The Old Church Slavonic Psalms and the Problem of the Western Readings: a reassessment

The article deals with the problem of the origin of the so-called “Western readings” in the earliest textual stratum of the Old Church Slavonic version of the Psalms. Deter- mining their textual source represents a long-standing issue in the field of the textual transmission of this Old Testament book. The author’s basic thesis is that the underlying Greek text was not a ‘pure’ Lucianic text but one that contained a number of ‘Western’ readings. This is shown by a number of cases, in which the Vetus Latina and the OCS-Ps 1 have been found to be in textual agreement with the oldest Georgian redaction of the Psalms. The concomitant appearance of the so-called “Western readings” in very diverse traditions supports the conclusion that they may have belonged to a different, hitherto untraced, text-type of the Septuagint. The Holy Land may be understood as a possible milieu of diffusion of the supposed Greek model that influenced both traditions of the Western and the Eastern Christianity.