Some corrections to the treatise "On councils and heresies" by Germanos, Patriarch of Constantinople (ch. 1-15)

Travaux et Memoires. 2023. Vol. 27. P. 337–353.

Lukhovitskiy L.

Scholars of Byzantine Iconoclasm treat the heresiological text entitled On councils and heresies and attributed to Germanos of Constantinople with caution, because its anti-iconoclastic chapters are considered to be later additions. Whereas the arguments in favor of the interpolation theory are inconclusive, any thorough discussion of the text’s stratigraphy, authorship, and date must be preceded by a new critical edition. The present article takes a step in this direction. A brief presentation of the available manuscripts and previous editions is followed by two sections. The first demonstrates how the readings of the early-11th-c. manuscript of the Lambeth Palace Library help to improve the text’s syntax and inner logic proving its author to be a more ambitious writer and a more skilled theologian than it is usually assumed. In the second section are discussed several cases in which the Lambeth Palace manuscript appears to be, by contrast, less reliable than other witnesses, and an anti-Arian fragment, which is corrupted in all available manuscripts.

Keywords: греческая текстология, православное богословие, византийская литература, iconoclasm, иконоборчество, Greek textology, Byzantine literature, Orthodox theology