BMCR 2009.06.04: van der Horst on Volk, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos VI/1 & VI/2. Historia animae utilis de Barlaam et Ioasaph. Patristische Texte und Studien Bd. 61 & 60

Robert Volk, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos VI/1: Historia
animae utilis de Barlaam et Ioasaph (spuria). Patristische Texte und
Studien Bd. 61.  Berlin:  Walter de Gruyter, 2009.  Pp. xlii, 596.
ISBN 978-3-11-019462-3.  EUR 128.00; $179.00.

Robert Volk, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos VI/2: Historia
animae utilis de Barlaam et Ioasaph (spuria). Text und zehn Appendices.
Patristische Texte und Studien Bd. 60.  Berlin:  Walter de Gruyter,
2006.  Pp. xiv, 512.  ISBN 978-3-11-018134-0.  EUR 118.00; $165.00.


Reviewed by Pieter W. van der Horst, Utrecht ([email protected])
-------------------------------
To read a print-formatted version of this review, see
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2009/2009-06-04.html
To comment on this review, see
http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/06/20090604.html
-------------------------------

This work consists of two volumes, an introduction to the writing
commonly called Barlaam et Ioasaph, and a critical edition of the Greek
text. The text edition (vol. 2) was published in 2006, the introduction
(vol. 1) only two years later, in late 2008. It was decided to review
the text edition together with the introduction; hence the delay of the
review of volume 2.

In the centuries around the beginning of the common era, both oral and
written stories about the life and teaching of the Buddha circulated in
South-Eastern Asia. After their spread from India into Tibet, they were
taken further westwards by Buddhist missionaries who travelled into
Central Asia, where Manichaeans (well-known for their eclectic
adaptation of elements from older religions) found great affinity
between their own faith and this Buddhist message. They adopted and
adapted the stories of Buddha's life and teaching by adding quite a
number of ascetic features but also some Christian elements. In a still
later stage, this Manichaean propaganda document reached Baghdad where
an Arabic version came into being with the title Bilawhar wa-Yudasaf (=
Budhasaf = Bodhisatwa; note that in Arabic the B and Y are written
identically). The name Bilawhar, the teacher of the Buddha in the
Arabic version, reappears in the first fully Christianized version of
the Buddha story, the so-called Balavariani, made in Christian Georgia
(Caucasian Iberia); his pupil is called Iodasaph there; Balavar was
later garbled into Barlaam. This Georgian text was the missing link
between the oriental Buddhist legend and the Greek Christian text
called Barlaam et Ioasaph, until the Georgian version was discovered
some 50 years ago. The Georgian Balavariani was translated into Greek
(and much embellished again) around the year 985 by a Georgian monk who
did much translation work from Georgian into Greek and from Greek into
Georgian in a monastery at Mount Athos, namely, Euthymius the Hagiorite
(= the man from the Holy Mountain), who lived from ca. 955-1028. Since
some of the manuscripts state in a preface that the story was brought
from east to west by a certain John from the monastery of Saint Sabas
in the Judaean desert, it was soon believed that the most famous John
of this monastery, John of Damascus, was the author. This ascription is
found for the first time around 1100 and John's authorship remained
undisputed for many centuries, but that position is now rarely
defended. When decades ago the monks of the Abbey of Scheyern planned a
new critical edition of all works of John the Damascene, they still
took this work to be from his pen and Volk's predecessor as editor, B.
Kotter, decided to include it, but Volk, who took over Kotter's task
after the latter's death, unwaveringly puts the word 'spuria' on the
title page, and rightly so.

