The Armenian Version of the Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius

The Armenian Version of the Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius Aram Topchyan One of the most significant prophetic sources that widely circulated in Eastern Christian countries in the early Middle Ages was the Apocalypse attributed to Methodius of Olympus, bishop of Lycia. This saint, a fertile author, was mar- tyred circa 311, during the persecution of the Christians perpetrated by the Emperor Maximinus Daia (reg. 310–13). Several of his original writings have come down to us completely, in fragments or in abridged forms, in Greek or in old Slavonic translations, but it will be no exaggeration to state that, from the aspect of popularity, all of them have been overshadowed by the inauthen- tic work composed some three and a half centuries or more after Methodius’s death. Though the Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius was preceded by another well- known prophecy already containing some of the main features and charac- ters of the Byzantine apocalyptic tradition, namely the Latin Tiburtine Sibyl, Ps.-Methodius established a more elaborated model, which became a source of borrowing and imitation for subsequent authors. Written in the late fourth century and afterwards revised and interpolated,1 the Tiburtine Sibyl men- tioned the fanciful figure of the Last Roman Emperor. He fights successfully against the enemies of Christianity, in this case, the legendary Gog and Magog2 together with other “unclean nations” arising from the North and, in the end, hands over his empire to God, the supreme protector of the Christians. In the corresponding passage of the Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius, Gog, Magog, and the other “unclean nations” are replaced by the so-called “sons of Ishmael,” that is to say, the Arabs (later on the Turks3 and others were called so as well). This is doubtlessly the main reason why the prophetic text in question, as we shall see, became quite widespread, among other countries, in Armenia—a coun- try that continuously suffered from the military campaigns and domination of the “sons of Ishmael.” The character of the last Byzantine ruler totally defeat- ing the Ishmaelites and bringing peace and prosperity to the Christian world 1 See Alexander 1967, 41‒65. 2 For Gog and Magog in Armenian tradition, see van Donzel and Schmidt 2010, 38–44. 3 Cf. Ps.-Epiphanius’s Armenian Sermo de Antichristo, where the Muslim invaders of Christian lands are referred to as ‘sons of Ham’ and Turks (Ps.-Epiphanius 1976, 14). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�70�68_��8 The Armenian Version of the Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius 363 certainly seemed attractive to the Armenians and, therefore, the Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius was translated into Armenian, very likely, soon after its Greek version appeared in the last quarter of the seventh century. The Greek text formerly regarded as the original of the Apocalypse was pub- lished in 1897 by the Russian scholar V. Istrin.4 Having compared more than a dozen manuscripts, he came to the conclusion that four recensions of the work existed and that the first of them was the basis of the other three: the contents of the prophecy had been periodically changed and adjusted to the develop- ment of historical events. About seven decades after Istrin’s edition, the critical texts of four Greek redactions prepared by Anastasios Lolos were printed in two volumes (the first two redactions in 19765 and the third and fourth redactions in 1978).6 The critical Latin edition of the Apocalypse appeared in 1898,7 one year after Istrin’s book, of which the editor of the Latin text Ernst Sackur was unaware, but he was the first to express the view that Ps.-Methodius might have composed his work in Syriac rather than Greek.8 This conjecture was subsequently corroborated by the discovery of the complete Syriac text in the Codex Vaticanus Syrus 58 copied in the sixteenth century. Through detailed study of the manuscript and its comparison with the Greek version, Michael Kmosko,9 and later on Paul Alexander10 and Gerrit Reinink,11 offered a number of persuasive arguments proving that the Apocalypse was originally written in Syriac. We should add that Reinink also provided a critical edition of the Syriac text with a German translation in 199312 and that the oldest Greek and Latin versions once again appeared in 1998.13 Strangely enough, however, despite this active scholarly interest in the Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius, little attention has been paid to the issue of its Armenian translation. Various dates for the composition of the work have been suggested, but most of them fall within the second half of the seventh century. Paul Alexander, for instance, proposes a date between 644 and 678;14 Anastasios Lolos, the editor of the Greek recensions, opines that the Syriac original was written around 655 4 Istrin 1897. 5 Ps.-Methodius 1976. 6 Ps.-Methodius 1978. 7 Sackur 1898. 8 Ibid., 55. 9 Kmosko 1931. 10 See Alexander 1985, 31–3. 11 Reinink 1982, 336–44. 12 Ps.-Methodius 1993. 13 Ps.-Methodius 1988. 14 Alexander 1985, 24–5..

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