The article is devoted to the printing Cyrillic South Slavic Biblical texts from the beginning (incunabula) until the early seventeenth century, along with the presentation and characteristics of the sources from Montenegro, Venice, Serbia, Wallachia and others. This history is referred to some Glagolitic sources and to the much better recognised history of Eastern Slavic paleotypy, both from the area of the First Republic of Poland, as well as from typographical centres of the Russian Tsardom.

The article is an attempt to critically evaluate the manifestations of the philosophical culture sprouting in Rus’. With the baptism in the Byzantine Rite, Rus’ in the 10th century joined the family of Christian nations and defined the future direction of her own cultural development. The Middle Ages in Rus’ were eminently theocentric. Literature (which was mostly translated from the Greek in Bulgarian monasteries) had a religious character. Sacral content, assimilated in Rus’ mainly through the Old Church Slavonic (due to the scarce knowledge of Greek) had a decisive influence on formation of the philosophical worldview of Rus’ intellectual elite. The Bible thus became the main reference framework for the first Rus’ thinkers-philosophers: Ilarion of Kiev († 1055), Kirill of Turov († 1183) and Kliment Smolatic († 1164). Ilarion of Kiev, the first metropolitan of the Kievan Rus’ in his rhetoric work (which postulated the superiority of the New Testament to the Old) expressed a philosophical thesis of the equality of all Christian nations before God. Kliment Smolatic, the second metropolitan of Rus’, in his Letter to Presbyter Foma, defended the allegorical method of interpretating the Bible. Kirill of Turov, in his turn, in his Parable of the human soul and body allegorically tried to answer the question about the relationship of the body and the soul. For the Rus’ thinkers the content of the Bible served as a pretext for philosophical reflection, e.g. on the role of man in the universe, on the nature of reality, on the relation between matter and spirit. In their works we find the beginnings of the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.

The authors study different equivalents of the Hebrew word Eden in selected old and new Slavic translations of the Bible. The equivalents of this lexeme have been excerpted from several Slavic translations of the Bible, which were selected on the basis of diverse criteria. The translations are presented chronologically and old translations are opposed to the new ones. They represent three groups of Slavic languages: West Slavic, East Slavic and South Slavic and are connected with the base of translation, i.e. the original text and/or Greek or Latin text. They can also be classified according to religious denomination and the strategy of the translation. The observation of those equivalents enables us to see not only their variety and mutual influence among translations but also the struggle of Slavic translators with a very difficult language matter. Many factors were important in that struggle: genetic and structural distances between Semitic and Slavic languages, different perceptions of reality in distant cultures, the discrepancy between biblical and Slavonic realities and the influence of religious denomination. Another important factor was the state of biblical knowledge at the time – incomparably poorer in the case of the oldest Slavic translations in comparison to modern ones.

The authors summarize the academic legacy of late Oktawiusz Jurewicz and his role as a leading Polish byzantinist of the second half of the 20th century. The text is supplemented by the detailed and updated bibliography of Jurewicz.

In the last fifteen years, research on the Slavic Gospel manuscript tradition have reached new and important achievements especially with the spread of computer technology and digitization process. Taking into account progress in the study of the Greek manuscript tradition, the author explains some basic guidelines: the textual structure of the Gospel book, the Menologion pericopes, the Gospel book ornamentation, the new editions. At the end the main essays on individual manuscripts or on particular issues are introduced. The Slavic Gospel, therefore, is still a key issue of Slavic studies in the field of Slavic paleography, textual criticism, and linguistic analysis.

Modern scholarship on the textual history of Church Slavonic biblical translation recognizes two distinct revisions of the Church Slavonic Psalter from the early fourteenth century, Redaction III (sometimes called the ‘Athonite’ redaction) and Redaction IV, known only in the Norov psalter manuscript. Although they are both attested from the same period and in manuscripts of similar Bulgarian provenance, these two redactions are in some respects systematically different in their linguistic character, their approach to translational issues and their Greek textual basis. In the light of A.A. Turilov’s observation that the Mihanovic Psalter, possibly the earliest witness to Redaction III, is written in the same hand as the greater part of the Norov Psalter, this paper examines the textual antecedents of the two redactions and the importance of the Mihanovic Psalter as a link between them.

The texts of the oldest Slavonic translation of the Psalter are among the most thoroughly studied texts of Cyril‘s and Methodius‘ translations in all their different forms. The history of these texts has already been clarified in many respects. However, we observe the fact that research and publications are usually based on a very narrow range of manuscripts, the largest part of which were discovered and put into scientific circulation already in the 19th century. Very rarely, new data appear on the manuscript tradition until the 14th century, the studies do not even use manuscripts known for a long time. This observation applies mostly to the commented texts. This article introduces for the first time into scientific circulation the text of a so far unknown catena to the Psalter, found in a Bulgarian manuscript from the 14th century, and makes a first attempt to determine its place and importance in the development of the Psalter text among the Slavs.

