The Transmission of the Old Church Slavonic Version of the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus and the Problem of its Glagolitic Substratum

The present paper deals with the problem of the alleged Glagolitic substratum of the Old
Church Slavonic version of the Homilies (λόγοι) of Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 329–390),
undertaken in Bulgaria between the late 9th and the early 10th century. This article aims to offer a
contribution to this issue in a multidisciplinary perspective. From a methodological point of view,
an attempt is made to tackle it not only by studying the material and graphic aspects of the
manuscripts witnesses, but also by considering the results of their text-critical and linguistic
analysis. Accordingly, a number of previously unstudied paleographical, codicological,
orthographical, phonetical, textual and lexical features are subjected to examination. On the one
hand, the author investigates the Glagolitic letters found in the oldest Cyrillic witness of this
translation, some of which were only recently discovered; on the other, he explores several scribal
mistakes, lexical archaisms and hapax legomena. Moreover, a few very special readings, featuring
the reflex / šč / for Protoslavic *tj are investigated for the first time. All the collected evidence
points to how two Homilies of this corpus in all likelihood originally circulated in Glagolitic and
how their Cyrillic transliteration was in all probability carried out soon afterwards in the Balkan
area.