Il Vangelo di Mstislav e la tradizione testuale dei vangeli slavi

This paper contains a brief survey of research into an early 12th century weekday lectionary known as the Mstislav Gospel. In the middle of the 19th century, the first scholar to deal with the concrete text of this manuscript was K.I. Nevostruev (whose impressive study remained unpublished for more than a hundred years). By means of an accurate comparison with the Greek text, the scholar noticed the conformity of the Mstislav Gospel with the oldest Slavic tradition (particularly in the John cycle). After a few decades, however, in the works of G.A. Voskresenskij, the Mstislav Gospel became the central witness of the so-called ‘second redaction’ of the Slavic gospels, which generated a strict association of its text with the East Slavic tradition, losing sight of its particulary archaic character. During the 20th Century, the Bulgarian philological school, chiefly on the basis of lexical arguments, reinterpreted the ‘second redaction’ (and the Mstislav Gospel with it) as the ‘Preslav text’, i.e. a revision of the original text whose origins were thought to date back to 10th century Bulgaria. Actually, the analysis of the text of this manuscript in the light of the Greek text, on the basis of the corpus of 467 ‘test passages’ elaborated by the Münster Institute for New Testament Textual Research (cf. the Text und Textwert series), clearly reveals the archaic and conservative nature of the Mstislav Gospel, while the so-called ‘Preslav text’ appears much less homogeneous than is currently believed.