Ralf Cleminson

The article discusses the Synopsis Apostolorum attributed to Dorotheus of Tyre, which purports to be a list of the Seventy Apostles. It gives a brief overview of the history of the text in Greek and Slavonic. In contrast to the Greek tradition, where it may be found in miscellanies of various types and also in manuscripts of the Apostolos which are provided with relatively extensive apparatus, in Slavonic it is found exclusively in Apostolos manuscripts. The redaction of the Synopsis, moreover, corresponds to the redaction of the Apostolos; there are discernible differences between the texts in each of the three Slavonic redactions in which it is represented. This indicates that it was translated as part of the accompanying text each time that the Apostolos itself was translated. This means that the Slavonic version (unlike the Greek) exists exclusively as paratext, but that this paratextual status, being dependent on the version, is not intrinsic to the work but a function of its history. This in turn points to the necessity of taking the paratext into account in any study of the text of the Bible.

The paper discusses the translation of Ἄρειος πάγος into Slavonic, which until the late seventeenth century is almost invariably Аріевъ ледъ. It is suggested that although this does not correctly render the original meaning of the Greek, translators (and others, including their Greek contemporaries) did not necessarily perceive place names as literally meaningful. Аріевъ ледъ was thus simply the established Slavonic name for the Areopagus, and known as such to Slavonic writers. The principle place where it occurs is in the Acts of the Apostles, where it is used consistently, and there is a varied body of commentary in Slavonic attached to this passage, which is discussed in detail. The use of the toponym in a number of non-Biblical texts is also traced.

The paper argues that the debate with John Grammaticus in the fifth chapter of the Vita Constantini was a historical event. It is placed in the narrative immediately before Constantine’s participation in the mission to the Saracens, which is identified with that which took place in 855/856: this requires the emendation of a single character in the Vita, giving Constantine’s age as 29, not 24. (This also means that he could have been appointed chartophylax, and deacon, at 25.) It is suggested that the debate took place at the very end of 855, when it would have been relevant to political circumstances.

The paper proposes an encoding standard for early Cyrillic characters and glyphs that are still missing in the Universal Character Set (UCS) of the Unicode Standard and for different reasons will probably never be included, but are nevertheless used by the paleoslavistic community. This micro-standard is meant to expand, not to replace the Unicode standard and follows the path chosen by the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) a few years ago for the Latin script (see http://www.hit.uib.no/mufi/). Starting from the inventory of Old Cyrillic originally proposed at the conference held in Belgrade on 15–17 October 2007 (see BP), and taking in view the recommendations given by Birnbaum et al. 2008 and the MUFI-consortium, the chosen set is limited to 178 units with a specific function (characters and composites, superscript characters, modifier characters, and punctuation marks), which are located in the Private Use Area (PUA). Their positions (code points) are coordinated with MUFI. This set we will call PUA1. In the future a second set PUA2 will be proposed for a number of ligatures and paleographic variants that may not be coordinated with MUFI and are intended for special publications addressed to Slavistic readers. It is hoped that the proposed PUA encoding for Early Cyrillic Symbols, for which we choose the abbreviation CYFI, will establish itself as a sort of micro-standardization. Designers of scholarly fonts are encouraged to include these symbols according to this proposal (see code points in the appendix).

The paper contains research work and publication of Slavonic translation of Loci Selecti of St John Damascene (a catena on the Pauline Epistles, the compilation of which is ascribed to St John Damascene). No Slavonic version has previously been identified: that is to say, the existence of fragments of such a translation has twice been noted, but on neither occasion were they recognised for what they are (Archimandrite Amfilochij and Michael Bakker). There is a clear connection between the fragments of the Slavonic version of the Loci selecti and the Second Redaction text of the First Epistle to Timothy, and each must be studied in the context of the other. The copy in the Karakallou Apostolos No 294 is in the centre of the publication, in which the redaction of the text of the epistle is the same as that of the manuscripts cited by Ampfilochij, namely the redaction we now know as the Second or Preslav Redaction of the text. The Second Slavonic Redaction of the Apostolos is considered to have originated in Eastern Bulgaria in the tenth century, and is much better represented by lectionaries than by continuous texts. The author proves that the Second Redaction of the Slavonic Apostolos as we now know it is a composite text: I Timothy was translated separately from the rest. The paper threw new light on the history of the translation of New Testament in Old Church Slavonic.

A White Paper prepared on behalf of the Commission for Computer Processing of Slavic Manuscripts and Early Printed Books to the International Committee of Slavists This White Paper emerged from discussions among the authors at the Slovo conference that took place in Sofia from 2008-02-21 through 2008-02-26. It is partially a response to three documents published by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences: "Standard of the Old Slavic Cyrillic Script", "Standardisation of the Old Church Slavonic Cyrillic Script and its Registration in Unicode", and "Proposal for Registering the Old Slavic Cyrillic Script in Unicode" The purpose of this White Paper is to provide for the benefit of medieval Slavic philologists: 1. A review of the current state of Unicode with respect to encoding early Cyrillic writing. 2. A brief statement of basic Unicode design principles. 3. An overview of the relationship between character set and font technologies. 4. A response to "Standard","Standardisation", and "Proposal" that provides a realistic perspective on the compatibility of these documents with modern character set standards. 5. A discussion of the possible need for further expansion of the early Cyrillic character inventory in Unicode. 6. A discussion of strategies for meeting the encoding needs of Slavic medievalists in a standards-conformant way. This White Paper is contributed for discussion before and during the September 2008 International Congress of Slavists in Ohrid.

The article presents a first attempt of a publication of fragments from medieval Slavonic written records in electronic form – a problem which so far has not found a satisfactory solution. Two manuscripts from the National Library on Budapest (Szechenyi) have been studies, described and realized as electronic publications. The first one (MS Duod. Eccl. Slav. 2) is Glagolhic, from XI-XII century and contains Vita of Simeon Stulpnik. The second one (Fragm. Eccl. Slav. 3) includes seven parchment fragments from XIII-XIV century with partially conserved Cyrillic text by the Apostle. The possibilities to deliver the data and metadata from the fragments are examined. As a result the most precise and close to the original electronic publication can be realized. Subject of discussion are the rules created in the framework of the Text Encoding Initiative, which although oriented to a wide range of different kinds of texts, do not reflect the specificity of the medieval manuscripts. Regarding the fragments, of paramount importance is the necessity in the model of description the degree of preservation of the text, depending on the preservation of the material on which it has been conserved, to be noted. As the fragment does not contain the whole text of the primarily existing manuscript but only part of it, the hierarchy of the computer description should reflect this peculiarity, as at the same time it well presents the separate lines in the text, about the separation of words, about the preserved (or missing) letter symbols and the punctuation. Meanwhile a place for marking the identification of the biblical text should be provided. Discussed in detail are the possible approaches to the elements, their characteristics and order in the publication – from the highest to the lowest level at the description of the text and its articles. Some questions connected with Unicode have been presented, in the context of the author’s view that not only the encoding of the texts is important, but also the adequate representation of their position in the writing margin, for example, referring to the rubrics and their writing in the margins. Enclosed is an illustration of the acquired approach – publication of fragment No. 1 (its front side, Romans 1:8-14).