TEXT-CRITICAL AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF SLAVONIC COPIES OF THE APOCRYPHAL ACTS OF PETER AND ANDREW IN THE LAND OF BARBARIANS

The paper analyzes Slavonic copies of the apocryphal Acts of Peter and Andrew in the land of Barbarians from a text-critical perspective. This text was composed in the early Christian cultural milieu of the third or fourth centuries. The apocryphon was introduced to the Slavic world from Byzantium no later than the twelfth century. A total of four Slavonic witnesses are known, three of which are of Russian provenance, and one in the sixteenth-century Croatian Glagolitic script. Our textual analysis revealed that the four Slavonic copies are derived from a single Church Slavonic translation of the Greek original. The Glagolitic copy, for which the existence of a Cyrillic source is almost certain, follows the Greek text closely despite its use of local dialect. In contrast, the Russian copies, though fragmentary, clearly show Old Russian language features of the earliest times, but contain some textual divergences. These divergences are