The Georgian Bible

Among the ancient translations of the Bible, the Georgian version has been one of the slowest to receive general attention outside the Caucasus. It was made in a language unrelated to Greek, Syriac or Armenian, written in an alphabet of its own, and preserved for most of its history in monasteries in Georgia, in Palestine, at Sinai and on Mount Athos. Yet it is one of the oldest of the Christian versions, its earliest fragments going back to the fifth and sixth centuries, and the manuscripts that carry it record in unusual detail how a translation could be revised, generation after generation, as the church that used it changed its links with the wider Christian world. This article describes the origins of the Georgian Bible, the oldest surviving witnesses, the early Gospel recensions, the revision carried out by Georgian monks on Mount Athos in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the later history of the Old Testament, and the printed editions of the modern period.¹²

Kartli and the Coming of Christianity

The Kingdom of Kartli

The Georgian-speaking lands of late antiquity were divided between two main political units. In the east lay the kingdom of Kartli, known to Greek and Latin writers as Iberia, with its capital at Mtskheta on the river Kura; in the west lay the lands that classical writers called Colchis and later Lazica, along the eastern shore of the Black Sea. Kartli stood between the Roman and Persian empires and was drawn alternately towards each. Its rulers, its nobility and its literary culture were shaped by long contact with Iran as well as with the Greek-speaking Roman east, and recent historians have stressed that the Christian literature of early Georgia grew up in a world that was, in many respects, part of an Iranian commonwealth.³

According to Georgian tradition, Kartli was converted in the fourth century through the work of Nino, a Christian woman from Cappadocia who came to Mtskheta as a captive or a pilgrim, healed the queen, and persuaded King Mirian III to accept the new faith. The story is told in the medieval collection known as the Conversion of Kartli, and an independent account appears in the church history of Rufinus of Aquileia, written about 402, which reports what Rufinus had heard from a Georgian prince named Bacurius. Historians generally place the conversion of the royal house in the 330s. The new church looked at first to Antioch and Jerusalem; its bishops were consecrated from Antioch, and its liturgy followed that of Jerusalem closely.⁴

The Georgian Alphabet

A Christian scripture required a written language, and Georgian was not yet written in a script of its own when Christianity arrived. Medieval Georgian historiography ascribed the alphabet to an early king, Parnavaz, centuries before Christ; the Armenian writer Koryun, in his life of Mesrop Mashtots composed in the fifth century, credits Mashtots with creating alphabets for the Armenians, the Georgians and the Caucasian Albanians. Neither claim can be confirmed. What is certain is that the earliest form of the script, called asomtavruli, the capital letters, is attested in inscriptions of the fifth century. The oldest securely dated Georgian inscriptions include those found at the Georgian monastery near Bir el-Qutt, south of Jerusalem, generally assigned to the 430s, and the building inscription of the Sioni church at Bolnisi in southern Georgia, dated to 493–494.⁵

The alphabet is phonetic and well suited to the sounds of Georgian, which include ejective consonants and clusters that Greek letters could not represent. Its order follows the Greek alphabet for the letters the two languages share, with additional letters for sounds peculiar to Georgian, a feature it has in common with the Armenian and Gothic alphabets created for Christian purposes in the same period. In the ninth century a rounded minuscule script, nuskhuri, came into use for books, and from about the eleventh century the secular script mkhedruli, from which modern Georgian writing descends, developed alongside it. Biblical manuscripts were long written in nuskhuri with asomtavruli capitals, a combination known as khutsuri, the script of the clergy.⁶

The First Translations

Sources and Date

There is no account of the first Georgian translation of the Bible comparable to the narratives of Jerome or Ulfilas, and its date must be inferred. The oldest original work of Georgian literature, the Martyrdom of Shushanik, attributed to the priest Iakob Tsurtaveli and set in the 470s, quotes the Gospels and the Psalms, which suggests that at least these books were available in Georgian by the late fifth century. Scholars therefore usually place the first translations in the fifth century, perhaps beginning in its first half.⁷⁸

