MAIASK. 2016. No. 8
Basil Lourié (
Why So Syrian?
A Quantitative Bayesian Approach to the Perturbations
of the Textual Flow in the Slavonic Recensions of the
Pauline Epistles
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Pages: 615-655
Some “Oriental” impact on a very
early recension of the Slavonic translation of the
five Pauline epistles is demonstrated. The most natural interpretation of
this fact is that the Greek originals used for the Slavonic translation were
those widespread outside the borders of the ninth-century The
quantitative method proposed in this paper is dedicated to comparison of two
competing hypotheses concerning the textual flow of a highly contaminated
tradition. The method has the following preconditions and limitations: (1) the total number of possible hypotheses must be previously reduced
to two: that a specific source of contamination existed or not; (2) in the
present (simplest) modification of the method, the hypothesis about the
presence of a discussed source of contamination must additionally imply a
high value of the signal-to-noise ratio (> 0.5), that is, that this
hypothetical source, if it actually existed, was the major source of contaminations
of a specific kind (defined above as “perturbations”). |
Key
words: Slavonic New Testament,
Pauline epistles, Oriental versions of New Testament, Syriac
New Testament, Ethiopic New Testament, Bayesian posterior likelihoods,
inductive logic. |
Received October 27, 2016 |
About the author: Basil
Lourié (Perm,
Russia). Doctor of philologycal science, Leading Researcher of the
Scientific and Educational Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Empirical
Research, Sector for Historical Research of the E-mail: info@hse.perm.ru |