Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Slavic Languages and Literatures
First Advisor
Goldblatt, Harvey
Abstract
Both specialized and non-specialized works dealing with the scriptures among the medieval Orthodox Slavs tend to subsume the scriptures under the category of “Bible.” Thus, historians of “the Bible” in Slavia Orthodoxa often view the advent of the Gennadius Bible as the culmination of a centuries-long project. The author of the present work, however, argues that the Orthodox Slavs operated under a paradigm of what is here termed “scripturality”: for participants in the Orthodox Slavic tradition, “scripture” was an open category, and the scriptures were themselves open texts. Scripturality was part of the Orthodox Slavs’ Byzantine patrimony and, indeed, part of the common inheritance of early Christianity, but it was in Slavia Orthodoxa that this way of relating to sacred text reached perhaps its purest expression. Medieval Orthodox Slavic texts regularly refer to all sacred writing as “scripture” and invoke these writings as having a common authority. This basic hermeneutic and terminological orientation resists the idea of a “Bible,” a collection of all the divinely authored writings in a single pandect. Thus, the appearance of the Gennadius Bible, rather than being the result of a centuries-long quest, is the irruption of a novel biblical artifact in a scriptural context. The author argus that the Gennadius Bible and its successors, rather than transforming the Orthodox Slavic tradition of sacred literature, are themselves best read within that tradition as a specialized type of scripture.
Recommended Citation
Mikitish, John Max, "Bible as Scripture: Orthodox Slavic Scripturality and Church Slavonic Bibles" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1091.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1091