The question of the base text has been debated for more than a century. The Georgian Gospels contain readings and turns of phrase that are best explained if the translators worked from an Armenian text, and the Armenian version in turn had been made partly from Syriac. Some scholars have argued for a direct Syriac contribution as well, while others have stressed the Greek basis of particular books. Robert P. Blake, the Harvard historian who did more than anyone in the first half of the twentieth century to make the Georgian versions known in the West, concluded that the earliest Georgian Gospels rested on an Armenian model. That view is still widely held, though with the qualification that the translators probably consulted Greek and Syriac texts and that the situation differed from book to book. The early history of the Armenian version, with which the Georgian is so closely tied, is described in the article on the Armenian Bible; its Syriac background is discussed in the article on the Syriac New Testament.⁹¹⁰

Khanmeti and Haemeti Texts

The oldest surviving pieces of the Georgian Bible are written in an archaic stage of the language whose grammar differs from later Old Georgian in one easily recognised respect. Where later texts use the prefix h- or s- to mark certain persons in the verb, these early texts use kh-. Georgian scholars therefore call them khanmeti texts, from the name of the letter khan. A slightly later group, which uses h- in the same positions, is called haemeti, from the letter hae. Khanmeti texts are generally dated to the fifth to seventh centuries, and haemeti texts to the seventh and eighth.¹¹¹²

Most of these fragments survive as palimpsests: their parchment was scraped and reused by later scribes, and the earlier writing has to be recovered from under the later text. They include portions of the Gospels, of Jeremiah and other prophets, and a lectionary arranged for the Jerusalem church year. Joseph Molitor gathered the known khanmeti and haemeti texts in 1956, and more have been recovered since. The best-studied example is a palimpsest codex in Vienna, Codex Vindobonensis georgicus 2, whose lower writing contains khanmeti lessons from the Old and New Testaments; Jost Gippert and his Georgian colleagues published it in 2007 with the help of multispectral photography.¹³¹⁴

The palimpsests of Sinai have produced a still more remarkable discovery. Among the manuscripts found at St Catherine’s Monastery in 1975, described in the article on the 1975 New Finds at Sinai, were Georgian codices whose lower writing turned out to be in the language of Caucasian Albania, the third Christian kingdom of the Caucasus. The Albanian text, the only substantial literary text in that language known to survive, contains lessons from the Gospels and parts of the Gospel of John. Its edition by Gippert, Wolfgang Schulze, Zaza Aleksidze and Jean-Pierre Mahé in 2008 showed that in the early Middle Ages Georgian monks at Sinai had access to Albanian books and reused them for their own copies.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷

The Early Gospel Recensions

The Adysh Gospels

The earliest complete Georgian Gospel book is the manuscript known as the Adysh Gospels, after the village of Adishi in the mountain region of Svaneti, where it was kept for centuries. It was copied in 897 in the monastery of Shatberdi in Klarjeti, in the south-west of the Georgian lands, an area which in the ninth and tenth centuries was the centre of a revival of Georgian monastic culture under the Bagratid princes. The manuscript is written on parchment in large asomtavruli letters. Its text is regarded as the best representative of the oldest recension of the Georgian Gospels.¹⁸

The Adysh text attracted the attention of Western scholars when a facsimile was published in Moscow in 1916. In the 1920s, Kirsopp Lake, Robert Blake and Silva New, in their study of the textual affinities of the Gospel of Mark, found that the Old Georgian Gospels belonged with a group of witnesses that they and B. H. Streeter associated with Caesarea in Palestine: the Koridethi Gospels, a Greek manuscript itself copied in the Caucasus; certain minuscule families; and the Armenian version. The precise definition of this Caesarean group has since been much disputed, but the Georgian evidence remains important because it preserves readings from an early stage of the Gospel text in the eastern churches.¹⁹

The Second Recension

Three tenth-century Gospel books from the same region preserve a revised form of the text. The Opiza Gospels were copied in 913, the Jruchi Gospels in 936 and the Parkhali Gospels in 973. Their common text differs from the Adysh Gospels in many places, generally moving closer to the wording of the Greek. Georgian scholars name the Adysh text the first or proto-vulgate recension and that of Opiza, Jruchi and Parkhali the second. Akaki Shanidze published the two recensions side by side in 1945 on the basis of the manuscripts of 897, 936 and 973, and Blake, with Maurice Brière, edited the Old Georgian Mark, Matthew and John in the series Patrologia Orientalis between 1928 and 1950.²⁰²¹

