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).
 chapter four

Patriarchal Lectionaries
of Constantinople
History, Attributions, and Prospects

Robert S. Nelson

I n 1305 t h e pat r i a rch At h a na sios com pelled certa i n bishops r esi di ng

in Constantinople to return to their dioceses. Accordingly, late that year Nikephoros Moschopoulos,
the proedros of Lakedaemon, left the capital for Mistra after arranging for his library to follow. Four
horses were required to transport the books.1 Among them most likely was an evangelion or gospel
lectionary (Moscow, State Hist. Mus. gr. 225, Vlad. 12 (GA ℓ 49) that he later donated to the church
of the Brontochion in Mistra in 1311/12 (Fig. 4.1).2 He or a deacon read the pericope, the gospel por-
tion appointed for the day, from this or another manuscript to the assembled congregation at the
Brontochion or at the Metropolitan church of St. Demetrios, which Nikephoros restored with his
brother.3 Such oral recitations were the single most important way that the Byzantines encountered the
New Testament, and while those ephemeral events are lost, the lectionaries survive. Each unique manu-
script provides information about the New Testament as read in ritual contexts both at the time of the
manuscript’s creation and later, as in the case of Moschopoulos’s lectionary, to which I will return.
Over two thousand lectionary manuscripts have been tabulated in the system begun by Caspar René
Gregory and continued by Kurt Aland; they are denoted by what are now known as Gregory-Aland
(GA) numbers.4 Despite this abundant evidence, New Testament scholars decided long ago that the text

1  I. Ševčenko, “The Imprisonment of Manuel Moschopulos in the Year 1305 or 1306,” Speculum 27 (1952): 147; see A.-M. Maffry
Talbot, The Correspondence of Athanasius I Patriarch of Constantinople (Washington, DC, 1975), xxiv; eadem, “Moschopoulos,
Nikephoros,” in ODB 2:1414–15; PLP fasc. 8, no. 19376. On Moschopoulos’s manuscripts, see R. S. Nelson, “The Manuscripts of
Antonios Malakes and the Collecting and Appreciation of Illuminated Books in the Early Palaeologan Period,” JÖB 36 (1986):
248–52, repr. in idem, Later Byzantine Painting: Art, Agency, and Appreciation (Aldershot, UK, 2007), chap. 13. For the Moscow lec-
tionary, see below. Much of the research for this study was conducted by means of the microfilms of Greek lectionaries at the Institut
für Neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) in Münster. I am most grateful for the assistance there of Holger Strutwolf, Ulrich
Schmid, Klaus Wachtel, Christian Askeland, and Troy Griffitts.
2  A. Vladimir, Sistematicheskoe opisanie rukopisei Moskovskoi sinodalnoi (patriarshei) biblioteki (Moscow, 1894), 12–13; A. V. Bank
et al., Iskusstvo Vizantii v sobraniiakh SSSR: Katalog vystavki, vol. 2, Iskusstvo ėpokhi ikonoborchestva: Iskusstvo IX–XII vekov (Moscow,
1977), 48; Nelson, “Manuscripts of Antonios Malakes,” 250; B. L. Fonkich and F. B. Poliakov, Grecheskie rukopisi Moskovskoi sinodalnoi
biblioteki: Paleograficheskie, kodikologicheskie i bibliograficheskie dopolneniia k katalogu arkhimandrita Vladimira (Filantropova)
(Moscow, 1993), 25–26. I am grateful to Anna Zakharova and Alexander Saminsky for aiding my research on manuscripts in Moscow.
3  S. Runciman, Mistra: Byzantine Capital of the Peloponnese (London, 1980), 101–2; M. Chatzidakis, Mystras: The Medieval City
and the Castle (Athens, 1994), 25–28.
4  C. R. Gregory, Textkritik des Neuen Testamentes (Leipzig, 1900–1909); K. Aland et al., Kurzgefasste Liste der griechischen
Handschriften des Neuen Testaments, 2nd ed. (New York, 1994). The history of enumerating Greek New Testament manuscripts is

