“The Life of St John of the Ladder” in the Slavonic Manuscript and Early Printing Tradition

Authors:

Pages: 409-425

Abstract:

St. John of the Ladder (6th–7th c.), an abbot in the Sinai monastery, with grace, insight and personal experience in fasting, wrote “Heavenly Ladder”, one of the most widely read books in the Christian world. It exists in the literary tradition along with the brief biography of John, written by monk Daniel Raitski. This paper traces and recovers for the first time in its fullness the literary destiny of the hagiographic text. Its Old-Bulgarian Menologe-Reading translation is to be found in the Suprasulski/Retkov collection (10th–11th c.). The Old Preslav Translation (OPT), which is the basic translation of the “Ladder”, belongs to the old Literary School of Preslav. The Edited Old Translation (EOT) of the old John of Athos and/or monk Marko takes us to the age of the Byzantine-Bulgarian hesychast tradition of the 14th century. Around 1371, within the literary circle of St. Euthymius of Tarnovo, a New Bulgarian Translation (NBT) of the “Ladder” was done, where all preceding translations were attached and summarized. Not later than 1421, monk Ephraim of Tzarigrad (Istanbul) added interpretations to the NBT. In this way the “Ladder Interpreted” came into being. In the 17th century Gherman Tulupov prepared three copies of this in the Holy-Trinity Sergieva Lavra. Based on Gherman’s copy of the “Ladder”, the Solovetski scribe Sergei Shelonin prepared the Moscow edition of 1647. In the book “The Lives of the Saints”, the metropolitan bishop Dimitrii Rostovski recreated the biography on the basis of “The Ladder Interpreted”. Also based on NBT St. Paisii Velichkovski (1722– 1794) edited the translation of the book “The Ladder”. In 1785 the highly authorized and Russian-adapted translation of D. M. Ulyaninski was printed in Moscow (later reissued in St. Petersburg in 1812, 1817, and in Kiev in 1823, 1836, 1862, 1869).

Keywords:

Lives of Saints, hagiography, translation, Greek language, Old-Bulgarian language

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