The relation of the two recensions is not simple. The second does not consistently correct the first towards a single Greek manuscript, and in some passages it seems to preserve older readings that the Adysh text lacks. Recent research has tended to see the early Georgian Gospels as a living text, revised several times between the fifth century and the tenth, with influence from the Armenian and from Greek manuscripts of more than one kind. Jeff Childers’s survey of the version for the second edition of The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research sets out the evidence and the problems that remain.²²

The Rest of the New Testament

The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles are preserved in early forms as well, though in fewer manuscripts and with less complete editions. Acts survives in an old version edited by Ilia Abuladze in 1950, and the Pauline and Catholic Epistles in several tenth-century manuscripts. The Book of Revelation was not part of the early Georgian New Testament, which in this respect resembled the canons of the Syriac and Armenian churches. It was translated only in the late tenth century, together with the commentary of Andrew of Caesarea, by Euthymius of Athos.²³²⁴

The Jerusalem Connection

For several centuries the strongest outside influence on Georgian church life was Jerusalem. Georgian monks lived in Palestine from the fifth century onwards; the monastery near Bir el-Qutt is one of the earliest archaeological traces of their presence, and later the monastery of the Holy Cross outside Jerusalem became the main Georgian house in the Holy Land. The Georgian church adopted the Jerusalem liturgy and its cycle of readings, and Georgian manuscripts are now the most important witness to the lectionary of the Jerusalem church as it was used between the fifth and the eighth centuries. Michel Tarchnischvili published this great lectionary in four volumes between 1959 and 1960, and it has been fundamental for the study of early Christian worship.²⁵

Biblical texts were copied in these Palestinian houses and at Sinai, where a Georgian community lived beside the Greek monks of St Catherine’s. The earliest dated Georgian manuscript, a homiliary known as the Sinai Mravaltavi, was copied in 864 and is preserved at Sinai. The Georgian collection there, enlarged by the discoveries of 1975, is among the largest in the world, and the monastery’s Greek manuscripts, including the leaves of Codex Sinaiticus, belong to the same environment in which Georgian scribes worked.²⁶

The Athonite Revision

Iviron and Its Founders

In the second half of the tenth century the centre of Georgian learning shifted to the Byzantine world. About 980 a group of Georgian monks, led by John the Iberian, his son Euthymius, and the former general John Tornike, founded a monastery on Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula in northern Greece. It became known as Iviron, the monastery of the Iberians. Tornike had served the emperor Basil II in suppressing the revolt of Bardas Skleros, and the gifts he brought back helped to endow the house. Iviron remained a Georgian community until the fourteenth century and has kept a large library of Georgian manuscripts to the present.²⁷²⁸

The aim of the Georgian monks on Athos was to bring their church into full harmony with the church of Constantinople, both in its liturgy and in its scriptures. The older Georgian texts had grown up in close contact with Armenia and Jerusalem, and at the end of the tenth century they differed from Byzantine usage in many details. The Armenian church had by this time separated from the Byzantine church over the Council of Chalcedon, while the Georgian church had in the early seventh century sided with Chalcedon. Georgian writers of the Athonite school therefore treated agreement with the Greek text as a sign of orthodoxy.²⁹

Euthymius

Euthymius, who died in 1028, translated a large number of Greek works into Georgian, including homilies, saints’ lives, theological treatises and the commentary on Revelation already mentioned. He also revised the Georgian Gospels and other books of the New Testament against Greek manuscripts in use in the Byzantine church of his day. His revision is the first known attempt to align the whole Georgian New Testament systematically with a Byzantine text. According to his biographer, he translated with great speed and with an eye to the needs of his Georgian readers, sometimes expanding or clarifying the Greek. He died in Constantinople after a fall from his mule.³⁰³¹

Euthymius was also, according to the same tradition, the translator into Georgian of a Christian adaptation of the story of the Buddha, known in Georgian as Balavariani and in Greek as Barlaam and Ioasaph. The question of whether the Greek text was made from his Georgian is still discussed, but the attribution illustrates the scale of the literary exchange between Georgian and Greek at Iviron.³²

