1.10 Old Church Slavonic Texts [History of Research]

The study of the Church Slavonic translations of the Scriptures suffers from a lack of a thorough and methodologically grounded textual-critical approach, especially to the earliest corpus of texts dating from Cyrillo-Methodian and Old Bulgarian periods (second half of the ninth to the turn of the tenth–eleventh centuries C.E.). Slavic philology today has failed to provide an impetus in order to overcome methodological backwardness in the current state of art and to foster new approaches. By offering a fresh insight into looking at longstanding issues in the history of research on the Church Slavonic Bible, this article intends to promote more profitable studies rather than merely summarise previous investigations. The focus here is on broader issues, with an aim to addressing the subject from a new standpoint. This paper briefly tackles the wide-ranging problem of ways in which to approach the textual transmission of the Church Slavonic Bible and how to come to terms with methodological challenges in order to overturn the previous mindset on producing scientifically valid and reliable critical editions of the Church Slavonic Bible. Adopting a new line of inquiry would inevitably rule out the vast majority of the hitherto produced editions of the Church Slavonic versions as satisfactory tools for properly assessing their text-critical value for the LXX. The lesson to be drawn from the history of research is consequently to map out a path that leads to incorporating the study of this until recently underestimated secondary version into contemporary Biblical scholarship.