Franciszek Skoryna z Połocka jako biblista
Francis Skorina from Polock as a Biblical Scholar

Summary/Abstract: The article gives a general picture of the activity of Francis Skorina as a translator, commentator and publisher of biblical texts, mainly Old Testament ones, and as an editor, publisher and author of hymnographic and euchographic works (Prague 1517–1520 and Vilnius 1522, 1525). Skorina printed twice the Plaster without, however, translating it and published one time each 22 OT books with a linguistic revision of the text. In 1525 he published a Church Slavic apostolos (epistle book) with forewords by himself and a specific calendar. The language into wich Skorina translated the bible texts and wich he used in the prefaces and aftrwords of his publications was defined by himself as Russian. Today it is called usually Old Byelorussian – a literary language based on Old Church Slavic with a strong influence from the written and spoken language used in the Great Principality of Lithuania. Besides the printed translations and the manuscript copies of them, the written tradition has preserved several MSS with biblical books translated by Skorina and with prefaces to them, which the Polish humanist was not able to publish. While the printed books have been published many times and can be found easily in an electronic variant, the manuscript texts have not as yet been studied will and are poorly known. F. Skorina also took care also of liturgical books. The "Malaya Podorozhnaya Knizhka", which is a kind of a psalter with a service attached to it, has also New Testament texts and among the akathistoi, canons and prayers added to them and meant for every day of the week, we find some prayers and two akathistoi created by him even with an acrostic. The article directs the attention of the reader to the biblical similes in the Akathistos of John the Baptist (especially in ikoses 5, 8 and 11), which show Skorina's profound knowledge of the Bible and his high artistic mastery.

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