The Syriac Anaphora of St Basil according to the Manuscripts

The anaphora attributed to St Basil (died 379) is one of the most interesting liturgical sources within the Christian tradition. This liturgical formular has been spread over the whole orbis christianus. There is manuscript evidence of this liturgy in all classical and ancient liturgical languages (Armenian, Arabic, Coptic, Georgian, Greek, Latin, Syriac...). Although there is a considerable number of manuscripts, we have to notice that there is a lack of critical editions of texts as well. Just a few number of manuscripts have been critically published hitherto. This gap is quite evident regarding the Syriac manuscript tradition, the coherence of which we do not know. And of course there are important differences at least in phraseology if not in greater structural units to be expected. This fact is of crucial importance if we have the intention of clarifying the history of this ancient and widespread liturgy by comparative liturgiology. This method, which is fundamentally a philological one, seems to be the only appropriate way of working out serious scientific commentaries on the subject. Thus, it is the main aim of this project to find out, to classify and to evaluate the Syriac manuscript tradition of the anaphora attributed to St Basil, to make evident ist homogenity regarding the oldest extant textual evidence. By this way a critical edition of the text with translation and a phililogical as well as a structural analysis is to be prepared.

The project`s first aim was to collect as many of the oldest Syriac manuscripts as possible containing the liturgy attributed to St Basil - beeing one of the most prominent, widespread and ancient liturgical texts still in use in several churches. We studied the text of this lengthy liturgy, preparing a German translation of the textus receptus (a book printed in 1922 in the Lebanon) and starting comparative textual investigations on the basis of the manuscripts. The results are completely astonishing. In a much wider scale than the Coptic or the Armenian traditions from which we know the manuscript tradition, the Syriac history of the text proved to be complex and full of rupture and amalgamation, thus showing not just slight variants as results of the process of translation. We unexpectedly had to realize that there have been effectuated several reworkings of the material by the insertion of new textual passages abandoning traditional features at the same time. Those textual reshapings are mirrored in the manuscript evidence since the 15th century. But already the oldest extant manuscripts from the 12th and 13th centuries are showing diversity, the most important of which between the different ecclesiastical traditions Syrian Orthodox and Melkite. To a number of most ancient manuscripts we could not yet get access, namely to those shelterd in the St Catharine`s Monastary on Mount Sinai. The astonishing complicate and difficult textual history of the Syriac version of St Basil`s liturgy and the impossibility of having access to several manuscripts in some collections of the Middle East makes the intended and necessary critical edition of this text a delicate and to some extent preliminary adventure.