The New Testament

in Byzantium
DU M BA RTON OA K S BY Z A N T I N E S Y M P OSI A A N D COL LO QU I A

Series Editor
Margaret Mullett

Editorial Board
Dimiter G. Angelov
John Duffy
Ioli Kalavrezou
 The New Testament
in Byzantium
Edited by
Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson

DU M B A RTO N OA K S R E S E A RC H L I B R A RY A N D C O L L E C T IO N
Copyright © 2016 by Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

libr ary of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Nelson, Robert S., 1947– editor.

Title: The New Testament in Byzantium / edited by Robert S. Nelson and
Derek Krueger.
Description: First [edition]. | Washington, D.C. : Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and Collection, 2016. | Series: Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine symposia
and colloquia | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lcccn 2015043619 | isbn 9780884024149 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Bible. New Testament. Greek—Versions—Criticism, Textual—
Congresses. | Bible. New Testament. Greek—Language, style—Congresses.
| Bible. New Testament—Criticism, interpretation, etc—History—Middle Ages,
600–1500—Congresses.
Classification: lcc bs2325 .n483 2016 | ddc 225.09495/0902—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015043619
isbn 978-0-88402-414-9

www.doaks.org/publications

Designed and typeset by Melissa Tandysh

Frontispiece: Hagia Sophia, Constantinople, lintel of Imperial Door

(photo © Robert S. Nelson)
 contents

1  New Testaments of Byzantium

Seen, Heard, Written, Excerpted, Interpreted
Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson
1
2  New Testament Textual Traditions in Byzantium
David Parker
21
3 The Textual Affiliation of
Deluxe Byzantine Gospel Books
Kathleen Maxwell
33
4  Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
History, Attributions, and Prospects
Robert S. Nelson
87
5  Producing New Testament Manuscripts in Byzantium
Scribes, Scriptoria, and Patrons
Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann
117
6  The Reception of Paul and of Pauline Theology
in the Byzantine Period
Fr. Maximos Constas
147
7  The Hagiographers’ Bible
Intertextuality and Scriptural Culture in the Late Sixth
and the First Half of the Seventh Century
Derek Krueger
177
8  The Interpretation of the New Testament
in Byzantine Preaching
Mediating an Encounter with the Word
Mary B. Cunningham
191
 9 
Bearing Witness
New Testament Women in Early Byzantine Hymnography
Susan Ashbrook Harvey
205
10  Contemplating the Life of Christ in the Icons
of the Twelve Feasts of Our Lord
Charles Barber
221
11  Narrating the Sacred Story
New Testament Cycles in Middle
and Late Byzantine Church Decoration
Nektarios Zarr as
239
12  Conservation and Conversation
New Testament Catenae in Byzantium
William Lamb
277
13  The Afterlife of the Apocalypse
of John in Byzantium
Stephen J. Shoemaker
301
Abbreviations
317
About the Authors
319
Index of Manuscripts
321
General Index
326
 chapter one

New Testaments of Byzantium

Seen, Heard, Written, Excerpted, Interpreted

Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson

T h i s v o l u m e o f e s s a y s a b o u t t h e N e w Te s ta m e n t i n B y z a n t i u m
works against the simple notion of the Bible as a single text, a bound book, a fixed document, and an
artifact widely available to all—the consequence of printing and the Protestant reformation. Instead,
it examines diverse aspects of the Greek New Testament in the Middle Ages, considers the variety of
its written forms both as continuous text and as apportioned for liturgical use, and explores its oral and
visual transmission and impact through sermons, hymns, icons, and mosaics. Byzantines seldom encoun-
tered the text of the Bible as a whole, but rather in manuscripts that divided scripture into smaller units,
combined at times with other contents, so that the sum of the parts was greater than the whole. The early
modern print revolution transformed the Bible fundamentally and, in the opinion of most people posi-
tively, but it also froze the Bible in time, cut it off from lived tradition, and turned it into a dead artifact.
Byzantium’s Bible was a Bible before print, a Bible so diverse, multifarious, multitudinous, that it cannot
be easily imagined, explained, or encapsulated by one accounting. Consequently, our investigations here
are only the beginning of a needed reevaluation of the New Testament in Byzantium, while at the same
time they continue a process of commentary on the Greek New Testament that has been going on for cen-
turies. This volume revises and prints a version of an oral event, the annual symposium of the Byzantine
Center at Dumbarton Oaks in the spring of 2013. As such it lacks the immediacy of that moment and has
been stripped of most of the linguistic markers of oral performance, yet it gains the advantages of wider
distribution and the footnote apparatus of scholarship created by the rise of print culture.
While few today would doubt the importance of the New Testament for Byzantine Christianity
and society at large, its transmission and cultural impact need reassessment within modern Byzantine
studies as a whole, for this is one area in which the interdisciplinarity that often characterizes Byzantine
studies fragments into narrow specialties, especially in the chronological progression from biblical and
New Testament studies to later historical periods. But certain historical ruptures cannot be smoothed
over. The fourth century witnessed not only the formulation of official Christian doctrines endorsed by
councils and enforced by imperial legislation; it also saw the closing of the canon of scripture authorized
for use in Christian worship.1 The New Testament is an anthology of writings that were composed in

1  B. M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (New York, 1987); L. M. McDonald,
The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority (Peabody, MA, 2007); G. Aragione, E. Junod, and E. Norelli, eds.,
Le canon du Nouveau Testament: Regards nouveaux sur l’ histoire de sa formation, Le Monde de la Bible, vol. 54 (Geneva, 2005);
D. Brakke, “Canon Formation and Social Conflict in Fourth-Century Egypt: Athanasius of Alexandria’s Thirty-Ninth Festal
Letter,” HTR 87 (1994): 395–419; idem, “A New Fragment of Athanasius’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter: Heresy, Apocrypha, and the
Canon,” HTR 103 (2010): 47–66; J. Verheyden, “The New Testament Canon,” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 1,
From the Beginnings to 600, ed. J. C. Paget and J. Schaper (Cambridge, 2013), 389–411.