The aim of the paper is to present the results of analysis of the biblical quotations and borrowings found in the Palaea Historica (9th century) in its second Slavic translation, according mostly to the classification of biblical quotations given by M. Garzaniti (2014). Having its narrative material based on the Octateuch as well as the Books of Samuel, Books of Kings and Books of Chronicles, the Palaea contains a variety of adaptations of the biblical text, which provide evidence for the creative usage of the hypertext (through inter al. summary, contamination of episodes, expansion of details, dramaturgization). Literal quotations from the Old and New Testaments also form an important group of such borrowings. Curiously, a part of these play no narrative role, but rather a structural one, as they summarize the meanings of particular chapters (stories).

The article focuses on the history of the Book of Revelation of St. John the Theologian among Orthodox Slavs in the Middle Ages. The aim is to present its place among the other biblical books, related to Cyril and Methodius’ literary tradition and follow its origin, its way of life and spreading in the Slavia Orthodoxa. The two main versions of the distribution of the book are presented – without interpretations and with the interpretations of St. Andrew of Caesarea, while the specifics of the basic versions of the book are also presented (East Slavonic and South Slavic versions with commentaries, Bosnian Cyrillic version, the earliest Serbian transcript, Croatian Glagolitic fragments, Bulgarian calendar version). An opinion has been expressed that a common initial translation is at the root of all these versions of the book, which was accompanied by interpretations, and probably made in Bulgaria at the end of 9th–10th C. Subsequently, it has been edited at different Times and in different locations, placed in the composition of different collections, or as a separate book.

The article studies the correlation between the Slavonic liturgical and non-liturgical versions of the Book of Exodus. The linguistic-textological data as well as some variant readings allow us to conclude that during the translation of the non-liturgical (full, ceti) text of the Book of Exodus the translator did not use already translated paroemias. There is every reason to associate this new translation with the texts translated or revised in Preslav in the 10th century. The liturgical (paroemias) readings were included in the full copies of Exodus later and thus partially replaced the non-liturgical text. Most often this replacement was performed in the full copies of late Russian group.

In subject literature there has been a discussion regarding juridical education of Socrates, the author of Ecclesiastical History. For quite long he has been believed to be a lawyer, owing to the title scholastikos, attributed to him. Recently, however, his legal education has been questioned by some scholars. The purpose of this article is to try to answer whether Socrates, as viewed from the work of Sozomen, also presumably a lawyer, could have knowledge of ecclesiastical law and distinguished between the terms of canon (used in ecclesiastical law) and nomos (used in civil law). The analysis of both Ecclesiastical Histories proves that the word canon had numerous meanings for Socrates, who used it while referring to pure ecclesiastical law, as well as to church regulations or practices, ordinances, resolutions, church registry, or even expressions of faith. Moreover, some regulations in ecclesiastical law were not always called canons by Socrates, which demonstrates some lack of precision while using legal terminology. Sozomen, on the other hand, while correcting Socrates’ narration, restricted the meaning of the term canon only to the particular church regulations, excluding those established by heterodox synods, which had a significant impact on how frequently they appeared in the text. The liberty of using legal terms by Socrates can be an additional argument to prove that he was not a professional lawyer, just like some discrepancies in the knowledge of ecclesiastical law are clearly visible in describing powers of the bishops of Rome and Constantinople.

The figure of the first Roman emperor in many ways had an impact on the Polish culture, especially in historiography and literature. In my paper I focus on some issues connected with the subject. I discuss the ideas presented by Tadeusz Zielinski, one of the most eminent researchers of the ancient world in Europe in the first part of 20th century. He devoted a significant part of his opus to present his own vision of Augustus seen as a reformer of the Roman state religion. Zielinski built the emperor’s image as the saviour of the Roman world in the face of „the end of times”. This term played significant role in Zielinski’s thinking about Roman history at the end of the Republic. For the Polish scholar celebration of the secular game in 17 BC was the final task done by Augustus. This task Zielinski defined as the sacred mission and connected with the figure of Sibyl and the impact of the Etruscan theory of saeculum. For Zielinski, Augustus belonged to the most important men of providence in Roman history. In the same way I discuss the ideas presented by Ludwik Piotrowicz and Mieczyslaw St. Poplawski. Both scholars analised the question of imperial cult in depth. Poplawski expressed original view on Augustus apotheosis seen as the development of imperial cult in transcendental perspective. Piotrowicz instead saw this problem as a purely political phenomenon. Last part of my paper is devoted to short resentation of the echos of Augustus’ bimillenium in Polish scholar activity.