George the Hagiorite

The work of Euthymius was completed by George of Athos, called in Georgian Giorgi Mtatsmindeli, the Hagiorite. Born in 1009, he became abbot of Iviron and spent his last years in Georgia and Constantinople, dying in 1065. George made a fresh and more thorough revision of the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles and the Psalter, bringing the wording still closer to the Byzantine Greek. His text became the standard form of the New Testament in the Georgian church and is often called the Georgian vulgate. Most Georgian Gospel books copied after the eleventh century follow it, and the earlier recensions were preserved largely because older manuscripts survived in remote churches and monastic libraries.³³

The relation between the work of Euthymius and that of George has been examined in detail since the publication of their texts in Tbilisi in the second half of the twentieth century. George’s revision was not merely a mechanical correction: he wrote prefaces explaining his principles and claimed to have compared Greek manuscripts to establish the correct reading. His text, like the Byzantine text it followed, is of less value for the early history of the Greek New Testament than the older Georgian recensions, but it is central to the history of the Georgian church and its literature.³⁴

The Old Testament

Early Translations

The history of the Georgian Old Testament is more complicated and less well known than that of the New. Khanmeti fragments show that some books, at least of the prophets, were translated in the earliest period. Robert Blake’s study of the ancient Georgian versions of the Old Testament, published in 1926, concluded that the early translations had been made from the Armenian and were later revised from the Greek of the Septuagint. Later scholars have refined this picture without overturning it, while showing that individual books had different histories.³⁵³⁶

The Oshki Bible

The oldest substantial manuscript of the Georgian Old Testament is the Oshki Bible, copied in 978 at the monastery of Oshki in Tao, in the south-west of the Georgian lands, and afterwards taken to Iviron, where it is still kept. It is a large parchment codex in three volumes, of which parts are lost, and contains most of the historical, poetic and prophetic books. Its text represents an early revision against the Greek, and it was produced in the same circle of monastic patrons in Tao who supported the founding of Iviron. The Oshki Bible is the principal witness to the Georgian Old Testament before the further revisions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.³⁷³⁸

Ephrem Mtsire and Gelati

In the late eleventh century the revision of the Old Testament against the Greek was carried further by Ephrem Mtsire, Ephrem the Lesser, who worked at the Black Mountain near Antioch, another centre of Georgian monastic life in the Byzantine world. Ephrem translated and revised a number of biblical and patristic books and wrote notes on the principles of translation. In the twelfth century the monastery and academy of Gelati in western Georgia, founded by King David IV, known as the Builder, became the centre of Georgian learning, and a further revision of the Old Testament associated with its scholars is preserved in the Gelati Bible. The Gelati scholars favoured a very literal rendering of the Greek, sometimes at the expense of natural Georgian style.³⁹⁴⁰

A complete Georgian Bible in one manuscript does not seem to have existed until much later. The so-called Mtskheta Bible, a manuscript copied in the seventeenth century and kept for a long time at the cathedral of Mtskheta, brought together the books of both testaments in the forms then current. It was the basis for much of the later printed tradition.⁴¹

Printing and the Modern Period

Tbilisi and Moscow

The first Georgian books were printed in Rome in 1629 by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, for missionary use. A press in Georgia itself was set up at Tbilisi in 1709 under Vakhtang VI, the ruler of Kartli, and among its first products was a Gospel book. The first complete printed Georgian Bible was produced in Moscow in 1743, where the sons of Vakhtang VI, the princes Bakar and Vakhtang, lived in exile after their father’s flight to Russia. Known as the Bakar Bible, it was based on the Mtskheta manuscript and on revisions made by Georgian scholars of the previous generation, notably Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani, whose dictionary of the Georgian language was a landmark of the period.⁴²

During the nineteenth century, when Georgia was part of the Russian Empire, the Russian Synod controlled church publishing, and further editions of the Georgian Bible were printed under its direction. The Georgian church recovered its independence in 1917, but the Soviet period that followed restricted religious publishing severely. In 1989, as the Soviet Union was coming to an end, the Georgian Patriarchate under Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II published a complete Bible in Georgian, based largely on the traditional texts, and this edition has since been reprinted many times.⁴³