Volk's two volume magnum opus puts the study of this curious Byzantine
piece of hagiography that started its life as a Vita of Buddha on a
completely new footing. The first volume, the Einfuehrung, begins with
a detailed and magisterial survey of the history of theories about the
author of Barlaam et Ioasaph and Volk demonstrates why the ascription
of authorship to Euthymius the Georgian has now become unavoidable.
Then follows a long chapter on the sources used by the author, among
which the most important are, apart from the Buddha legend in its
Georgian dress and the Bible, the Vita of Mary the Egyptian (by
Pseudo-Sophronius), the Narratio of Pseudo-Nilus Ancyranus, the
so-called Eklogai of John Chrysostom (selections from his homilies
compiled in the tenth century), the second-century Apology of
Aristides, and the 'Fuerstenspiegel' of Agapetus Diaconus. The various
ways in which these sources are used and reworked are presented here. A
short but fascinating chapter deals with the reception history of our
document up until the end of the twentieth century (it contains among
other things the bizarre story of how Catholic missionaries in the
early modern period used Barlaam and Ioasaph in their efforts to
convert Buddhists in Asia to Christianity). The next chapter ("Der
Inhalt", 158-239), long though it is, is a shortened and paraphrastic
rendering of the contents of the story. This is a useful tool for the
reader who wants a quick orientation in the work as a whole or in
certain chapters, but it would have been more user-friendly to place
this chapter earlier in the book.

The pie\ce de re/sistance of the book is a chapter of more than 250
pages in which Volk discusses the textual tradition of Barlaam et
Ioasaph. Here one finds an impressively detailed list and exhaustive
description of all Greek manuscripts of the work known today. There are
more than 160 of them, of which 36 are from monastery libraries on
Mount Athos (where the Greek text came into being) and 32 in the
Bibliothe\que Nationale in Paris. It is striking that the oldest
manuscript is from 1021, no more than 35 years after the work was
written and copied during the lifetime of Euthymius. Volk divides the
manuscripts into five families and presents a detailed stemma codicum
at the end of the book on a fold-out sheet. All of the manuscripts have
been personally inspected by Volk, a truly immense labor. Hereafter he
deals with translations of the text, ranging from the first Latin one
from 1048 and the earliest Arabic one from 1065 to the most recent
twentieth-century ones into a variety of modern languages including
Modern Greek. The final chapter ('Die Illustrationszyklen') does not
deal with the miniature illustrations in several of the manuscripts
themselves but with the explanatory captions accompanying them. The
Greek text of all these captions (almost 400) is presented in full,
even when the illustration itself is lost, as is often the case. So far
on the 'Einfuehrung,' a most impressive feat.

The final result of all this labor is found in vol. 2, the critical
edition. To make clear how gigantic a step forward this is compared
with other editions, it should be compared to the currently most used
edition, that by G.R. Woodward and H. Mattingly in the LCL, first
published in 1914 and reprinted up till the present day. Woodward and
Mattingly reprint the text as it was constituted by J.F. Boissonnade in
his Anecdota Graeca of 1832, the first complete edition of the Greek
text. Boissonnade knew only a handful of manuscripts, but his text
gained authoritative status because it was included in Migne's
uncritical Patrologia Graeca. Boissonnade nonetheless had a very
limited and selective critical apparatus, but Migne omitted it, and so
do Woodward and Mattingly. Volk's very complete critical apparatus
fills on average half of every page. His text differs in many hundreds
of instances from Boissonnade and the LCL edition. In those instances
where I checked the manuscript basis of these differences it was always
easy to agree with Volk's editorial decisions. His text is an exemplary
demonstration of common sense and acumen.

The edition is followed by some 100 pages that are equally divided
between Appendices and Indices. The appendices contain Greek Epitomai
and excerpts of selections (esp. the parables) from the text of Barlaam
et Ioasaph, most of them from one and the same manuscript. The indexes
cover biblical quotations and allusions, non-biblical quotes,
testimonies (later medieval texts that quote Barlaam et Ioasaph), and a
select index of the most important Greek terms (a full concordance
would perhaps have been better). All of this is carried out with very
great akribeia -- I have found not even one error in the Greek spelling
or accentuation. This work is a paragon of diligent and meticulous
scholarship.