The Bible in South and East Slavic Lands: a Preliminary Investigation

According to the Life of Constantine-Cyril, the philosopher credited with initiating Slavic literacy, the very first words to be recorded in the language of the Slavs were: "Iskoni be slovo, i slovo be ot" boga, i be bog" slovo.,,1 These, of course, comprise the opening lines of the fourth gospel (John 1:1). Thus, the earliest action of the first writer in Slavic was to translate the Bible. Later, in Moravia, Constantine continued his translation of holy writ when he taught the local Slavs "Matins and Hours, Vespers and Compline, and the Liturgy,,,2 all of which require at appropriate points in their recitation the insertion of Biblical verses (Timothy, now Archbishop Kallistos, Ware claims that the entire psalter is recited weekly in the Orthodox daily office [i.e., Matins and Vespers], and that in each celebration of the liturgy there are 98 quotations from the Old Testament and 114 from the New3). Later, in Rome, Constantine's biographer records that he presented the Pope with a copy of the Slavic scriptures. 4 In the accompanying life of Constantine's brother Methodius we learn that these "Slavic scriptures" are in fact the gospels5 and the Apostolos (the Acts and the pastoral epistles), 6 copies of which, at least presumably, he also brought with him later to Constantinople when he was summoned there by the Byzantine emperor. 7 At the very end of the Life of Methodius we read: " ... [Methodius] took two priests from among his disciples, who were excellent scribes, and translated quickly from Greek into Slavic-in six months-beginning with the month of March to the twenty-sixth day of the month of October-all the Scriptures in full, save Maccabees ... For previously he had translated with the Philosopher only the Psalter, the Gospels together with the Apostolos, and selected Church liturgies."~ Thus, at least according to this document, by the end of 884 the Slavs possessed in their own vernacular language the entire corpus of holy scripture, with the exception of two de utero-canonical books. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the Bible to the Slavs. The oldest datable Slavic manuscript, the Freising Fragments (ca. 1000 AD), contains a Biblical text (Matthew 6:9b-13, the Lord's Prayer). The oldest dated Slavic book is the Ostromir Gospel (1056-57). Almost without exception, every original work of old Slavic literature is shot through with Biblical citations. When printing arrived among the Eastern Slavs, it was parts of the Bible (the gospels and the psalter) which were printed first, in Moscow in 1565.9 The role played by vernacular translations of the Bible in the cultural development of the Poles, Czechs, Belorussians, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs is too vast to chronicle here. But, as loze Pogacnik notes in citing Northrop Frye's work on the Bible as the "great code" of Western civilization, translating the simplicities and complexities of holy writ is something of a trial by fire for any dialect with literary pretensions. In Pogacnik's words, "A language which is capable of the Bible is literarily mature.,,10 While it is good to stress the centrality of Holy Scripture for the development of Slavic literatures (and not just Slavic: one would be remiss to exclude, at least in discussion of the Orthodox Commonwealth of Eastern Europe, the Romanians, whose literacy was initiated by vernacular translations of scripture), it is also expedient to note that little work has been done on investigating the translation of the Bible into the Slavic languages, and much of that work is now quite dated. To those familiar with this issue, "little work" may seem a gross understatement of the amount of literature in existence concerning certain