A sermon attributed to Theodore Syncellus (Theodoros Synkellos) is considered as one of the basic sources for the study of the Avar siege of Constantinople in AD 626. Therefore, the most historians paid more attention to the analysis of its historical background than to its ideological content. From the ideological point of view, the document serves as an evidence that a fear for the future of the Empire and its capital Constantinople began to rise within emerging Byzantine society. The Avar siege served its author mainly as a model for developing his polemics with imaginary Jewish opponents and their religion. It deserves to be included in a long succession of similar polemical treatises, which have existed in Christianity from its earliest times.

Milk was a very significant food product in the Mediterranean. The present study is not devoted to milk as such, but to therapeutic galactology, galaktologia iatrike (?a?a?t?????a ?at????), a version of which is extant in De medicina penned by a Roman encyclopaedist called Celsus. The author places milk and milk-derived products among therapeutic substances, indicates the methods of processing such substances, and also provides the readers with details on dietary and pharmacological characteristics of dairy foods as well as indicating their place in a number of cures. It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that the characterizations of milk and dairy products with regard to their dietary properties and application as pharmakon (f??µ???) are not an exclusive feature of De medicina, but they are regularly mentioned not only in medical works, such as De diaeta I–IV, teachings of Dioscorides, extant fragments penned by Rufus of Ephesus, Galen, Oribasius, Aetius of Amida and Paul of Aegina, but also in Historia naturalis by Pliny. This is a clear sign that milk was considered to be significant from the medical point of view and was as such very interesting both for the medical profession and for general public. Therefore De medicina appears as a typical work, and details contained in it are simply a testimony of the evolution of the doctrine that was already present in De Diaeta I–IV and later developed by the most prominent physicians.

Treatises left by Oribasius (first and foremost his Collectiones medicae and Eclogae medicamentorum) preserve a vast body of information on the varieties of bread eaten in late antiquity, characterise them from the point of view of dietetics, list medical conditions in which a given variety is especially beneficial, and name medical preparations which include the product. The present study elaborates on Oribasius’ dietetic knowledge and his input into the development of dietetic discourse (namely his influence on Byzantine dietetic doctrine), determines Oribasius’ main information sources on bread, characterises bread as food, lists varieties which were thought to be used by physicians and explains reasons for the preferences, and finally exemplifies cures and medical preparations which include bread.

This paper examines the distribution of three types of sporadic and infrequent diacritics in the Dobrejšo Gospel and their functions: a dot or acute-accent shape over a liquid consonant letter in OCS tr?t/tr?t formations, and, more rarely, over other consonant letters in clusters; a single or multiple acute-accent shape over the letter ? or ? in certain words; and a titlo over unabbreviated words containing OCS tr?t/tr?t formations.

On the basis of numismatic material I present aspects of the figure of Aeneas as they appear in ancient tradition. I have concentrated on the iconographic details and the arrangement of the reverse scenes which allow one to isolate the elements of Aeneas’s portrait in the coinage that are closely associated with his role as the one who, by carrying over the sacra to Italy, made way for the foundation and continuation of Rome.

Satan’s interference in the events described in the first chapters of the book of Genesis and in the life of the protoplasts is not mentioned at all in the biblical text. This happens, however, in pseudo-canonical texts. The article is a short survey on the apocryphal accounts that mention Satan and their influence on art. The main focus is put on the inclusion of the image of Satan behind Cain’s figure in a number of depictions of the scene The Murder of Abel in the Russian art of the 16th and 17th centuries. The possible links between this visual motif with several literary sources is examined, among them the Short and the Explanatory Palaea, the Tale of Bygone Years (Povest’ vremennykh let or Primary Chronicle), Russian recensions of the apocryphon The Sea of Tiberias, and of The Revelation of Pseudo-Methodius of Patara. In addition, some instances of the same visual decision in Balkan art are pointed out and their connection to Russian models is underlined.

The paper discusses a group of monumental crucifixes from the 13th-century East Adriatic and Italy, pained or executed in low relief, that display a verse inscriptions on the transverse limb of the cross. The main scope of the paper is to examine the provenance of the text inscribed in order to yield clearer insight into their function, use and original location in the church interiors. The paper specifically aims at analyzing three monumental crucifixes from the East-Adriatic city of Zadar which, although have already been the subject of a respectable number of studies, have not attracted attention as objects of devotion. My interest, therefore, is turned towards verse inscription as their distinctive feature and, as I shall argue, a key aspect in understanding their function. Examining the nature of the text displayed, iconography and materiality of these crucifixes, my main argument is to demonstrate how these objects provoked a multi-faced response from their audience, since were experienced by seeing, hearing and touching respectively.

The paper presents the rules for typological classification of Slavonic manuscripts and early printed books with the Gospel text. It enumerates different types of the books with the Gospel and sometimes also with other parts of the Holy Scripture. Information about the Greek tradition of the Gospel is also included in the article and serves as the basis of comparison.