1
Greek by members of the Jesus movement
between the late 40s of the common era and the
first quarter of the second century, including
four biographies of Jesus (the Gospels), a narra-
tive history of the earliest Christian communi-
ties (the Acts of the Apostles), letters from the
movement’s leaders to congregations (attributed
to Paul and other leaders of the early Christian
movement), a sermon (the book of Hebrews),
and, eventually, an apocalyptic vision of the end
of days (the Apocalypse of John, or the book of
Revelation). Regarded and revered as the inspired
word of God, these texts imparted the Christian
story and encoded its central teachings. And yet,
Christianity is not so much the religion of the
New Testament as the religion of its use.2
Manuscripts and Materiality
Considering the New Testament in Byzantium
invites us to rethink our assumptions about scrip-
ture’s primacy as a fixed and continuous text, or
even a text at all, a legacy of the Protestant ref-
ormation and the invention of printing; and, in
particular, to reconsider our notion of the Bible
as a physical object, like the present book that we
hold in our hands, as opposed to oral, ephemeral
discourse. For most of Byzantium’s population
the Bible was as much or more a product of its dis-
semination through hearing liturgical extracts,
or pericopes, sermons, and hymns, and seeing
visual art in churches, observing New Testament
imagery in daily life, or even debating theology in
streets or monasteries. For this reason, the Bible
in Byzantium extended well beyond the dimen-
sions of its codices.
Even the text of the New Testament of Byzan­
tium was not the same as a modern printed Greek
New Testament that scholars use. The standard
critical edition of the New Testament, the Nestle-
Aland text, resulted from two centuries of efforts
to replace or correct the text as handed down in
2  Scholarship on the reception of the Bible, particularly in the
medieval West, is vast. For a survey of topics and problems, see
R. Marsden and E. A. Matter, eds., The New Cambridge History
of the Bible, vol. 2, From 600 to 1450 (Cambridge, 2012); F. van
Liere, An Introduction to the Medieval Bible (New York, 2014);
S. Boynton and D. J. Reilly, eds., The Practice of the Bible in the
Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western
Christianity (New York, 2011); G. Cremascoli and C. Leonardi,
eds., La Bibbia nel Medioevo (Bologna, 1996).
2 Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson
Byzantine manuscripts from the middle and late
Byzantine periods, sometimes called the textus
receptus, or received text, or the “majority text,”
since the majority of Byzantine exemplars repre-
sent some version of it.3 The critical project has
thus to some extent obscured the New Testament
as it was familiar to Byzantines; hence the reluc-
tance of the present Orthodox church to accept
the textual creation of modern biblical scholars
and its preference for the product of its ecclesias-
tical traditions. In fact, no two manuscripts are
identical, and David Parker’s contribution to this
volume reassesses our knowledge of the forms
of the Greek New Testament text as they were
known and used in the Middle Ages. Variants
may represent local traditions rather than reflect
copyists’ errors or idiosyncrasies. Thus, while
we look toward a reconstruction of the model
Byzantine text, the work of the New Philology
requires us to consider individual manuscripts
to see what the New Testament was in specific
instances, and in particular times and places.4
Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann’s chapter consid-
ers important scribal workshops that produced
copies of biblical books, and Kathleen Maxwell
explores the relations of luxury manuscripts of
the four Gospels to their textual models.
We have dedicated a significant portion of
this volume to the material history of the New
Testament in Byzantium, examining the text of
the New Testament and the various formats of
3  The standard critical edition is Novum Testamentum
Graece, ed. E. and E. Nestle, B. and K. Aland et al., 28th ed.
(Stuttgart, 2012). For the text of the Greek New Testament
regarded as authoritative in Orthodox polities, known as the
patriarchal text, see Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη: Ἐγκρίσει τῆς Μεγάλης
τοῦ Χριστοῦ Ἐκκλησίας (Istanbul, 1904; repr. Athens, 2004).
This text is available online at http://www.goarch.org/chapel/
biblegreek. Based on late Byzantine manuscripts, the patriar-
chal text was authorized by the patriarch of Constantinople in
1904. A new edition of the Byzantine majority text, based on
the Kr or family 35 texts, has been prepared by the Center for
the Study and Preservation of the Majority Text and is available
at http://www.cspmt.org. For studies and analysis of Byzantine
textual transmission, see D. C. Parker, An Introduction to the
New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts (New York, 2008);
idem, “The New Testament Text and Versions,” in The New
Cambridge History of the Bible, 1:412–54; B. M. Metzger and
B. D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission,
Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York, 2005).
4  D. C. Parker, Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New
Testament (Oxford, 2012).
its copying and dissemination.5 Library inven-
tories reveal how Byzantines collected and orga-
nized New Testament writings for a variety of
uses. We learn from the mid-thirteenth-century
inventory of the monastery of the Mother of God
at Skoteine near Philadelphia in Asia Minor,
for example, that its church possessed “an orna-
mented gospel lectionary for daily use,” a volume
organized into separate pericopes read out dur-
ing services. Another contained only the Gospel
readings for Sundays; another only selections
from John. One volume, an “apostolos for daily
use,” contained the lections from the letters of
Paul and other epistles and those from the Acts
of the Apostles apportioned and assigned to days
throughout the year. The monastery also owned
“four books each with the four gospels,” presum-
ably for private or communal reading outside the
context of the liturgy when one wanted to read
all the way through a narrative text, although
these, too, could be marked for liturgical use.
The monastery owned a Gospel of Matthew with
commentary—perhaps an anthology of patristic
exegesis known as a catena—in two volumes (and
an extra copy of volume two); and the commentar-
ies of the archbishop of Bulgaria, Theophylaktos
of Ohrid (ca. 1050–1126) on the four Gospels;6 a
volume of the “epistles of the holy apostle Paul
with commentary”; a copy of Ephesians with a
commentary; and two volumes of the Acts of the
Apostles with commentary, each of these com-
mentaries perhaps a catena.7 These books attest
an interest in learned interpretation, but they
also raise questions about how exegesis framed
and defined the meaning of these texts and how
the interpretation of the text became part of the
5  See also the excellent overview by G. Parpulov, “The Bibles
of the Christian East,” in The New Cambridge History of the
Bible, 2:309–24.
6  For Theophylaktos of Ohrid, see M. Mullett, Theophylact of
Ochrid: Reading the Letters of a Byzantine Archbishop, Birming­
ham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs, vol. 2 (Aldershot,
UK, 1997), 8–9.
7  “Skoteine [Boreine]: Testament of Maximos for the Monas­
tery of the Mother of God at Skoteine near Philadelphia,” ed.
M. Gedeon, in “Διαθήκη Μαξίμου μοναχοῦ κτίτορος τῆς ἐν Λυδίᾳ
μονῆς Κοτινῆς (1247),” Μικρασιατικὰ Χρονικά 2 (1939): 271–90,
at 280, trans. G. Dennis, in BMFD 3:1185; J. Bompaire, “Les cat-
alogues de livres-manuscrit d’époque byzantine (XIe–XVe  s.),”
