‘The Old is in the New Revealed’: Prophetical Quotations from the Slavonic Translation of Doctrina Iacobi in the Literature of Early Kyivan Rus
‘The Old is in the New Revealed’: Prophetical Quotations from the Slavonic Translation of Doctrina Iacobi in the Literature of Early Kyivan Rus

Summary/Abstract: The first part of this paper discusses a small number of quotations from the books of the prophets in the Philosopher’s Speech. In part, these have already been identified by L. Müller and O. V. Tvorogov as markedly different in form and/or language from their counterparts in those canonical translations of the books of the Bible that were available during the first centuries of Slavonic writing. In 2006, the author showed that the source of one of these quotations, an Ezraic agraphon on the crucifixion of Jesus, was in the Slavonic translation of Doctrina Iacobi, a Byzantine anti-Judaic work of the 7th century. The translation is extant only in East Slav manuscripts from the early 15th century onwards. In this part of the paper, it is shown that the quotations from Is 9:2, Is 56:7, Jer 17:9 (with a text that differs greatly from that of the Bible), Jer 38 (31):31/33, and Zech 7:13 in the Philosopher’s Speech share this origin in the Doctrina. L. Müller has posited (1962, 1971, 1988–1989) the existence in the literature of medieval Rus´ of a now lost (?) thematical collection of Old Testament quotations on the rejection of the Jews and the calling of a new people, which is reflected in the Philosopher’s Speech as well as in Hilarion of Kyiv’s Sermon on Law and Grace. In the second and last part of this paper, the author will analyse several quotations from the prophets in Hilarion’s sermon which diverge in form from those of the received translations. The aim is to determine their origin, to test Müller’s hypothesis of a prophetical florilegium, and to date more precisely the first appearance of the Doctrina in East Slav writing.

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