The main thesis of this paper concerns the contamination of characters and events from two biblical Covenants – the Old and New Testaments – in the narratives of interlocutors whose knowledge of the Bible came predominantly through direct transmission within local tradition. The influences of the Biblia Pauperum, which merges the two Covenants, and of Jewish tradition are also evident in these narratives. Consequently, the narratives of the inculturated folk Bible cannot be organised according to the structure of the canonical text, although a different, “grassroots” order can be outlined. I support my thesis using ethnographic material collected between 1980 and 2000, mainly among Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities in Central and Eastern Poland and Polish diaspora communities in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine – communities that, until the Holocaust, were also shaped by their Jewish populations.
This article focuses on the most variable section of the Acts of Paul and Thecla in the Church Slavonic translation. Not only does it evaluate the version of the beatitudes that circulated in Church Slavonic based on twelve Cyrillic manuscripts, but it also considers this part of the text in light of questions raised about the original Greek text. Comparing the Greek and Church Slavonic texts and analysing the meanings of words in their cultural contexts reveals that reading texts in different languages can alter interpretation, even when the translation is accurate. However, not just about translation. The Church Slavonic version of the beatitudes is the result of a lengthy process of making them “more orthodox”, which started with the Greek manuscripts and continued even after they were translated, as evidenced by later manuscripts.
The article discusses the reading zhitie fariseisku “Pharisaical way of life” from the so-called Laodicean Epistle – practically the only surviving work that contains ideas presumably attributed to the “Novgorod-Moscow heresy” (zhidovstvuiushchie “Judaizers”) of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The main difficulty with this reading is that it presents the Pharisees in a purely positive context, which was highly unusual for traditional Christian literature. After Moshe Taube revealed that in the Ruthenian translation of the treatise Secret of Secrets, associated with the “literature of the Judaizers”, the term “Pharisee” was translated from the Hebrew word nazir “Nazirite; later, recluse, monk”, it became clear that the Pharisees in the Laodicean Epistle were in fact Nazirites, although the reasons for this translation decision remained unexplained. The article shows that in the Edited Pentateuch, which is of Ruthenian origin (presumably made in the second half of the 15th century in Kyiv), the “Law for a Nazirite” (Num 6:1–21) is regularly glossed with the heading “on the Pharisees” or “on the Pharisee fast”. Thus, the Pharisees were related not only to medieval recluses, but specifically to the Old Testament category of those specially consecrated to the Lord. This can be seen as a search the Jewish origins of Christianity for the predecessors of the “Judaizing”, so that the “Pharisees” of the Laodicean Epistle are the true original Christians.
The article revisits the discussion about the potential influence of Jewish traditions concerning the image of Jacob engraved on the Throne of Glory on Jacob’s vision in the Slavonic Ladder of Jacob. First suggested by James Kugel, the influence of Jewish traditions associated with Jacob’s engraved image has been recently called into question by Sabine Fahl and Christfried Böttrich. The article argues that instead of focusing on differences in content between the two narratives, one must explore the tradition on Jacob’s image as a formulaic scene that allows for the creation of new content through the selective reassembly and re-use of the scene’s structural elements. The Ladder’s composers were either unfamiliar with the narrative behind the structure, or they chose to ignore that narrative. Instead, the Ladder adopts individual building blocks from the tradition on the image of Jacob and then reassembles these blocks into a new narrative. The article uses the relationship between the Ladder and Jewish traditions on the image of Jacob as a starting point for a broader argument about the Ladder as a product of Byzantine literature.