in Byzance et les Slaves: Études de civilisation; Mélanges Ivan
Dujčev (Paris, 1979), 67.
text’s transmission. The monastery apparently
lacked a copy of the Apocalypse of John or a run-
ning copy of the Catholic epistles. In addition to
various packagings and editorial presentations of
New Testament materials, the monastery owned
a Propheteia, or Prophetologion—containing the
few readings from the Old Testament still read
in the course of the Byzantine service—and a
variety of service books necessary for performing
the hymns of the liturgy throughout the annual
calendar, a number of psalters, a cycle of readings
from the lives of the saints, and a great number of
patristic texts, among other volumes.8
The New Testament tomes lead the inven-
tory, coming before all other service books and
theological treatises. While the list attests the
prominence of the New Testament at Skoteine
(and probably in well-appointed Byzantine mon-
asteries in general), there was no single New
Testament in the modern sense in this monas-
tery. New Testaments in a single volume were rel-
atively rare in Byzantium, as Kavrus-Hoffmann
notes in her chapter. Instead, works from the
canon of the New Testament appear in a variety
of formats, organized for liturgy, reading, and
study. In a manner probably typical for a humbler
Byzantine church, whether parochial or monas-
tic, one of Skoteine’s dependencies owned only
service books, among which were a Sunday gos-
pel (a type of lectionary with readings only for
Sundays) and an undecorated apostolos, that is,
only biblical texts arranged for liturgical use.9
For most Byzantines, the New Testament was
the lectionary, since most people encountered
the Christian scriptures orally in the rearrange-
ment of the continuous text into smaller narra-
tive or didactic units, or pericopes, throughout
the church year.
Monastics and clergy were not alone in
using and possessing New Testament texts. The
mid-eleventh-century will and testament of the
8  On the various service books necessary for the perfor-
mance of the liturgy, see J. Getcha, The Typikon Decoded:
An Explanation of Byzantine Liturgical Practice, trans.
P. Meyendorff (New York, 2012). On the paucity and content
of lections from the Old Testament, primarily during Lent,
see J.  Miller, “The Prophetologion: The Old Testament of
Byzantine Christianity?” in The Old Testament in Byzantium,
ed. P. Magdalino and R. Nelson (Washington, DC, 2010),
55–76.
9  “Skoteine” 27, ed. Gedeon, 281, trans. Dennis, BMFD 3:1186.
New Testaments of Byzantium 3
provincial nobleman Eustathios Boilas demon-
strates that a wealthy layman might also own such
books, particularly for reading and study. Among
his impressive library of religious and secular vol-
umes, he owned copies of the Gospels in different
forms. His inventory presents a ranked order of
three manuscripts.10 First was an evangelion, or
gospel lectionary, his “most precious treasure,”
“written in gold letters throughout,” contain-
ing portraits of the four evangelists, and thus
designed to impress and to celebrate the Word.
The second was a parchment evangelion with no
further details given, implying a utilitarian man-
uscript. The last and the least valued was a small
tetraevangelion or continuous copy of the four
Gospels, described as “poor” and written perhaps
on paper, a material ultimately from China via
the Arabs and less expensive than parchment.11
Boilas owned a gospel commentary and a small,
portable copy of Acts “for the road.” His list
includes a book called a kanonikon “containing
an epitome [or abridgement] of the Old and New
Testament.” The collection reflects keen interest
in the content and the interpretation of biblical
literature. The library also contained a number of
service books. As in the case of the later Skoteine
Monastery inventory, the New Testament vol-
umes, in their various formats, led the library
catalogue, indicating their primacy within a
Byzantine Christian’s book collection. Boilas
owned two Psalters, one with commentary and
the other presumably for prayer, as was necessary
for familial or private devotion. He left his entire
library to the local church, which he had previ-
ously built and adorned with liturgical objects,
10  The text appears in P. Lemerle, Cinq études sur le XIe
siècle byzantin (Paris, 1977), 24–25. This section is discussed
by M.  Parani, B. Pitarakis, and J.-M. Spieser, “Un exemple
d’inventaire d’objets liturgiques: Le testament d’Eustathios
Boïlas (avril 1059),” REB 61 (2003): 147–48, 162–63. There is
a not always reliable English translation in S. Vryonis Jr., “The
Will of a Provincial Magnate, Eustathius Boilas (1059),” DOP
11 (1957): 263–77. See also M. Parani, “On the Personal Life
of Objects in Medieval Byzantium,” in The Material and the
Ideal: Essays in Medieval Art and Archaeology in Honour of Jean-
Michel Spieser, ed. A. Cutler and A. Papaconstantinou (Leiden,
2007), 157–87, at 169–70.
11  The word used is λαιφανάτον, deriving from λαῖφος, for
clothing. See Parani et al., “Exemple d’inventaire,” 163. While
this is not the normal word for paper (for which see “Paper” in
ODB), some Byzantine paper was made from rags, which may
suggest the derivation of the term.
4 Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson
textiles, relics, and icons. He donated his books
there “so that [his] two daughters may have the
use and possession of them for chanting, read-
ing, and learning.”12 The terms of the bequest
confirm that both women and men used New
Testament texts, as well as other books, for devo-
tion and education.13
Boilas’s most prized possession, the lection-
ary written in gold, confirms that some copies
of New Testament texts were especially luxuri-
ous. Other examples include an earlier, enigmatic
lectionary in Naples. This small abbreviated
manuscript, containing the readings for only
the most prominent feasts of the church year, is
also written in gold but in this case on purple
parchment, the imperial color. At the beginning,
there is a small cross inscribed ΒΑCIΛΕΙΟΥ
ΚΡΑΤΟC.14 Given the possible date of its majus-
cule script in the ninth century and the luxury
of the materials, the emperor Basil I may have
been its intended recipient. Contemporary with
Boilas’s golden lectionary are three golden lec-
tionaries in Moscow (Fig. 1.1), at the Hilandar
Monastery on Mt. Athos (no. 105), and at the
Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence (Med. Palat.
244), all probably written by the same scribe or
copying center.15 Whether Boilas’s long-lost lec-
tionary had calligraphy as handsome as that of
the Moscow manuscript (Fig. 1.1) will never be
known, but both the Moscow and Florence lec-
tionaries also contain evangelist portraits like the
provincial aristocrat’s prized evangelion.
The contents of these various volumes,
whether only listed in inventories or preserved to
the present, raise questions about the principles
12  Lemerle, Cinq études, 25.
13  For women’s dedications in imperial and aristocratic
Bible manuscripts, see A.-M. Talbot, “Female Patronage in the
Palaiologan Era: Icons, Minor Arts, and Manuscripts,” in Female
Founders in Byzantium and Beyond, ed. L. Theis, M. Mullett,
and M. Grünbart, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte,
vols. 60–61 (Vienna, 2013), 259–74, esp. 269–73.
14  On the inscription, see R. S. Nelson, “‘And So, with the
Help of God’: The Byzantine Art of War in the Tenth Century,”
DOP 65–66 (2011–12): 178.
15  On the last lectionary see R. S. Nelson, “Empathetic Vision:
Looking at and with a Performative Byzantine Miniature,”
Art History 30, no. 4 (2007): 489–502. He is preparing a mono-
graph on the Florence manuscript and the related golden
lectionaries.

