Bible quotations in three Slavonic-Russian translations of the 18^th century Areopagiticа (based on the treatise “On the Celestial Hierarchy”)

   The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of Bible quotations found in three translations of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s treatise “On the Celestial Hierarchy”. It was translated into the Slavonic-Russian language in the 18^th century. This was an important epoch in the formation of the Russian standard language, when, on the one hand, it was actively secularized, differentiating from the Church Slavonic language; on the other hand, the Church Slavonic language also underwent serious changes under the influence of the Russian spoken language. As a result of this process, the conservative version of the Church Slavonic language remained only as the language of liturgical texts, while new translations of theological texts increasingly used the “Slavonic Russian language”, perceiving it as a high church-book style of the Russian standard language. A significant milestone in the fixation of the lexical and grammatical structure of the Church Slavonic language of the Russian version, as well as in the biblical text standardization, was the publication of the Empress Elizabeth Bible in 1751. The article analyzes three translations of the aforementioned theological treatise (belonging to Moses Gumilevsky, Paisiy Velichkovsky and an anonymous author) to reveal the dependence of the Church Slavonic biblical text on this standard sampling twelve quotations from the Holy Scripture. At the same time, we draw conclusions, based on the textology of the analyzed Bible quotations, regarding the clarification of the creation time of the anonymous translation.

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