BOSANSKO ČETVEROEVANĐELJE - SOFIJSKI ODLOMCI
BOSNIAN GOSPEL - THE SOPHIA FRAGMENT OF THE GOSPELS

Summary/Abstract: The Sophia fragment of the Gospels comes from a mediaeval codex that belonged to the Bosnian Church. It is kept in the Bulgarian National Library of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Sophia, under call sign. НБКМ 23+468, in the Славянски ръкописи or Slavic Manuscripts collection. The surviving fragment comprises 52 pages from what was originally a much larger manuscript. It contains parts of the second half of the Gospel according to Matthew and the beginning of the Gospel according to Mark. The surviving sections of the codex offer no information that might point to the book's earliest owners and the manuscript has no marginal glosses, but repairs to it and liturgical markings added subsequently do suggest it may have been kept for at least a short period of time in an Orthodox monastery. The Sophia Gospels were copied out in the second half of the 14th century in a Cyrillic script whose palaeographic and orthographic features are consistent with contemporary Church Slavonic manuscripts from Bosnia, while linguistic forms found in the fragments suggest they may have come from an area with a diphthongic value for Jat. The lexical choices in the Sophia Gospels are reliable evidence that the exemplar used by the scribe was highly archaic, a finding in line with the current state of knowledge regarding the Bosnian group, which passed on the oldest version of Cyril and Methodius’ translation of the New Testament. This critical edition of the Sophia Gospels, which includes variants from two other Bosnian manuscripts, the Vrutok and the Dovolje Gospels, has confirmed the high degree of closeness between the exemplars of the Sophia and of the Vrutok gospels. This research makes it possible to state that the Bosnian Sophia Gospels offer a typical example of the New Testament text as preserved under the aegis of the Bosnian Church.

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