for the selection of texts to include. The choice
and arrangement were governed not only by the
definition of the canon of scripture or by the
demands of liturgical use. The earliest examples
of the complete Greek Bible present the New
Testament as part of their patron’s conception
of the corpus of the Christian Bible. The Codex
Sinaiticus, penned in the fourth century, origi-
nally contained the Old and New Testaments
and included some writings, such as the epistle of
Fig. 1.1. 
Moscow, State
Historical Museum
gr. 511, fol. 7r: text page
(photo courtesy State
Historical Museum)
Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, that were
later decisively excluded from the New Testament
canon. The fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus,
also a complete Bible, included First and Second
Clement in its New Testament. That volume
appends to the book of Psalms, as an aide or com-
mentary, Athanasios’s Letter to Markellinos con-
cerning the chanting of the Psalms. Even in these
instances of rare single-volume Bibles from late
antiquity, the New Testament is not a settled set
New Testaments of Byzantium 5
of books as such.16 One finds few editions of the
entire Bible after the Iconoclasm of the eighth
and ninth centuries. The best known is the
tenth-century Leo Bible in the Vatican Library,
Reg. gr. 1. Commissioned by a high-court offi-
cial and donated to a monastery founded by his
deceased brother, the book’s handsome full-page
frontispieces to each biblical book are accompa-
nied by exegetical epigrams that attest to the sin-
gularity of the enterprise.17 Only the first volume
of the Old Testament survives, but the decorated
table of contents details the order of the second
volume. The Gospels and Acts are followed by
the Catholic epistles, the Apocalypse, and, lastly,
the Pauline epistles.18
The Leo Bible’s ordering of the books of the
New Testament is very rare. The early twentieth-
century New Testament scholar Hermann von
Soden cited only one manuscript with this order
before the year 1000, Gruber Ms. 152 in the
Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago.19 In her
essay Kavrus-Hoffmann makes a compelling case
for assigning the latter to the Stoudios Monastery
in Constantinople in the middle of the ninth cen-
tury, which monastery, well known for its support
of iconophile doctrines, also had a major scripto-
rium. A monk and later abbot of that monastery,
Nicholas of Stoudios, copied the first dated Greek
manuscript in minuscule script, the Uspenskii
Gospels now in St. Petersburg (National Library
of Russia, gr. 219). Thereafter the minuscule script
would become standard for the New Testament
and other texts because this alphabet of lower-case
cursive letters could be written more quickly and
in less space. Until the eleventh century, however,
the more ceremonial lectionary retained the older
majuscule script of upper-case letters inherited
from antiquity. The manuscript of the Uspenskii
Gospels is also the earliest dated to include the
16  Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, 62–67;
D. C. Parker, Codex Sinaiticus: The Story of the World’s Oldest
Bible (London, 2010), 27–40.
17  C. Mango, “The Epigrams,” in La Bible du Patrice Léon,
Codex Reginensis Graecus, vol. 1, Commentaire codicologique,
paléographique, philologique et artistique, ed. P. Canart (Vatican
City, 2011), 59–79.
18  Canart, Bible du Patrice Léon, 8.
19  H. von Soden, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer
ältesten erreichbaren Textgestalt, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1911–13),
1.1:104 (δ30), 1.3:1652.
6 Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson
supplementary texts that became standard in later
Byzantine manuscripts.20 Both the Uspenskii
Gospels and—even more—the Gruber manu-
script contain prefatory texts about the Gospels
and biographies of their authors; later manuscripts
include epigrams about the evangelists.21 As a
result, the medieval gospel book differs from the
comparative simplicity of earlier New Testaments,
acquiring a more didactic character akin to the
study Bibles of our day with their introductions to
each book of the Bible.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the use of gos-
pel books to record memorials is well attested;
hence their value for social history. For example,
at the end of the Uspenskii Gospels are listed
the deaths of Abbot Plato of the Sakkoudion
Monastery (814), his nephew Theodore of
Stoudios (826), and his brother Joseph (832), all
in the hand of the manuscript’s scribe Nicholas
of Stoudios, in exile at the time. While the
Uspenskii Gospels attests to a social network of
monks in early ninth-century Constantinople, a
twelfth-century gospel book at Oxford, Christ
Church, gr. 32, provides evidence of associations
of another sort. On a formerly empty page at the
end of this decorated luxury manuscript, a hand,
different from but probably approximately con-
temporary with that of the original scribe, began
recording about 1139 the births of children to a
member of the imperial Komnenian family. The
practice resumed in the next generation with the
births of three children in the 1170s.22 This gos-
pel book can be documented in the possession
of an aristocratic family for two generations, but
it is likely that many manuscripts remained in
families for longer periods of time. A two-volume
20  K. Treu, Die griechischen Handschriften des Neuen Tes­
taments in der UdSSR: Eine systematische Auswertung der
Texthandschriften in Leningrad, Moskau, Kiev, Odessa, Tbilisi
und Erevan, TU 91 (Berlin, 1966), 84–87; R. S. Nelson, The
Iconography of Preface and Miniature in the Byzantine Gospel
Book (New York, 1980), 96–103. On Nicholas of Stoudios,
see ODB.
21  These miscellaneous prefaces and epigrams were first col-
lected by Soden, Schriften des Neuen Testaments, 1.1:293–384.
For a more recent study of epigrams, see K. Bentein et al., “New
Testament Book Epigrams: Some New Evidence from the
Eleventh Century,” BZ 103 (2010): 13–23. A database of book
epigrams is being prepared at Ghent University: http://www.
dbbe.ugent.be/node/1, accessed 24 January 2015.
22  I. Hutter, Corpus der byzantinischen Miniaturenhand­
schriften, vol. 4.1 (Stuttgart, 1993), 65.
deluxe New Testament, copied in Constantinople
at the end of the thirteenth century for a female
member of the then-ruling Palaiologan fam-
ily, provides one of the best-documented cases.
The monogram of her family name in the femi-
nine gender, but not her given names, appears on
the canon table of the gospel book (Vat. gr. 1158)
(Fig. 1.2) that belonged, along with its companion
copy of the Acts and the Epistles (Vat. gr. 1208), to
Charlotte of Lusignan (d. 1487), the last Queen
of Cyprus, who was a Palaiologina by lineage
through her mother.23 Customs of personal iden-
tification changed under Italian influence, and
Charlotte added her coat of arms at the begin-
ning of one manuscript (Fig. 1.3) on a page facing
that of Pope Innocent VIII, to whom she gave
both volumes. Connecting the dots between the
two female members of the Palaiologan family,
the original owner and Charlotte, one can con-
clude that the manuscript remained in the posses-
sion of that family for nearly two hundred years.
The gospel book as object played a signifi-
cant role in Byzantium. It was at the center of
the First or Little Entrance of the divine liturgy,
where it was processed into the naos, or nave, of
the church for the reading for the pericope of
the day. According to the liturgical commentary
of Patriarch Germanos, this introduction of the
Gospels represented the coming of Christ him-
self, the parousia, making the book a metonym
for Christ.24 Consequently, the covers of lection-
aries were richly decorated, often with images of
Christ.25 Because they marked the presence of
God, Byzantines employed gospel books in other
rites. The open gospels were held above the head of
the confirmand at the consecration of bishops.26
By means of the gospel book, Christ himself pre-
sided over this clerical ceremonial of laying on of
23  H. Buchthal and H. Belting, Patronage in Thirteenth-
Century Constantinople: An Atelier of Late Byzantine Book
Illumination and Calligraphy (Washington, DC, 1978), 6,
116–18.
24  Nelson, Iconography of Preface and Miniature, 64.
25  E.g., two bookcovers in the Treasury of San Marco; see
A. Grabar, “Calici bizantini e patene bizantini medievali,” in
Il tesoro di San Marco, ed. H. R. Hahnloser, 2 vols. (Florence,
1965–71), 2:47–49.
26  L. Brubaker, Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzan­
tium: Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus
(Cambridge, 1999), 122–23; N. P. Ševčenko, The Life of Saint
Nicholas in Byzantine Art (Turin, 1983), 81.
hands. Byzantines placed their own hands on the
gospel book when they took oaths, rites that were
often transacted with the book placed on the altar
of a church.27 Similar practices were followed in
the Latin West.28 In the Palaiologan period, oaths
with hands on the Gospels usually sufficed, but
during the reign of the emperor Alexios III, one
talisman was not enough, and an official took an
oath before the Holy Gospels, the Cross, and the
Virgin Hodegetria.29
The manuscript of the Gospels had these
talismanic powers, to state the obvious, because
of the writings that they contained. Powerful
effects could also be achieved, according to some,
with a much smaller subset of text in the form of
words inscribed on parchment or papyrus and
enclosed in an amulet worn on the body. Such
objects might ward off evil or heal the sick, and
the distinction between ancient or pagan magic
and Christian belief was negligible, as surviving
examples from Egypt demonstrate. A parchment
Coptic amulet in Berlin contains the begin-
nings of the Gospels of John, Matthew, Mark,
and Luke in that order, plus portions of several
psalms. It ends with a reminder of Jesus’s mira-
cles and a plea to “spare your servant who wears
this amulet.”30 In presenting its petition, another
Coptic amulet’s text prays “the prayer of the
gospel,” that is, the Lord’s Prayer, and repeats the
first words of the Gospels of John and Matthew,
the senior evangelists, concluding by evoking
the “light from light, true God,” an adaptation
of the Nicene Creed.31 As opposed to these tex-
tual amulets, a fascinating amulet from the sixth
or seventh century in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art combines a Greek gospel text with an
image on a blood red stone. Probably intended
to be worn like a necklace, the amulet combines
an image of the Woman with the Issue of Blood,
27  P. Koukoulès, Vie et civilization byzantines, 6 vols. (Athens,
1948–57), 3:352–54.
28  E. Poleg, Approaching the Bible in Medieval England
(Manchester, 2013), 77–80.
29  N. Oikonomidès, “Le serment de l’impératrice Eudocie
(1067): Un épisode de l’histoire dynastique de Byzance,” in
idem, Documents et études sur les institutions de Byzance (VIIe–
XVe s.) (London, 1976), no. 3, 111–13.
30  M. W. Meyer and R. Smith, eds., Ancient Christian Magic:
Coptic Texts of Ritual Power (Princeton, 1999), 34–35.
31  Ibid., 42.
New Testaments of Byzantium 7
 Fig. 1.2. 
Vat. gr. 1158, fol. 6r:
Canon table with
monogram of
Palaiologina (with
the permission
of the Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana,
all rights reserved)