Scholarship

The scholarly recovery of the ancient Georgian Bible owes much to the work of Georgian philologists in Tbilisi in the twentieth century, among them Ivane Javakhishvili, Korneli Kekelidze, Akaki Shanidze, Ilia Abuladze and their successors, who edited the early manuscripts and studied the history of the language. In the West, Blake and Brière in America and France, Joseph Molitor in Germany, and later Bernard Outtier in France and Jost Gippert in Germany, made the texts accessible to biblical scholars. Editions of individual books of the Old Georgian Old Testament have continued to appear in Tbilisi, and electronic text projects such as TITUS at Frankfurt have made many Old Georgian texts available in digital form.⁴⁴⁴⁵

The Value of the Version

For the textual history of the Greek New Testament, the Georgian version is valuable chiefly for its oldest recension. Because it was translated in the fifth century from an Armenian text that may in turn reflect a Syriac and an early Greek model, it preserves readings from the eastern churches of a period from which few Greek manuscripts survive. The difficulty is that every reading has to be traced back through more than one language, and the influence of the Armenian, whose own early history is uncertain, makes it hard to say what Greek reading lies behind a Georgian phrase. Editors of the Greek New Testament therefore cite the Georgian with caution, generally distinguishing the Adysh text from the later Athonite revision.⁴⁶⁴⁷

For the history of Christianity in the Caucasus the version is more directly important. Its successive recensions show the Georgian church turning first to Armenia and Jerusalem and then, from the late tenth century, to Constantinople. The khanmeti palimpsests, the Jerusalem lectionary and the Caucasian Albanian lower texts at Sinai reveal a network of monastic communities across the eastern Mediterranean in which Georgian monks copied, translated and exchanged books. The revisions of Euthymius and George of Athos show how deliberately a church could reshape its scripture to express its doctrinal loyalties. In these respects the Georgian Bible is comparable to the Slavonic Bible, which grew up a century earlier under Byzantine influence and is described in the article on Cyril and Methodius and the Slavonic Bible.⁴⁸⁴⁹

Conclusion

The Georgian Bible was created within a century of the conversion of Kartli and was continuously copied and revised for a thousand years. Its earliest form, preserved in khanmeti palimpsests and in the Adysh Gospels of 897, belongs with the Armenian and Syriac versions of the Christian east. Its later form, shaped by the monks of Iviron and by the scholars of the Black Mountain and Gelati, belongs with the Byzantine tradition. The modern study of the version, begun in Tbilisi and in a few Western universities in the early twentieth century, has made these layers visible and has given the Georgian Bible a recognised place among the ancient versions. Much remains unpublished or only partly edited, and the palimpsests of Sinai and elsewhere continue to yield new evidence about the first centuries of the translation.⁵⁰⁵¹

