Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/134

112 and appointed to be read in church upon, every day in the year. The story of Baralam, as the Armenian spells it, and of Josaphat, comes at the end of this Armenian Menologion, and is probably a later addition to the main collection, which was made as early as the ninth century. I have compared this Bodleian text with that of a similar manuscript which I lately procured from Tiflis, and which is now in the British Museum. The Bodleian codex was written in the sixteenth century, about 1550. That of the British Museum is dated 1603; but this apocryph is added in a later hand at the end of the volume. I have also compared the beginning and end of the piece with a text found in an Armenian Menologion of the year 1440, preserved in the Library of San Lazaro, at Venice. The latter is the most ancient text that I have seen of it. An older Alenologion of the thirteenth century, also preserved at Venice, does not contain this piece. A notice at the end of the apocryph informs us that it was translated into Armenian by one Asat, under the king Bagratuni. The Bagratuni dynasty ruled from about 850 to about 1050, so that the Armenian version may well be as old at the tenth century; and the good and pure Armenian in which it is composed makes it probable that it was earlier rather than later. Syriac constructions, especially the use of the participle for the finite verb, frequently occur, as well as some purely Syriac words, which are to be found in no other Armenian writing. It must therefore have been made, not from a Greek, but from a Syriac text. It probably circulated among Armenian readers as an edifying tale before it was transferred into the Menologion, in the fifteenth century; for no doubt these Buddhist saints took some time to find their way into the Christian calendar. That it was circulating among the Armenians as a separate book, and that it was very popular among them, long before Barlaam and Josaphat received actual canonization, is rendered probable by the circumstance that early in the fifteenth century a certain Armenian poet, called Arhakel Vardapct, turned it