who touched Christ’s garment and was healed,
with an abbreviated passage from the Gospel of
Mark (5:25–34) about the event. Placing text and
image on the material medium of the red stone
that itself was thought to have healing properties,
the amulet allowed all three agents to touch the
woman’s skin for psychological comfort, if not a
cure.32 The language of the amulet’s inscription
contains a number of what might be considered
32  J. Tuerk, “An Early Byzantine Inscribed Amulet and Its
Narratives,” BMGS 23 (1999): 25–42.

8 Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson

 Fig. 1.3. 
Vat. gr. 1208, fol. 1v:
Coat of arms of
Queen Charlotte
of Lusignan (with
the permission
of the Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana,
all rights reserved)

New Testaments of Byzantium 9

to be misspellings, but the text can also be seen as
the record of the vowel shifts of spoken Byzantine
Greek.33 Thus, the amulet gives witness to the
New Testament of everyday life.
Liturgy and the Experience
of the New Testament in Church
Whether literate or not, most Byzantines
absorbed their New Testament through hearing
the ritualized reading or intoning of the text in
the course of the liturgy, particularly in the lec-
tions, or readings, appointed for the day. Thus,
the lectionary was the primary source of the New
Testament’s stories and teachings. In fact, approx-
imately 45 percent of all surviving Byzantine New
Testament manuscripts are lectionaries, a figure
all the more remarkable because these were the
volumes in heaviest use.34 Already in fourth- and
fifth-century Jerusalem, readings for the key feasts
marking events in the life of Christ drew from the
relevant passages in the Gospels. Passages about
the nativity of Christ were read at Christmas,
about his baptism on Epiphany, about his passion
during Holy Week, and about his resurrection
on Easter.35 For those attending church on days
of major festivals, these central narratives simply
became common Christian knowledge. The lec-
tionary mapped the story of the New Testament
onto the liturgical year. This pattern quickly
influenced reading cycles throughout the empire,
including in Constantinople, as attested for the
33  E.g., the beginning of the inscription ΚΕΗΓΥΝΙ for καὶ
ἡ γυνὴ. Ibid., 25 n. 2.
34  For an inventory and description of extant New Testament
manuscripts, see Kurt Aland et al., Kurzgefasste Liste der
griechischen Handschriften des Neuen Testaments, 2nd ed.
(Berlin, 1994). Among minuscules, for example, Kurzgefasste
lists 2,403 lectionaries and 2,856 continuous texts (many of
which are marked for liturgical use).
35  Egeria confirms the reading of relevant biblical passages
on site on the days celebrating various events. See J. Wilkinson,
trans., Egeria’s Travels, 3rd ed. (Warminster, UK, 1999). For the
lectionary of Jerusalem, see the fifth-century Armenian and
the late seventh-century Georgian witnesses: A. Renoux, ed.,
Le codex arménien Jérusalem 121, PO 163, 168 (Turnhout, 1969–
71); M. Tarchnischvili, ed., Le grand lectionnaire de l’ église de
Jérusalem (Ve–VIIIe siècle), CSCO 188, 189, 204, 205, Scriptores
Iberici, vols. 9, 10, 13, 14 (Louvain, 1959–60). For the early
development of the calendar, see T. J. Talley, The Origins of the
Liturgical Year, 2nd ed. (Collegeville, MN, 1991); P. F. Bradshaw
and M. E. Johnson, The Origins of Feasts, Fasts, and Seasons in
Early Christianity (Collegeville, MN, 2011).
10 Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson
sixth century by the christological hymns of
Romanos the Melodist and sermons of Leontios
the Presbyter.36 The lectionary also integrated the
New Testament, especially the Gospels, into the
cult of saints through the calendar of observances
appended to many manuscripts. These calendars
offer clues to the changing ritual life of particular
communities, for example, that of the cathedral
of Constantinople, one aspect of Robert Nelson’s
paper in this volume.
The lectionary and the festal cycle influenced
Byzantine visual culture. Artisans illustrated
festal scenes in manuscripts and on devotional
objects and icon panels, creating a visual New
Testament beyond the biblical text.37 To appre-
ciate the impact of the New Testament on the
Byzantine Christian imagination, we must reex-
amine both verbal and visual re-presentations
of the sacred narratives in literature and arts.
For example, the festal cycle with its hymns
and images conflated separate Gospel accounts
such that Matthew’s Magi appeared with Luke’s
Shepherds at the nativity. When Christ entered
Jerusalem, the crowds threw down both the syn-
optic gospels’ cloaks and John’s palm branches.
After Iconoclasm, the codification of what Otto
Demus called “the classical system of Byzantine
church decoration”38 led to the imprinting of
the yearly cycle of major feasts primarily on cen-
tral parts of the naos, later also on the ancillary
spaces. All these were the parts of the church
reserved for the laity, and the entire church pro-
gram was designed to be seen from the point of
view of a layperson in the naos, not the priest in
the bema, the area surrounding the altar. The
36  P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis, eds., Sancti Romani melodi
cantica: Cantica genuina (Oxford, 1963); translations of the rel-
evant hymns appear in Romanos the Melodist, On the Life of
Christ: Kontakia, trans. E. Lash (San Francisco, 1995). Leontii
presbyteri Constantinopolitani: Homiliae, ed. C. Datema and
P. Allen, CCSG 17 (Turnhout, 1987); Leontius, Presbyter
of Constantinople, Fourteen Homilies, trans. P. Allen and
C. Datema, Byzantina Australiensia, vol. 9 (Brisbane, 1991). For
an account of the sixth-century festal cycle in Constantinople,
see D. Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical
Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium
(Philadelphia, 2014), 67–105.
37  For the great feasts on lead seals, see the exhibition “Leaden
Gospels” at http://www.doaks.org/resources/seals/leaden-
gospels, accessed 21 December 2014.
38  Thus, the title of the first chapter: O. Demus, Byzantine
Mosaic Decoration (London, 1947), 3–39.
walls of churches rendered the gospel narratives
present visually, enveloping the congregation
in the history of salvation. Charles Barber and
Nektarios Zarras further develop the liturgical
significance of the programs of church decoration
in their essays in this volume. Barber explores the
manner in which the liturgy during the eleventh
century was visualized through images of the life
of Christ with implications for iconic combina-
tions of such imagery, while Zarras, after begin-
ning in the middle Byzantine period, moves to
the late Byzantine era to study its more extensive
narrative cycles of monumental church decora-
tion. At that time new rites and hymns stimu-
lated Byzantine beholders to see religious images
differently and encouraged artists to produce
more detailed christological cycles around the
walls of church interiors.
For much of the rest of the year beyond the
major festivals, New Testament books were read
in pericopes that followed the sequence in their
source texts, apportioned over a series of weeks
in a pattern known as lectio continua, continu-
ous reading. This tendency is already evident in a
fifth-century East Syriac lectionary and in the ser-
mons of John Chrysostom, who worked his way
through Genesis, for example, over the course of
Lent and Eastertide.39 Using this method, the vast
majority of the New Testament was read out in
the course of the liturgical year, although patterns
of assigning the excerpts differed from place to
place. The major exception was the Apocalypse of
John; its canonical status was uncertain until the
middle Byzantine period and it never entered the
Orthodox lectionary. This treatment of so much of
the New Testament in the annual liturgical cycle
stands in great contrast to the Old Testament,
very little of which was read in the lectionary sys-
tem of Constantinople after the sixth century. By
the eighth century, the Prophetologion, the ser-
vice book for readings from the Old Testament,
assigned lections from Genesis, Proverbs, and
Isaiah to Vespers during Lent and from Exodus
and Job to Holy Week. Additional Old Testament
