The Banica, Dobrejšo and Curzon Gospels in Light of the Greek Text

The Textual Tradition of the Church Slavonic Gospels is one of the more fascinating and controversial issues in Slavic Studies. More than 100 years after Voskresenskij’s edition of the Gospel of Mark, scholars largely continue to use the same categories. There are many reasons for this, first of all the extent of the corpus and the gradual formation of local redactions, which often hindered precise definition of the various textual types. Nevertheless, in many occasions the impasse seem to originate from the misunderstanding of the different nature of textual and lexical variants. It is clearly understandable that, from its very beginning, Slavic Philology has paid much more attention to the lexical level, in the attempt to define local redactions of Church Slavonic from a linguistic point of view. Such an approach, however, contributed to overshadow the actual text and its history: apart from general remarks about the presence of ‘Western’ variants in the oldest versions, and the convergence with the “Byzantine text” in the latest, ‘redactions’ of the Slavic Gospels continue to be defined on lexical grounds. Incidentally, this is the main reason for the marginal use of the Slavic version in New Testament Textual Criticism. Predominance of the lexical element clearly emerges in the identification of the so-called ‘Preslav Text’ (i.e. Voskresenskij’s ‘Second Redaction’). In this article, I try to define the Balkan-Bosnian tradition of the 13th-15th Centuries from a strictly textual point of view. For this purpose, the “Text und Textwert” Münster corpus of testual nodes is employed.