DISTINGUISHING FEATURES OF THE DOBREJŠO GOSPEL’S BOOK OF MATTHEW Cynthia M. Vakareliyska This paper offers a preliminary list of distinguishing features for the version of Matthew in the Dobrejšo Gospel (D), a liturgical tetraevangelion from western Bulgaria datable most likely to the thirteenth century and reflecting an early Ohrid tradition.1 Together D and the fourteenthcentury Curzon Gospel (C) and Banica Gospel (B),2 which are also liturgical tetraevangelia from western Bulgaria, comprise the only family of closely related Bulgarian gospel manuscripts identified so far. The following is a crude stemma of the relationships among D, B, and C, their hypothetical shared ancestor (DBC), and the hypothetical later shared antigraph for C and B (CB): While all three manuscripts reflect the DBC source for Mark, Luke, and John, none of the three manuscripts contains the complete DBC version of Matthew. This circumstance makes identification of D’s distinguishing features in Matthew highly problematic. B's entire Matthew version must be disregarded, as B substitutes a textual 1 Issues involved in the classification of D as western Bulgarian vs. Macedonian are discussed in Vakareliyska 2010. For distinguishing features of D’s version of Mark, Luke, and John, see Vakareliyska (2011). 2 This preliminary corpus, which was used for comparison with C in Vakareliyska 2008, is currently being augmented with manuscripts from the South and East Slavonic long lectionary traditions in preparation of an annotated edition of D. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�3675_0�� 258 CYNTHIA M. VAKARELIYSKA version for this Gospel book that differs considerably both from the DBC version of Matthew, as witnessed in D and C, and from the DBC version of the other three Gospels. C preserves the DBC version from the lection beginning at Mt 15:12 to the end of Matthew, but it contains a different version for the first half of Matthew that corresponds to some extent to the Serbian long lectionaries (see Vakareliyska 2008, vol. 2: ch. 5). Since D contains the original DBC version throughout Matthew, D’s distinguishing features – as determined through comparison with the canonical OCS gospels and other non-DBC versions of Matthew – are the only known witness to the DBC version of the first half of Matthew. D’s extant text, however, begins only at chapter 10, leaving no witness for the DBC version of Matthew chapters one to nine inclusive. This paper looks first at the second half of D’s version of Matthew (the lections from Mt 15:2 to 28:20), which is shared by C, and then at the first half, focusing on unusual features that distinguish D’s version of Matthew in a significant way both from C (in the second half of Matthew) and from the following corpus of gospels: Codex Zographensis (Z), Codex Marianus (M), Codex Assemanianus (A), Vatican Palimpsest Gospel (V), Savvina Kniga (S), Ostromir Gospel (O), Vukan Gospel (Vk), Vraca Gospel (Vr), Kohno Gospel (K), Plovdiv Gospel (P), Hilandar Gospel (H).3 I. MATTHEW 15:2–28:20 In this portion of Matthew, both C and D consistently display characteristics of the DBC tradition that occur in all three manuscripts throughout Mark, Luke, and John, including specific lexical variants as well as the stylistic convention of avoiding abьe, ubo, and i bystъ and omitting jako after most verbs of speaking.4 Only two distinctive orthographic-level features, however, are shared by C and D in this portion: 3 This preliminary corpus, which was used for comparison with C in Vakareliyska 2008, is currently being augmented with manuscripts from the South and East Slavonic long lectionary traditions in preparation of an annotated edition of D. 4 For a complete list of these, see Vakareliyska 2008 vol. 2: ch. 5. .