readings took place during festal vigils. The most
familiar Old Testament book was that of the
39  F. C. Burkitt, The Early Syriac Lectionary System (London,
1923); John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, trans. R. C. Hill,
FOTC 74, 82, 87 (Washington, DC, 1986–92), PG 53:21–54:580.
Psalms, which as the core of the church’s cycle
of prayer were chanted in their entirety over the
course of a week in monasteries and appointed
as appropriate to the various services of the so-
called cathedral liturgy of non-monastic churches
throughout the year.40
According to the tenth-century witnesses to
the lectionary for Hagia Sophia, known as the
typikon of the Great Church, the usual service of
the divine liturgy included two lections from the
New Testament: a reading from one of the four
Gospels preceded by a reading from the Apostles,
usually a letter of Paul (although from Easter to
Pentecost, readings from the Acts of the Apostles
replaced the New Testament letter). This lection-
ary combined an older system for Saturdays and
Sundays with a newer arrangement for every day
of the year, and assigned the pericopes from the
Gospels in relatively sequential and continuous
reading according to seasons: John from Easter
to Pentecost, Matthew and Luke from Pentecost
to the beginning of the lenten cycle, and Lent
largely given over to readings from Mark. The
readings from the Apostles followed a similar
scheme, running through the Pauline corpus,
beginning with Romans after Pentecost, followed
by the Corinthian correspondence, Galatians,
Ephesians, Philippians, and so forth.41 If one
attended services every weekday, one heard most
of the New Testament in the course of the year,
but we should assume few did beyond the staff
of monasteries and cathedrals. A layperson who
attended only on Sundays heard considerably less.
40  S. Engberg, C. Høeg, and G. Zuntz, eds., Prophetologium,
vol. 1 of Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae: Lectionaria (Copen­
hagen, 1939–81). Miller, “Prophetologion” (n. 8 above). It remains
unclear whether the Old Testament had been read during the
divine liturgy in Constantinople before the sixth century. For
the controversy, see S. G. Engberg, “The Prophetologion and
the Triple-Lection Theory: The Genesis of a Liturgical Book,”
BollGrott, 3rd ser., 3 (2006): 67–91; R. F. Taft, “Were There
Once Old Testament Readings in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy?
Apropos of an Article by Sysse Gudrun Engberg,” BollGrott,
3rd ser., 8 (2011): 271–311. For the Psalms, see Getcha, Typikon
Decoded, 15–23 (n. 8 above); G. R. Parpulov, “Psalters and
Personal Piety in Byzantium,” in Old Testament in Byzantium,
ed. Magdalino and Nelson, 77–105; idem, Towards a History of
Byzantine Psalters ca. 850–1350 AD (Plovdiv, 2014), available at
https://archive.org/details/ByzPsalters, accessed 21 January 2015.
41  Le typicon de la Grande Église: Ms. Sainte-Croix no. 40, Xe
siècle, ed. J. Mateos, OCA 165, 166 (Rome, 1962–63); idem, La
célébration de la parole dans la liturgie byzantine: Étude histo-
rique (Rome, 1971); Getcha, Typikon Decoded, 59–66.
New Testaments of Byzantium 11
 The liturgical reading of the New Testament
proceeded according to a set ritual that attested
to the holiness of the act of presenting and of
listening to the word of God. By the middle
Byzantine period, the rite achieved a form still
largely followed in contemporary Greek and
Slavic Orthodoxy. During the divine liturgy,
the Liturgy of the Word, the section of the ser-
vice with liturgical readings, began with the
Little Entrance. A deacon processed through
the church carrying the gospel book, accompa-
nied by other clergy, including the celebrating
priest (or priests) and servers. The church filled
with incense as the choir chanted set hymns,
including the Trisagion. Until the twelfth cen-
tury, this procession began in the narthex, or
entrance hall, and proceeded through the naos
to the altar. After the twelfth century the Little
Entrance proceeded from the sanctuary, into the
congregation, and back into the sanctuary.42 The
lections began after the Little Entrance. After
the deacon adjured the congregation, “Wisdom!
Pay attention!,” a member of the minor clergy
known as an anagnostes, or liturgical reader, read
the lection from the Apostolos. After this read-
ing, the choir chanted the Alleluia. The deacon
approached the priest and placed the gospel book
in his hands. He prayed on his own behalf that his
reading would be a forceful proclamation of the
gospel. The priest then turned to the congrega-
tion and announced, “Wisdom! Stand up! Listen
to the Holy Gospel according to N.!” The choir
responded, “Glory to you, Lord, Glory to you,”
before the priest commanded, “Pay attention.”
The priest then chanted the text of the assigned
pericope. Afterward, the choir acclaimed, “Glory
to you, Lord, Glory to you,” once again, and the
priest returned the gospel book to the deacon,
who kissed it, raised it aloft, made the sign of the
cross, and replaced it on the altar.43 The reading
of scripture received a reverence second only to
the eucharistic sacrifice itself, a reverence that
extended to the book as object.
At Hagia Sophia in Constantinople on great
feast days, the procession of the Little Entrance
42  Mateos, Célébration de la parole, 70–91; R. F. Taft, Beyond
East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding, 2nd ed.
(Rome, 1997), 207–18.
43  Mateos, Célébration de la parole, 128–29.
12 Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson
included the patriarch and the emperor, who
entered through the tallest door of the inner nar-
thex, the Imperial Door. The book displayed at
the center of its ninth- or tenth-century lintel
(Fig. 1.4) opens to John 10:7–9 (“I am the door
of the sheep . . . if anyone enters by me he . . . will
go in and out and find pasture”), preceded by the
incipit formula of the lectionary, “The Lord said.”
Thus, the book represented is a lectionary, and
the space beneath and beyond it is biblically and
ritually transformed into God’s heavenly pasture,
for even when the door is closed and no rites are
enacted, the Evangelion is always open.44 The
textual metaphor, of course, applies to Christ,
but placed in this position it transforms the door
below and those going in and out. The words on
the book also elevate the depicted book, the lec-
tionary, to the same status as the divine door, the
medium of Christ’s message.
Hearing the New Testament in the context
of the liturgy meant hearing the sacred scripture
adorned and interpreted by chants, hymns, and
sermons. Authors and composers highlighted cer-
tain aspects of the biblical text and deemphasized
others. They coordinated biblical verses in the lec-
tion with other verses from the scriptures to gain
insight into deeper meanings. Hymnographers in
particular introduced new elements to the bib-
lical narratives with extraordinary creativity.45
Together with preachers they performed exege-
sis on the assigned readings in light of broader
theological commitments, reading scripture in
light of doctrine. Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s con-
tribution retrieves the excitement and illumina-
tion that hymnography could bring to scripture
by charting the treatment of biblical women
from the fourth-century Syriac poet Ephrem
44  R. S. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950: Holy Wisdom
Modern Monument (Chicago, 2004), 12.
45  On the inventive qualities of Byzantine hymnography in
handling New Testament narratives, see Krueger, Liturgical
Subjects (n. 36 above); S. A. Harvey, “Why the Perfume
Mattered: The Sinful Woman in Syriac Exegetical Tradition,”
in In Dominico Eloquio/In Lordly Eloquence: Essays on Patristic
Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken, ed. P. M. Blowers et al.
(Grand Rapids, MI, 2002), 69–89; G. Frank, “Romanos and the
Night Vigil in the Sixth Century,” in Byzantine Christianity,
ed. D. Krueger, A People’s History of Christianity, vol. 3
(Minneapolis, 2006) 59–78. On Romanos’s ability to convey
complex theological concepts, see S. Gador-Whyte, Theology
and Poetry in Early Byzantium: The Kontakia of Romanos the
Melodist (Cambridge, forthcoming).

