1 Jean-Daniel Kaestli et Pierre Cherix, l’Évangile de Barthélemy d’après deux écrits apocryphes, Turn (...) 2 There are other apocryphal texts related to the apostle Bartholomew that were clearly favoured in o (...) 1The apocryphal Gospel of Bartholomew (BHG 228) is one of the two well-known apocryphal texts that describes in detail the descent of Christ into Hell – the other being the Acta Pilati (Evangelium Nicodemi) – and it is probably the earliest of the two.1 Its importance for Christian dogma is undeniable, as it narrates the salvation of Adam, and therefore of the whole humanity, by Christ himself before resurrecting. It is one of the few fundamental ideas expressed in the Creed («and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven») of which there is no trace in the canonical gospels. By contrast to the Acta Pilati, though, it is not a widespread text, and the witnesses available in any of the three languages analysed in Chromá’s volume (Greek, Latin and Church Slavonic) are limited.2

Chroma’s volume is, in this sense, very useful. Although some of the Church Slavonic texts had been published previously, never before such a detailed study of this text in Church Slavonic had been attempted. The volume opens with a brief introduction to the history of the apocryphon, followed by an overview of the manuscripts, an interesting textological analysis in chapter 3, then a lexical analysis followed by an overview of the morphology and syntax in chapter 5, before finishing with the author’s conclusions. However, this is less than half of the volume. The rest is devoted to a line by line (rather a verse-by-verse) multilingual transcription of the text (Greek, Latin and Church Slavonic) until the end of the text of the Church Slavonic witnesses (which is only until chapter 4:13, out of 5:11 of the Greek original and one of the Latin translations), the transcriptions of all the Church Slavonic witnesses (two running until ch. 4:13, two containing only the first chapter, one containing part of the first chapter, and another containing random and often abridged excerpts of chapters 1, 3 and 4). The book is completed by some reproductions of the manuscripts (including one of the previously unknown Greek manuscript from Venice) and very useful indices verborum (Old (sic.) Church Slavonic-Greek and Greek-Old (sic.) Church Slavonic), synoptic tables of the contents of all the manuscripts (eleven in total) and various indices and bibliography. So far, the contents of the book, which are obviously very useful.

3 A. Wilmart and E. Tiserant, ‘Fragments grecs et latins de l’Évangile de Barthélemy’, Revue Biblique (...) 3The question to be asked now would be very useful for whom. And that is where the full potential of the volume is sadly not developed. Despite being written in English, the volume is only really useful for Slavicists, which is a real pity given the relevance of the text and the studies that have already been carried out about the same text in other linguistic domains. Even more so when this is actually the only publication that discusses all the manuscripts known so far of this text in their original languages since the works of Wilmart and Tiserant (1913) or Moricca (1921 and 1922)3. Furthermore, Chromá presents for the first time the direct transcription of the recently discovered Greek manuscript M from Venice (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, XI.024, coll. 1293), which, despite its erratic orthography, is key in the reconstruction of the Greek text in parts where the previously known Greek manuscripts H and G had verses missing, such as the title, 1:3 or 1:25-27. In addition to the known Slavonic manuscripts P and V, Chromá presents and transcribes four fragmentary Slavonic manuscripts also for the first time, three dated to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and one very interesting fragment from the monastery of Dečani dated to the late fourteenth century and containing only 1:1-23.

