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Mzekala Shanidze
The Homily "On Jealousy" in the Khanmeti Homiliary
Summary
Uncial underwriting on palimphsest parchment folios of Ms.S-3902 (National
Centre of Manuscripts, Tbilisi) was deciphered in 1927 by A. Shanidze. Large
folios of the original manuscript - which had been cut and reshaped to fit the size of
the new manuscript - were found to contain fragments of several homiletical
works, copied, as indicated by the palaeographical and linguistic features of the
text, in the first half of the eighth century.
Less than half of the homily "On Jealousy", ascribed in the manuscript to John
Chrysostom, has survived on the mutilated folios, the rest is lost. The remaining
text of the underwriting was well-nigh illegible; no other manuscript containing the
complete text of the homily was accessible at that time, only in the Udabno
Homiliary there was an acephalous fragment identical with the ending. Neither
were there, eighty years ago, technical devices to help the reader’s naked eye when
trying to read the washed-out text. Because of this, the published text has several
large gaps, and some sections are nearly blank, except for some words or letters
here and there on the page.
In the present article the text of the Pseudo-Chrisostomian homily "On Jealousy"
is complemented and reconstructed on the basis of the same text in a manuscript
unavailable at the time of the first publication (Ms. No. 4 in the collectiom of the
Georgian Mss. in the Library of the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem). In this
manuscript, dated to the fourteenth century, the text of the homily is complete and
follows the surviving Khanmeti fragments literally.The text in the Jerusalem
manuscript fits neatly into the gaps of the palimphsest, supplying the correct
reading for missing letters, words or even whole lines. This leads us to assume that
the text of the homily in the Jerusalem manuscript is a faithful copy from an older
manuscript. Therefore, it is possible to suggest, with considerable certainty, that the
homily "On Jealousy" in the Jerusalem ms. has as its source a translation made
very early, but the text itself, in all probability, was copied from a ms. of the type
of the Sinai or any other Homiliary (Mravaltavi).The absence of khanmeti forms in
Jer. 4, as a feature characteristic for the Homiliaries, could be an indication of this
fact. The complete text of the homily "On Jealousy" is published here with a brief
Introduction.The text of the palimphsest is presented in two columns (as in the
manuscript). The text reconstructed by A. Shanidze is in parenthesis, (as in the
edition of 1927), the readings following Jer.4 the present writer has put in square
brackets.
Sigla: A - Publication by A. Shanidze; J - Ms. Jerusalem 4; U - Udabno Homiliary.
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