the Syrian to the sixth-century Greek master
Romanos. Hymnographers opened the biblical
narrative to teach, adjure, and encourage their
congregants. They imparted complex intertex-
tual understanding through song. In her chapter,
Mary Cunningham takes up the sermon, focus-
ing on various interpretive and rhetorical tools
that homilists employed to instruct the assem-
bled faithful from the fourth century onward.46
Both essays show how the Byzantine encounter
with the New Testament generated new literary
46  For broader insight into sermons as a Byzantine exegeti-
cal and literary form, see M. Cunningham and P. Allen, eds.,
Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine
Homiletics, A New History of the Sermon, vol. 1 (Leiden, 1998).
Fig. 1.4. 
Hagia Sophia,
Constantinople,
lintel of Imperial
Door (photo
© Robert S. Nelson)
output in response to the demands of the lit-
urgy and the needs of the living church. Sermons
attest that preachers addressed a wide swath
of Byzantine society. Gregory of Nazianzos’s
late fourth-century sermons on the Trinity, for
example, treated complex theological topics with
rather technical language that perhaps only some
in the audience could have understood. On the
other hand, the evidence internal to the festal
sermons of Leontios the Presbyter suggests that
his congregation consisted primarily of working-
class artisans.47 By the ninth century, rather
47  P. Gallay, Grégroire de Nazianze: Discours 27–31, SC
250 (Paris, 1979); Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ:
The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius,
New Testaments of Byzantium 13
than composing new sermons, preachers would
regularly read from books sometimes called
panegyrika, arranged according to the church cal-
endar, that anthologized late ancient and earlier
Byzantine sermons, especially for major festivals.48
The appearance in the middle Byzantine period
of an illustrated edition of selected homilies of
Gregory of Nazianzos gives witness to the popu-
larity and social status of these manuscripts.49
Many homilies and hymns became liturgical clas-
sics, permanently influencing the public under-
standing of key biblical passages.
The Impact of the New Testament on
Byzantine Culture, Literature, and Thought
The familiarity of the New Testament, either
from hearing it read and preached on in church
or from private study, profoundly impacted reli-
gious prose compositions, especially the lives
of the saints.50 Derek Krueger’s chapter focuses
on the intertextual relationship with the Bible
that governed the composition of hagiogra-
phy, through which authors strove to present
their holy subjects as embodying Jesus’s teach-
ings and reenacting his and the apostles’ deeds.
Quotations from scripture pervaded religious
literature and peppered ecclesiastical speech.
trans. F. Williams and L. Wickham (Crestwood, NY, 2002);
Allen and Datema, in Leontius, Presbyter of Constantinople,
Fourteen Homilies, 5–8 (n. 36 above).
48  A. Ehrhard, Überlieferung und Bestand der hagiogra-
phischen und homiletischen Literatur der griechischen Kirche
von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts, TU
50–52 (Leipzig, 1937–52); M. B. Cunningham, “Messages in
Context: The Reading of Sermons in Byzantine Churches
and Monasteries,” in Images of the Byzantine World: Visions,
Messages and Meanings; Studies Presented to Leslie Brubaker,
ed. A. Lymberopoulou (Aldershot, UK, 2011), 83–98. There
remains some dispute (which we can probably never resolve)
about the extent to which preachers continued preaching, as
opposed to reading out patristic homilies. T. Antonopoulou
(The Homilies of the Emperor Leo VI [Leiden, 1997], 97–98)
argues for the continuation of preaching in every liturgical con-
text, including the divine liturgy. The monastic typika, however,
do not mention the preaching of new sermons, so it is impossible
to know whether preaching (in contrast to reading out of extant
sermons) ceased to take place on a regular basis after the eighth
century. That said, there are many surviving homilies from later
preachers, including Photios and John Xiphilinos.
49  George Galavaris, The Illustrations of the Liturgical Homilies
of Gregory Nazianzenus (Princeton, 1969).
50  I. Ševčenko, “Levels of Style in Byzantine Prose,” JÖB 31
(1981): 289–312.
14 Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson
Ultimately, knowledge of the Bible resulted in the
habits of Christian life. In addition to the profu-
sion of hymnography based on biblical themes,
some authors wrote religious poetry for non-litur-
gical contexts. In the fifth century, Nonnus of
Panopolis in Egypt composed a paraphrase of the
Gospel of John in Homeric hexameters that com-
mented on and expanded many of the episodes.51
Churchmen writing universal chronicles of the
history of the world drew most heavily from the
Old Testament, but for the events of the first cen-
tury they employed the New Testament, and par-
ticularly the book of Acts, as a historical source.52
The New Testament left a less insistent mark on
secular discourse, although these writings also
reflected Christian values and judgments.53 The
Bible and biblical learning made their mark even
on seemingly irreligious erotic novels as quota-
tions from the Septuagint and allusions to the
New Testament make occasional appearances.54
The Bible also influenced political thought
and the ways in which imperial history was nar-
rated and represented. While Old Testament
patriarchs and kings provided typological models
51  M. Whitby, “The Bible Hellenized: Nonnus’ Paraphrase
of St John’s Gospel and ‘Eudocia’s’ Homeric Centos,” in Texts
and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority, and
Change, ed. J. H. D. Scourfield (Swansea, UK, 2007), 193–229;
M. Ypsilanti, “Image-Making and the Art of Paraphrasing:
Aspects of Darkness and Light in the Metabole,” in Nonnus
of Panopolis in Context: Poetry and Cultural Milieu in Late
Antiquity with a Section on Nonnus and the Modern World, ed.
K. Spanoudakis, Trends in Classics. Supplementary Volumes,
vol. 24 (Berlin, 2014), 123–37; A. Faulkner, “Faith and Fidelity
in Biblical Epic: The Metaphrasis Psalmorum, Nonnus, and the
Theory of Translation,” in ibid., 195–210.
52  See especially the early ninth-century work of George the
Monk, The Chronography of George Synkellos: A Byzantine
Chronicle of Universal History from the Creation, trans. W. Adler
and P. Tuffin (Oxford, 2002), 477–85.
53  A. R. Littlewood, “A Statistical Survey of the Incidence of
Repeated Quotations in Selected Byzantine Letter-Writers,”
in Gonimos: Neoplatonic and Byzantine Studies Presented
to Leendert G. Westerink at 75, ed. J. Duffy and J. Peradotto
(Buffalo, 1988), 137–54.
54  Some apparently parodic allusions, however, are diffi-
cult to confirm. I. Nilsson, Erotic Pathos, Rhetorical Pleasure:
Narrative Technique and Mimesis in Eumathios Makrembolites’
Hysmine and Hysminias (Uppsala, 2001), 280–84; J. B. Burton,
“Reviving the Pagan Greek Novel in a Christian World,”
Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 39 (1998): 179–216; S. V.
Poljakova, Iz istorii vizantijskogo romana (Moscow, 1979),
110–13; S. MacAlister, Dreams and Suicides: The Greek Novel
from Antiquity to the Byzantine Empire (London, 1996), 133–35,
162–64.
for Byzantine emperors, Byzantine imperial ide-
ology posited a different relationship with the
New Testament.55 Byzantine historians were
eager to demonstrate that their subjects displayed
(or failed to display) the virtues preached by
Jesus. Nevertheless, biblical quotations are rela-
tively rare among secular historians. The emperor
was the vice-regent of Christ; his earthly court
was a model of the heavenly court.56 Thus, in
the bema of Hagia Sophia the archangel Gabriel
holds the globe of world rule, a Roman imperial
symbol, and wears the pearl-bedecked red shoes
of the Byzantine emperor as he stands in atten-
dance before the Theotokos and child in the
apse, a product of a long and complex process by
which Christian angels become associated with
the emperor cult.57 Over the Imperial Door lead-
ing into the nave of Hagia Sophia, a Byzantine
emperor kneels before an enthroned Christ. The
curved back of the throne resembles a lyre and
may refer to the actual throne in the audience
hall of the nearby palace, the Chrysotriklinos,
but without a doubt the same throne appears
on contemporary imperial coinage.58 That same
throne type reappears in the imperial frontispiece
to a twelfth-century gospel book in the Vatican
Library (Urb. gr. 2), in which Christ, flanked by
personifications of Mercy and Justice, rests his
hands on the crowns of John II Komnenos and
his coruler and son Alexios (Fig. 1.5).59
55  C. Rapp, “Old Testament Models for Emperors in Early
Byzantium,” in Old Testament in Byzantium, ed. Magdalino
and Nelson, 175–97; G. Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The
Imperial Office in Byzantium, trans. J. Birrell (Cambridge,
2003), 20–21, 48–51. Dagron describes for Byzantium “an
imperial Christianity that was Old Testament in tone . . . con-
fronted by the more New Testament-oriented Christianity of
the clergy” (103–4).
56  H. Maguire, “The Heavenly Court,” Byzantine Court
Culture from 829 to 1204, ed. H. Maguire (Washington, DC,
1997), 247–58.
57  Specifically on archangels, see C. Mango, “St. Michael and
Attis,” ΔΧΑΕ ser. 4, 12 (1984): 39–45.
58  P. Grierson, Leo III to Nicephorus III 717–1081, vol. 3, pt. 1
of Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks
Collection and in the Whittemore Collection, ed. A. R. Bellinger
and P. Grierson (Washington, DC, 1993), 154–56.
59  I. Spatharakis, The Portrait in Byzantine Illuminated
Manuscripts (Leiden, 1976), 79–83; F. D’Aiuto, in I vangeli dei
popoli: La parola e l’ immagine del Cristo nelle culture e nella sto-
ria, ed. idem, G. Morello, and A. M. Piazzoni (Vatican City,
2000), 260–64, with further literature.
The manuscript must have had an imperial
association, today unknown, but such gospel
books are not common in comparison to the illus-
trated Psalter, which was a popular text for emper-
ors who by typological reasoning became new
Davids. Archangels in imperial garb continued
to play an important role throughout the history
of the empire, as in a small steatite icon, probably
from the twelfth century, in the Museo Bandini
in Italy.60 There Gabriel, wearing a version of the
loros, or stole, holds a disc not as a symbol of world
dominion but as an icon of Christ Emmanuel, the
youthful Jesus, a popular theme during the reign
of the emperor Manuel I Komnenos. This, how-
ever, is about as far as the assimilation of emperor
and Christ could go. It was based on a linguistic,
not a visual similarity. Unlike in the Latin West,
in Byzantium it was not possible for rulers to
resemble Christ because of the Orthodox theory
of the icon being the true presence of the religious
person portrayed.61 For this reason, the heav-
enly court could be only partly imperial. Christ
could sit on an imperial throne, but he could not
wear imperial garb and be shown as an actual
emperor. Unlike David, Joshua, Moses, or other
Old Testament heroes used as imperial antitypes,
Jesus was not symbolically available, because he
was neither of nor in the past. The liturgy made
him present, every day again.
Byzantine theology always shaped the under-
standing of the sacred text. Perhaps more than
any other aspect of the Byzantine engagement
with the Bible, the history of biblical exegesis
remains under-attended. To date, few scholars
have explored and assessed Byzantine biblical
interpretation after the patristic period, other
than to judge it derivative. Yet Byzantine authors
continued to interpret scripture, and to use it cre-
atively in theological and polemic works as well
as in sermons. Florilegia organized around spe-
cific topics and catenae that grouped passages
from earlier authors commenting on the biblical
text show readers engaged in puzzling the deeper
meanings of scripture. Manuscripts frequently
60  I. Kalavrezou-Maxeiner, Byzantine Icons in Steatite (Vienna,
1985), 119–22.
61  E. Kitzinger, “On the Portrait of Roger II in the Martorana
in Palermo,” The Art of Byzantium and the Medieval West:
Selected Studies, ed. W. E. Kleinbauer (Bloomington, IN, 1976),
320–26.
New Testaments of Byzantium 15
 Fig. 1.5. 
Vat. Urb. gr. 2, fol.
19v: John II and
Alexios Komnenos
(with the permission
of the Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana,
all rights reserved)

