-Anastasian collections with their accompanying prefaces and appendices, which were eminently suitable for the instruction of the new converts.
This article deals with the Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem (CPG 2257), a fascinating collection of 137 questions and answers discussing the position of Christianity with regard to Hellenism and Judaism. The text has come down to us in 250 copies dating from the tenth to the nineteenth century and was translated from Greek into Arabic, Armenian, Church Slavonic, Ethiopie, Georgian and Latin. Although attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria (t 373) by most of the manuscripts, in all probability it was written sometime during the seventh or eighth century. Within the framework of DEBIDEM, an ERC funded research project hosted at King's College London, a critical edition of the Greek collection is being prepared for the Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca. In this article however, we focus on the surviving Church Slavonic material. Using traditional error-based stemmatics, we demonstrate that two very different and independent Church Slavonic translations of the Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem were in circulation.