ВОПРОСЫ ОНОМАСТИКИ | PROBLEMS OF ONOMASTICS

Tatiana G. Popova
Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University
Kaliningrad, Russia

New Testament Names in the Text of the Ladder of John Climacus

Voprosy onomastiki, 2023, Volume 20, Issue 2, pp. 247–269 (in Russian)
DOI: 10.15826/vopr_onom.2023.20.2.022

Received on 21 September 2022
Accepted on 18 March 2023

Abstract: The paper explores eleven New Testament names featured in the text of the Ladder by John Climacus, a translated monument of early Slavic writing. These personal names are a special kind of biblical quotations referring to the events of the holy history. The research is based on comparative analysis of the Greek texts of the Ladder published by Jacques Paul Migne (Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 88), four ancient Byzantine codes and five Slavic manuscripts which contain the first Slavic translation of the book made by Preslav scribes in the first half of the 10th century. The article follows research on the collective church memory of medieval scribes which manifests itself in the commonality of topics, images, plots, ideas, and expressions that go back to the text of the Bible. The New Testament characters that are featured in the Greek text of the Ladder and its Slavic traslations are: Jesus Christ, Mary, John the Baptist, John the Apostle, Lazarus, Peter, Paul, Timothy, Herod, Pontius Pilate, Judas. The author identifies the key biblical images in the Greek text of the Ladder (Jesus Christ and the supreme apostles Peter and Paul) and specifies the functions of New Testament names in the text: referential, symbolic, emphatic and indexical. The oldest Russian manuscript showcases spelling inconsistencies in relation to New Testament names as well as multiple errors indicating both the inexperience of the scribe and his poor knowledge of gospel stories. These errors were eliminated from the text of later manuscripts. The analysis identified four words that are absent in the historical dictionaries of the Russian and Old Slavonic languages (bezvrednitsa ‘dispassion’, besslovesne ‘wordlessly’, zluderzhanie ‘rancor’, suprotivpremeneniе ‘transformation’).

Keywords: New Testament, Ladder of John Climacus, biblical anthroponymy, early Slavic translations from Greek, collective church memory, Bible quotes, Old Russian language, Old Slavonic language

Acknowledgements
The paper was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (Project No. 22-18-00005 Iconography and Hagiography of the Ladder of St. John Climacus).

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