Notes

1. Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 182–200. ↩
2. Jeff W. Childers, “The Georgian Version of the New Testament”, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, eds, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–327. ↩
3. Stephen H. Rapp Jr, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes: Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 1–40. ↩
4. Grokipedia, “Saint Nino”; Grokipedia, “Kingdom of Iberia”. ↩
5. Grokipedia, “Georgian scripts”. ↩
6. Grokipedia, “Georgian language”. ↩
7. Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd edn (London: Garnett Press, 2010), 19–32. ↩
8. Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd edn (London: Garnett Press, 2010), 33–41. ↩
9. Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 182–200. ↩
10. Jeff W. Childers, “The Georgian Version of the New Testament”, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, eds, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–327, 300–310. ↩
11. Joseph Molitor, Monumenta Iberica antiquiora: Textus chanmeti et haemeti ex inscriptionibus, S. Bibliis et patribus, CSCO 166, Subsidia 10 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1956). ↩
12. Grokipedia, “Old Georgian”. ↩
13. Joseph Molitor, Monumenta Iberica antiquiora: Textus chanmeti et haemeti ex inscriptionibus, S. Bibliis et patribus, CSCO 166, Subsidia 10 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1956). ↩
14. Jost Gippert, with Zurab Sarjveladze and Lamara Kajaia, The Old Georgian Palimpsest Codex Vindobonensis georgicus 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). ↩
15. Jost Gippert, Wolfgang Schulze, Zaza Aleksidze and Jean-Pierre Mahé, The Caucasian Albanian Palimpsests of Mount Sinai, 2 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), vol. 1, introduction. ↩
16. Grokipedia, “Saint Catherine’s Monastery”. ↩
17. Grokipedia, “Caucasian Albania”. ↩
18. Akaki Shanidze, ed., Two Old Recensions of the Georgian Gospels according to Three Shatberdi Manuscripts (A.D. 897, 936 and 973), Monuments of the Old Georgian Language 2 (Tbilisi: Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR, 1945). ↩
19. Kirsopp Lake, Robert P. Blake and Silva New, “The Caesarean Text of the Gospel of Mark”, Harvard Theological Review 21 (1928), 207–404, 289–310. ↩
20. Robert P. Blake and Maurice Brière, eds, The Old Georgian Version of the Gospel of Mark, Patrologia Orientalis 20.3 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1928); Matthew, PO 24.1 (1933); John, PO 26.4 (1950). ↩
21. Akaki Shanidze, ed., Two Old Recensions of the Georgian Gospels according to Three Shatberdi Manuscripts (A.D. 897, 936 and 973), Monuments of the Old Georgian Language 2 (Tbilisi: Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR, 1945). ↩
22. Jeff W. Childers, “The Georgian Version of the New Testament”, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, eds, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–327, 300–310. ↩
23. Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 182–200, 186–190. ↩
24. Jeff W. Childers, “The Georgian Version of the New Testament”, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, eds, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–327, 310–318. ↩
25. Michel Tarchnischvili, ed., Le grand lectionnaire de l’Église de Jérusalem (Ve–VIIIe siècle), CSCO 188–189 and 204–205 (Louvain, 1959–1960). ↩
26. Grokipedia, “Saint Catherine’s Monastery”. ↩
27. Grokipedia, “Mount Athos”. ↩
28. Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd edn (London: Garnett Press, 2010), 63–72. ↩
29. Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd edn (London: Garnett Press, 2010), 63–72. ↩
30. Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd edn (London: Garnett Press, 2010), 63–72. ↩
31. Jeff W. Childers, “The Georgian Version of the New Testament”, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, eds, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–327, 310–318. ↩
32. Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd edn (London: Garnett Press, 2010), 19–32. ↩
33. Jeff W. Childers, “The Georgian Version of the New Testament”, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, eds, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–327, 310–318. ↩
34. Jeff W. Childers, “The Georgian Version of the New Testament”, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, eds, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–327. ↩
35. Robert P. Blake, “Ancient Georgian Versions of the Old Testament”, Harvard Theological Review 19 (1926), 271–297. ↩
36. Bernard Outtier, “Les recherches philologiques sur les versions géorgiennes de la Bible”, Bedi Kartlisa 42 (1984), 233–244. ↩
37. Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd edn (London: Garnett Press, 2010), 63–72. ↩
38. Bernard Outtier, “Les recherches philologiques sur les versions géorgiennes de la Bible”, Bedi Kartlisa 42 (1984), 233–244. ↩
39. Grokipedia, “Gelati Monastery”. ↩
40. Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd edn (London: Garnett Press, 2010), 63–72. ↩
41. Bernard Outtier, “Les recherches philologiques sur les versions géorgiennes de la Bible”, Bedi Kartlisa 42 (1984), 233–244. ↩
42. Grokipedia, “Vakhtang VI”. ↩
43. Grokipedia, “Georgian Orthodox Church”. ↩
44. Bernard Outtier, “Les recherches philologiques sur les versions géorgiennes de la Bible”, Bedi Kartlisa 42 (1984), 233–244. ↩
45. Tamila Mgaloblishvili, ed., Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus, Iberica Caucasica 1 (Richmond: Curzon, 1998). ↩
46. Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 182–200. ↩
47. Jeff W. Childers, “The Georgian Version of the New Testament”, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, eds, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–327, 300–310. ↩
48. Jeff W. Childers, “The Georgian Version of the New Testament”, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, eds, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–327. ↩
49. Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History, 3rd edn (London: Garnett Press, 2010), 63–72. ↩
50. Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 182–200. ↩
51. Jeff W. Childers, “The Georgian Version of the New Testament”, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, eds, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–327. ↩