16 Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson

transmitted New Testament text with margina-
lia, emendations, commentary, cross-references,
decorative motifs, canon tables, author portraits,
and illustrations of the stories. These also reflect
traditions of the New Testament.
A tradition of learned exegesis of scripture
began in Christian antiquity, with scholars pro-
ducing commentaries that proceeded verse by
verse through the texts, first quoting the biblical
text and then supplying interpretation. Some of
these survive in their entirety, while others can
be reconstructed from surviving fragments.62
Notable and influential works include Origen’s
third-century commentaries on Matthew, Luke,
John, Acts, and most of the Pauline corpus, and
the lengthy surviving fourth- and fifth-century
commentaries of John Chrysostom on Matthew,
John, Acts, and the letters attributed to Paul, each
of which began as a series of sermons.63 Fifth-
century church fathers Cyril of Alexandria’s
and Theodoret of Kyrrhos’s commentaries on
New Testament books continued to be cited,
among a long list of others by later writers.64
Most commentators, however, did not treat the
New Testament in isolation and also wrote com-
mentaries on Old Testament books. While all
of the books accepted as canonical in the early
Byzantine church received such treatment, run-
ning commentaries on the Apocalypse appeared
only in the late sixth and early seventh centu-
ries. Stephen Shoemaker’s chapter addresses the
works of Oikoumenios and Andrew of Caesarea
to reassess the peculiar history of the reception of
the Apocalypse in Byzantium.
For the most part, the genre of running com-
mentary waned after the close of the patristic
era in the seventh century, in large part because
the early church fathers, especially of the fourth
and early fifth centuries, themselves became
62  For an overview, see M. Simonetti, Biblical Interpreation
in the Early Church: An Historical Introduction to Patristic
Exegesis, trans. J. A. Hughes (Edinburgh, 1994); M. W. Elliott,
“Exegetical Genres in the Patristic Era,” in The New Cambridge
History of the Bible, 1:775–97.
63  For an inventory of Origen’s commentaries, see CPG
1:160–67; many surviving texts appear in the series Origenes
Werke, ed. P. Koetschau et al., 12 vols. in 13 (Leipzig, 1899–1955).
John Chrysostom’s New Testament homily cycles appear in PG
57–63; see CPG 2:522–28.
64  For Cyril of Alexandria, see CPG 3:5–9; Theodoret of
Kyrrhos, CPG 3:204.
canonized as authorities on theological and
scriptural matters in the course of the sixth and
seventh.65 The fifth century, however, witnessed
the emergence of a new genre for organizing bib-
lical interpretation known to modern scholar-
ship as the catena, or chain, that culled excerpts
from a wide range of earlier commentators and
anthologized them.66 Catenae tended to draw
heavily on Origen (often anonymously), Basil of
Caesarea, Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia,
Cyril, and Severos of Antioch, but regularly
employed passages from twenty or more authors,
without much regard to whether the source was
considered orthodox or heterodox. Sometimes
the original authority was cited by name, but
many passages appeared without attribution.
No two catenae are exactly alike, suggesting that
copyists and patrons continued to have a hand in
guiding the reading of the sacred text. The result
was an open and widely varied form that not only
preserved authoritative traditions but curated
them. Nothing as standardized as the Western
glossa ordinaria ever emerged.67
Catenae followed the order of the bibli-
cal text, verse by verse, and gathered relevant
interpretations from commentaries, sermons,
responses, and theological treatises. Formats in
manuscripts differ, but in many cases the biblical
verse appears in the center of the page in larger
letters, surrounded by the chain of commentary.
In other examples the biblical text and the com-
mentary appear in parallel columns. A manu-
script from the 880s, now in the Bibliothèque
nationale de France (Paris gr. 216, GA 605),
65  P. T. R. Gray, “‘The Select Fathers’: Canonizing the Patristic
Past,” StP 23 (1989): 21–36; idem, “Theological Discourse in
the Seventh Century: The Heritage from the Sixth Century,”
Byzantinische Forschungen 26 (2000): 219–28; Av. Cameron,
“Byzantium and the Past in the Seventh Century: The Search for
Redefinition,” in The Seventh Century: Change and Continuity,
ed. J. Fontaine and J. N. Hillgarth (London, 1992), 250–76.
66  For a partial catalogue of New Testament catenae, see CPG
4:228–59. The classic account is R. Devreesse, “Chaines exégé-
tiques grecques,” in Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement 1, ed.
L. Pirot (Paris, 1928), cols. 1084–1223. For a new perspective,
see W. R. S. Lamb, ed. and trans., The Catena in Marcum: A
Byzantine Anthology of Early Commentary on Mark (Leiden,
2012).
67  L. Smith, The Glossa ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval
Bible Commentary, Commentaria, Sacred Texts and Their
Communities: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic, vol. 3 (Leiden,
2009).
New Testaments of Byzantium 17
contains Acts, the Catholic epistles, and the let-
ters of Paul together with catena commentary.68
On the folio with the beginning of Romans
(136r), Paul’s text begins under a decorative roun-
del that gives the title: “The Holy Apostle Paul’s
Letter to the Romans” (Fig. 1.6). The biblical text
appears in two parallel columns in large minis-
cule script with ample space around it. The cat-
ena commentary, written in smaller format in
two different scripts, half uncials and miniscule
(possibly by the same scribe), begins at the upper
left, fills in space beside and between the col-
umns, and continues filling an entire column at
the right and the bottom of the page. Red sigla,
or symbols, in the biblical text function a bit like
modern footnotes to refer the reader to similarly
indicated paragraphs of the catena.69 This format
is consistent throughout the manuscript’s bib-
lical texts. All of the commentary on this page
is anonymous, although on other pages some
interpretations are attributed to various church
fathers. Above the second column the heading
of the so-called Euthalian apparatus indicates
the end of a series of another sort of standardized
editorial materials that preface the text, includ-
ing a hypothesis, or summary, of the letter, a list
of chapters, and the Martyrdom of Paul, each
intended to assist the reader in interpreting the
letter and its contexts (128r–135r).70 The appear-
ance of the apparatus and the catena together
is not unusual and provides an example of a
Byzantine study Bible. The challenges of study-
ing the enormous and complex body of material
in the catena tradition have hampered efforts to
understand the achievement and significance
68  Paris gr. 216 is dated by the Bibliothèque nationale de
France to the 880s because the scribe is a certain Stephanos,
who penned Bodleian Library d’Orville 301, a manuscript con-
taining Euclid that was owned and commissioned by Arethas of
Caesarea; its colophon states that the manuscript was written
in 888. It is not known whether Arethas owned or used Paris
gr. 216. A. A. Aletta, “Su Stefano, copista di Areta,” RSBN n.s.
41 (2004): 73–94, esp. 75–79. We thank Jeremy Schott for his
assistance with this manuscript.
69  I. Hutter, “Marginalia Decorata,” in The Legacy of Bernard
de Montfaucon: Three Hundred Years of Studies on Greek
Handwriting, ed. A. B. García and I. Pérez Martin, Bibliologia,
vol. 31 (Turnhout, 2010), 97–106.
70  On these texts, see L. C. Willard, A Critical Study of the
Euthalian Apparatus (Berlin, 2009); E. W. Scherbenske, Canon­
izing Paul: Ancient Editorial Practice and the Corpus Paulinum
(New York, 2013).
18 Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson
of these repositories of Byzantine exegetical tradi-
tion. Here, William Lamb offers a roadmap for
new work on catenae—their formation and con-
tents—prefaced by a useful history of the modern
critical engagement with commentary.71
In the middle Byzantine period scholars
continued to engage in exegesis of biblical texts,
although primarily in other formats, as the fol-
lowing examples indicate.72 Photios, patriarch of
Constantinople in the ninth century, addressed
a work to Amphilochios, the metropolitan of
Kyzikos, that considered a range of theological and
practical questions with frequent interpretations
of biblical passages.73 Photios’s readings quickly
entered the tradition of the catenae alongside
patristic authorities. Byzantine readers frequently
wrote notes, known as scholia, often copiously in
the margins of their copies of biblical books, pre-
senting precious evidence for ongoing engagement
and occasional puzzlement. The tenth-century
archbishop Arethas of Caesarea, some of whose
own manuscripts survive, maintained an ongo-
ing dialogue with scripture in his margins.74 One
running commentary, Theophylaktos of Ohrid’s
compendious studies of the Gospels and Epistles,
in addition to the Prophets and the Psalms, sur-
vives in its entirety from the middle Byzantine
centuries. Theophylaktos relied heavily on
Chrysostom and other authorities preserved in
the catenae, but reassembled them, with some of
his own input, into a univocal whole. His com-
mentary became widely popular; as noted above,
the monastic library at Skoteine owned a volume
containing his commentaries on the Gospels.75
71  Lamb, Catena in Marcum, 3–19.
72  On the later history of Byzantine biblical scholarship, see
T. M. Kolbaba, “Byzantine Orthodox Exegesis,” in The New
Cambridge History of the Bible, 2:485–504.
73  Photios, Epistulae et Amphilochia, vols. 4–6, ed. L. G.
Westerink (Leipzig, 1986–87).
74  P. Lemerle, Byzantine Humanism: The First Phase; Notes
and Remarks on Education and Culture in Byzantium from Its
Origins to the 10th Century, trans. H. Lindsay and A. Moffatt
(Canberra, 1986), 237–80; S. Kougeas, Ο Καισαρείας Αρέθας,
with an introduction by P. A. Demetrakopoulos, Epilecta, vol. 1
(Athens, 1985).
75  Theophylaktos’s biblical commentaries are published in
PG 123–26. Serviceable English translations (to be used with
care) have been published in the series “Blessed Theophylact’s
Explanation of the New Testament”: Theophylact, The
Explanation, trans. C. Stade (House Spring, MO, 2008). See
 Fig. 1.6. 
Paris, BnF, gr. 216,
136r: The beginning
of Paul’s Letter to the
Romans with catena
commentary (photo
courtesy Bibliothèque
nationale de France)

New Testaments of Byzantium 19

In the eleventh century, Michael Psellos exhib-
ited skill and idiosyncrasy in the interpretation
of scripture, particularly in his lectures.76 The
twelfth-century polymathic teacher, or gram-
matikos, Michael Glykas, composed Εἰς τὰς
ἀπορίας τῆς Θείας Γραφῆς κεφάλαια (Chapters on
the Difficulties in Holy Scripture).77 Throughout
the middle and late Byzantine periods, scriptural
exegesis informed debates about theology, canon
law, liturgical custom, and heresy. Indeed, because
scripture was authoritative, Byzantines contin-
ued to grapple with its meaning and punctuated
their arguments with proof texts and citations.
Fr. Maximos Constas’s essay on Byzantine inter-
pretations of Paul demonstrates the long history of
the Byzantine Orthodox exegetical tradition from
late antiquity through the Palaiologan period.
The cultural diffusion of the New Testament
and its impact on Byzantium—in manuscripts
and material culture, in church, song, art, let-
ters, and exegesis—cannot, however, be seen in
isolation from the impact of the Bible as a whole.
Byzantines viewed the Old Testament and the
New Testament together as a single source of
religious authority and instruction. According
to her biographer, the fifth-century Alexandrian
also D. Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits (Oxford, 1988),
34–82.
76  Michaelis Pselli Theologica, vol. 1, ed. P. Gautier (Leipzig,
1989), vol. 2, ed. L. G. Westerink and J. M. Duffy (Munich,
2002). See also A. Kaldellis, “The Date of Psellos’ Theological
Lectures and Higher Religious Education in Constantinople,”
Byzantinoslavica 63 (2005): 143–51.
77  Michael Glykas, Εἰς τὰς ἀπορίας τῆς Θείας Γραφῆς κεφάλαια,
ed. S. Eustratiades, 2 vols. (Athens, 1906); P. Magdalino, The
Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (Cambridge, 1993),
368–82.
20 Derek Krueger and Robert S. Nelson
abbess Synkletike taught: “We have a common
teacher in the Lord; we draw spiritual water from
the same source; we suck milk from the same
breasts—the Old and the New Testaments.”78
In her metaphor, God’s teaching flowed out in
scripture from Christ’s feminized body, nour-
ishing the church with divine instruction. Her
rough contemporary, Makarios of Magnesia,
posited an allegorical relationship between the
body and blood of Christ in the eucharist and the
two biblical testaments, Old and New, “which
one must attentively eat and digest, remember-
ing them saliently in the intelligence, and obtain
from them life not temporary but eternal.”79 The
texts of the New Testament thus provided spiri-
tual sustenance and ethical instruction, but not
in isolation from the rest of scripture. The Bible
as a whole became deeply familiar and intimately
embodied. For this reason the present volume
does not stand in isolation but serves as a com-
panion to The Old Testament in Byzantium,
the result of a prior Dumbarton Oaks sympo-
sium.80 The Holy Scriptures were fundamental
to Byzantine culture and part of every warp and
weft of its social fabric. The goal of understand-
ing precisely what those scriptures were and how
they functioned has drawn us to the Bible in
Byzantium. There is much here for the reader to
ponder and, we hope, to improve upon.
78  Ps-Athanasios, The Life and Regimen of the Blessed and Holy
Teacher Syncletica, trans. E. B. Bongie, Peregrina Translations
Series, vol. 21 (Toronto, 1996), 19 (PG 28:1499).
79  Makarios of Magnesia, Apokritikos 3.23.10 (Macarios de
Magnési, Le Monogénès, ed. and trans. R. Goulet, vol. 2 [Paris,
2003]).
80  Ed. Magdalino and Nelson (n. 8 above).