Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/156

134 The problem of the immediate textual parentage of the Greek form seemed to have suddenly been solved, when in 1888 Professor Marr of the St. Petersburg University published, in the proceedings of the Russian Archaeological Society, several extracts from the old Georgian text itself, along with a general description of its nature and contents. This Georgian version must be of great age, for it is written in the good and pure idiom of the Georgian N.T. which belongs to the fifth century; though that it is later than the Georgian N.T., the citatious therefrom imbedded in it prove.

Professor Hommel of München and Baron von Rosen, a Russian scholar, jumped to the conclusion that in this Georgian text we have the immediate parent of the Greek text, and that the notice found in two of the oldest Greek MSS.,—that Euthymius translated it from Georgian,—is actually true. But, as Kuhn in his elaborate monograph on Barlaam and Josaphat (published in München, 1894,) points out, this view is untenable. The attack on the iconoclasts, which the Greek text alone contains, belongs rather to the eighth century than to the last half of the tenth, in which Euthymius lived. The discovery also of such an early document as the Apology of Aristides imbedded in the Greek text obliges us to throw back its date as much as possible. Lastly, the circumstance that the order of the apologues and the general outline of events in the Georgian disagrees with that of the Greek, and follows the non-Christian Arabic and Pehlevi tradition, makes in the highest degree improbable this supposition of Hommel and Baron von Rosen. It is likely, I think, that the sentence in the Greek titles on which it is based were the addition of an Iberian copyist in a Greek monastery at Athos, who was familiar with the story in his own tongue. That Iberian monks often wrote out Greek books is likely enough, and