The Apostolos Manuscripts of St. Petersburg
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The Apostolos manuscripts of St. Petersburg by E. Strelnikova St. Petersburg State University There are two significant collections of Greek manuscripts in Saint Petersburg with a long and complicated history. They were formed out of collections that belonged to various private, scholarly and monastic libraries. The collection of Greek manuscripts in the National Library of Russia contains 965 items dating from the 3rd to the 20th century, written on parchment, papyrus and paper. In the collection there are several manuscripts of extreme importance on a worldwide scale. The majority of manuscripts are fragments brought to Russia as items of various private collections. Last year (2014) researchers of the manuscript department finished The Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts of the National Library of Russia. It includes all manuscripts written in Greek which belong not only to the Greek collection but to some other manuscript collections of the National Library of Russia. There is still no online catalogue but recently projects for digitizing and uploading catalogues of the library have been initiated. Another important collection of Greek manuscripts belongs to the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which has from 287 to 293 items according to different catalogues. The variation is due to discoveries of new manuscripts within collections already kept in the library, and the identification of two or more items in a single manuscript. 84 manuscripts belong to the period of the Byzantine Empire. The most numerous part of the collection is RAIK (the collection of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople). The only catalogue of the collection is The Description of the Manuscript Department of the Library of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, published in 1973 and written by a Russian paleographer, Irina Lebedeva. There is no available digital copy of this catalogue. Among codices of Byzantine period there are many Biblical corpora, first of all books used in liturgy. This class of literature is represented by many Old Testament and New Testament corpora grouped and arranged in different ways. We are going to look through codices containing texts of the Apostolos codices (The Acts of the Apostles, The Catholic Epistles and The Pauline Epistles). Readings from the Apostolos (as this text type is called in the Eastern tradition) follow readings from the Old Testament (in early Byzantine period) and precede readings from the New Testament in the liturgy. The contents of the Apostolic part of the New Testament are represented by two general types: Praxapostolos and Apostolos. This division is identical to one of Gospel where we have Tetraevangelion and Evangelion Lectionary. The first type contains continuous Biblical texts divided into liturgical readings. This plain text is supplied with signs marking the beginnings and endings of liturgical readings and their places in the liturgical cycle of the year. There are special additional materials in tables and short introductory articles. In the Praxapostolos these materials are traditionally attributed to Euthalius, a deacon of Alexandria, who lived between the 4th and 7th century. Liturgical readings of the second type are arranged in order of the calendar and in many cases do not represent a continuous Biblical text. It is important to state that very often readings in Apostolos Lectionary are organized to form a continuous text. Each codex of this type consists of three parts: synaxarion for movable calendar dates, menologion for the fixed calendar dates and a part containing additional readings for various needs. Both Apostolos and Evangelion Lectionaries are divided into two main groups according to their synaxarion sections: the short lectionary has readings for 7 day weeks in the period from Easter to Pentecost but in the rest of the year it provides readings only for Saturdays and Sundays. The full lectionary on the other hand has weekday readings almost for the whole liturgical year. The collection of Apostolos codices is represented by many exemplars derived from various libraries, such as private collections of Archbishop Porfiry Uspensky (1804–1885), archimandrite Antonin Kapustin (1817–1894), collector and researcher Athanasios Papadopoulos Kerameus (1856–1912), monastic library of Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, and the library of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople. The codices date from the 9th to the 16th cent. Most of them are fragments containing one or two leaves but here we concentrate on manuscripts which were preserved completely or mostly. I. Praxapostolos Codices The Praxapostolos is found in one library of St. Petersburg – the National Library of Russia – in a range of manuscripts. All Praxapostolos codices have the following text arrangement: the Acts of the Apostles, the Catholic Epistles (the Epistle by James, two Epistles by Peter, three Epistles by John and the Epistle by Jude), and the last section is the Pauline Epistles in this order: the Epistle to Romans, two Epistles to Corinthians, the Epistle to Galatians, the Epistle to Ephesians, the Epistle to Philippians, the Epistle to Colossians, two Epistles to Thessalonians, the Epistle to Hebrews, two Epistles to Timothy, the Epistle to Titus and the Epistle to Philemon. Some minor differences are found in the text structure of the codices. The author describes several Praxapostolos and Apostolos and codices in more detail (codex Greek 211, codex Greek 543, codex Greek 693, the Praxapostolos codex Kirillo- Belozersky Libr. 120/125. II. Apostolos Lectionaries The book-type called Apostolos Lectionary is represented in the libraries of St. Petersburg by three codices preserved completely. Two of them are the full lectionaries containing readings for the whole liturgical year, and one is a short lectionary for Saturdays and Sundays. The author continues with the description of the Apostolos codices: codex Greek 57, codex Greek 542, RAIK 91. III. Gospel and Apostolos Lectionary There is also an example of another liturgical combination of books found in the manuscript Greek 90. It represents the short lectionary type and has readings of the Gospel as well as of the Apostolos for Saturdays and Sundays. Described is: codex Greek 90, The goal of this short review is to throw light on the manuscripts, which have great interest for studies of the Christian liturgy, Biblical catalography and codicology, textual criticism and the history of Byzantine liturgical literature, so that the contents of these codices will attract more attention and finally be properly described and systematized. There is no contemporary bibliography for these codex types so they seem to be poorly investigated as a subject in textual criticism and in respect to their place in the history of liturgy. .