I have written before on Methodius of Olympus (d. 311 AD), and how some of his works survive only in an Old Slavonic translation. This week I scanned the preface of the Russian translation by E. Lovyagin (1905). It proved to be in a pre-revolutionary spelling, but a kind correspondent modernised this for me, so that I could use Google Translate and see what the author had to say. Here is the Russian text of the preface:
There is no evidence of the use of Old Slavonic sources, and the title page makes plain that this is from the Greek. Lovyagin seems to have taken the edition of Jahn – which assembled rather more Greek fragments than were accessible to the Ante-Nicene Fathers translators – and translated it into Russian. In fact a commenter on this post, discussing the table of contents, makes the same point.
Mikhail Chub in 1961 and 1964 did use manuscripts in his articles for Богословский труды (Bogoslovski Trudy – archive of these now online here). Two of these mss are now online here.
I had forgotten that, back in 2011, I obtained PDFs of these, which I can no longer locate; and translated Michael Chub’s preface and placed it here; and that I tried to get a translation made from a GCS edition of Methodius on Leprosy, using a commercial German translator, but unsuccessfully. But I still want to attack this material.
Perhaps the way forward is to get translations made of Michael Chub’s Russian translations. They are relatively short, and deserve attention. It is helpful that the articles can now be downloaded in PDF form.
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