Many things could have been done with all this material, but Chromá decided to focus on the linguistic analysis, which is understandable, since this is the result of a doctoral dissertation, as the author herself explains in the introduction. Naturally, a linguistic analysis of the translation from Greek is obviously made for Slavicists. However, much important information for non-Slavists is left untranslated. For example, in the description of the manuscripts, the author very wisely provides the contents of the codices in which the Church Slavonic fragments are included, but the descriptions are either in Church Slavonic (D, P, B, T), German (V) or Russian (U). And the verse-by-verse collation of the Greek, Latin and Slavonic texts has no translation into any other language, nor any explanation in notes, so either the reader is confident in these three languages, as one should certainly be, or they are literally lost in translation. Similarly, the presentation of the various Slavonic fragments, despite being called «editions», is no such thing: the texts are presented as found in the manuscripts, including the detail of the titles in rubric, exactly as read in the manuscripts, with only the occasional (!) when the scribe made a mistake, and the indication of the verses from the Greek source text. No changes or abridgements of the Slavonic witnesses, which are numerous, are explained. The Greek text of M is also transcribed in its entirety as a running text (transcription made by Jan Morávek) with minimum corrections.

The strength of the volume is, thus, in the linguistic analysis, and in these chapters (3, 4 and 5) particularly in chapter four, the author displays her best insights on the text. There are, however, two truisms that run through the whole volume and I think cloud the judgement of Dr. Chromá, or at least force certain conclusions, even in her linguistic analysis, that might crumble under scrutiny. The author is convinced that 1) the text was written in heretic circles (Monophysites, Docetists, Paulicians or Bogomils) and 2) that it was translated first in Bulgaria in the tenth century, and subsequently arrived to Rus after the invasion by Sviatoslav in 968-9 and the subsequent collapse of the School of Preslav (p. 14-5 and 134-5). In her mind, both are related: heretic texts could have only entered into the corpus before a clearer definition of the faith and such powerful heretical movement could have only been of the type that negated the double nature of Christ. In this sense, Chromá displays a poor understanding of what an apocryphal texts is, which is not the same as an indexed book or text, although later in Orthodoxy some forbidden books were also apocryphal ones, and, despite her conviction to the contrary, the Apocryphal Questions of Bartholomew, as presented in the longest Slavonic fragments, do actually support the double nature of Christ, particularly in the questioning of Mary by Bartholomew and the other apostles, in which, despite disagreeing with the better known topos of the Annunciation by the Archangel Gabriel, Mary relates how she was visited by God himself who gave her the news of her future motherhood. Her conviction of being before a tenth-century Bulgarian text forces her not only to speak of Old Church Slavonic throughout the volume, when Church Slavic would have been a more precise denomination for the linguistic registry that she is working with, but also to look for preslavisms, archaisms, and even a tenth century Preslav redaction of the Gospels, when not the archaic Cyrillo-Methodian redaction. Such endeavours make her relate, for example, the translation of the Greek ἀνήρ as мѫжь in a fifteenth century Russian manuscript (P) as confirmation of the use of the Preslav redaction of the Gospels (p. 83), when it is simply the ordinary translation in Old Russian of the term ‘male’. And so, through the lexical analysis, and despite using as main dictionaries those of Old Russian, and despite the fact as well that the orthography of all manuscripts is either clearly Serbian (Raška (D) or Resava (V)) or clearly north East Slavic-Novgorodian (P) or Russian (U, B and T), the author insists on a tenth-century Bulgarian origin («we attempted to prove that the archetype for the Slavonic translation of QB was created in Bulgaria in the tenth century, specifically before the year 970», p. 134) theoretically based on preslavisms (12 instances) and archaisms (4 instances). Unfortunately, many of the examples are simply not confirmed by the evidence she herself presents or are based on reconstructed innovations of the Preslav school, the most innovative of the two monastic schools of the First Bulgarian Empire and the one whose influence in Serbian manuscripts is longer lasting. The examples she finds, however, are there to be analyzed, and I could not find any example in which an alternative explanation due to the regional features of the manuscripts could not be adduced.

Without any doubt, the present volume is a valuable tool for the further study of this text since it offers a complete transcription of a substantial part (from the beginning until 4:13, when Jesus shows Beliar, the devil, to the apostles) of Questions of Bartholomew in the three languages in which the texts has survived, as well as much useful information for researchers (tables, indices), both for Slavists and non-Slavists. It is only desirable that a critical edition will one day follow this commendable effort.