87
 Fig. 4.1.  found in lectionaries was of little interest for
Moscow, State the study of the earliest versions of the New
Historical Museum, Testament. Thus, lectionaries have been little
gr. 225, Vlad. 12, studied in comparison to the continuous ver-
fol. 2r: Evangelist John sion of the Greek New Testament, save for
(photo courtesy State a flawed textual project at the University of
Historical Museum) Chicago begun in the 1930s and the art historical
researches of Kurt Weitzmann, published mainly
in the third quarter of the twentieth century.5
Weitzmann’s researches did not coalesce into
the intended book and his methodology received
trenchant criticism.6 In recent years historians of
recounted in D. C. Parker, An Introduction to the New Testament
Manuscripts and Their Texts (New York, 2008), 35–46. The
Moscow lectionary is GA ℓ 49.
5  See C. D. Osburn, “The Greek Lectionaries of the New
Testament,” in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary
Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis, ed. B. D. Ehrman and
M. W. Holmes, 1st edition (Grand Rapids, MI, 1995), 65–68. See
also the overview of E. Velkovska, “Lo studio del lezionari bizan-
tini,” Ecclesia Orans 13 (1996): 253–71.
6  Weitzmann’s many articles on the subject are collected in
his Byzantine Liturgical Psalters and Gospels (London, 1980).
88 Robert S. Nelson
art and liturgy have taken up the subject again
with a focus on eleventh-century Constantinople.
In this chapter I review that recent scholarship,
examine patterns of textual and artistic affilia-
tion, and place eleventh-century developments in
a longer chronological context.
But first I must introduce the gospel lection-
ary (henceforth, the lectionary). At the great
cathedral of Hagia Sophia, the lection was read
by the deacon or the patriarch from the ambo
placed toward the center of the nave. In more
modest churches, the lectionary was held or
placed on a lectern in front of the templon, the
structure that separates the bema or altar area
The critique is by M.-L. Dolezal, “Manuscript Studies in the
Twentieth Century: Kurt Weitzmann Reconsidered,” BMGS
22 (1998): 216–63. An important recent overview of illustrated
lectionaries is A. Zakharova, “The Relationship between Text
and Image in Byzantine Illuminated Gospel Lectionaries,” in
Bild und Text im Mittelalter, ed. K. Krause and B. Schellewald
(Cologne, 2011), 283–312.
from the naos or nave.7 Before the reading, the
book was first displayed to the congregation
when it was processed into the naos during the
First or Little Entrance. Consequently, its cover
came to be richly decorated, and consequently
such manuscripts had to be protected. At Hagia
Sophia in 1396, the lectionaries with the most
lavish gold and silver bindings were kept in the
treasury.8 Because of their high material cost
most lectionary bindings were later stripped of
their precious materials, but a few original deluxe
covers have survived, the most famous exam-
ple being the so-called Phokas lectionary at the
Lavra monastery on Mt. Athos.9
There are two principal classes of lectionaries,
those that have readings for Saturday and Sunday
only and those that include the weekdays as well.
A third minor category, denoted in the GA sys-
tem by the abbreviation SEL (selectae), consists
of manuscripts with a small, idiosyncratic selec-
tion of feasts.10 The contents of both major lec-
tionary types are divided into two sections, the
synaxarion, containing the movable feasts, and
the menologion, with the immovable feasts. The
movable feasts are the days of the church year
that depend upon Easter, such as Ascension,
Pentecost, Palm Sunday, and Holy Week. The
synaxarion begins at Easter and is divided into
four parts according to the source of the lection,
starting with the Gospel of John, followed by
Matthew, Luke, and Mark. Consequently, the
portrait of John is the first to be encountered in
7  Cf. the illustration in Heavenly Ladder of John Climacus,
Sinai, cod. 418: K. Weitzmann and G. Galavaris, The Monastery
of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Illuminated Greek
Manuscripts (Princeton, 1990), fig. 628.
8  Inventory of the treasury of Hagia Sophia of 1396: MM,
2:567; P. Hetherington, “Byzantine and Russian Enamels in
the Treasury of Hagia Sophia in the Late 14th Century,” BZ
93 (2000): 134.
9  Color illustration in S. M. Pelekanidis et al., Οἱ Θησαυροὶ
τοῦ Ἁγίου Ὄρους, 4 vols. (Athens, 1973–), 3:24; K. Weitzmann,
“Das Evangelion im Skevophylakion zu Lawra,” Seminarium
Kondakovianum 8 (1936): 83–98, repr. in idem, Byzantine
Liturgical Psalters and Gospels. Efthymios K. Litsas (“Palaeo­
graphical Researches in the Lavra Library on Mount Athos,”
Hellenika 50 [2000]: 218–20) has proposed a solution to the
awkward problem that the manuscript attached to the cover is
later than the cover, arguing that the cover was originally made
for Lavra Aʹ 86 (GA ℓ 1086), an uncial lectionary with a similar
standing figure of Jesus on fol. 67r.
10  Aland et al., Kurzgefasste Liste, xv.
Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
an illustrated lectionary (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). In a
Saturday/Sunday lectionary, the pericopes from
John in the weeks after Easter include weekday
lections, but the later sections of Matthew and
Luke are restricted to Saturdays and Sundays.
Consequently weekday lectionaries are larger
manuscripts. The second section of the lection-
ary, the menologion, commences on 1 September,
the first day of the secular year, and ideally has
pericopes for 365 days of the year, but many lec-
tionaries are selective. Finally, a lectionary may
include readings for other rites, especially during
Holy Week.11
In earlier scholarship, notions of prov-
enance, as implied in this chapter title, would
have drawn suspicion, because most Byzantine
lectionaries were thought to follow the rite of
Constantinople no matter where they were made
and examples can be deduced of provincial man-
uscripts with rubrics detailing processions in the
capital.12 In recent decades, however, the once
obdurate Byzantine lectionary has begun to give
up its secrets, beginning with the gradual discov-
ery of what has come to be known as the patri-
archal lectionary, or manuscripts made for the
use of the patriarch of Constantinople in Hagia
Sophia. Yvonne Burns began that line of inquiry
with the publication of a unique manuscript in
the Vatican, Ottob. gr. 175 (GA ℓ 131), which has
a small number of pericopes, hence a SEL lection-
ary. It contains lections for the seven days that the
patriarch himself read during the church year, as
specified by the typikon of the Great Church, the
order of ceremonies for Hagia Sophia from the
tenth century.13 Burns wrote nothing about the
manuscript itself, because she regarded it as only
evidence for a lost prototype of an early lectionary
and for her theory of the origin of the lectionary
in a single cycle text, based on her interpretation
11  Gregory, Textkritik, 1:338–40, 361–64, 384–86. For a
general introduction to the contents of the lectionary and to
current studies on its text, see the revised chapter by Osburn,
“Greek Lectionaries of the New Testament,” in Text of the New
Testament in Contemporary Research, ed. Ehrman and Holmes,
2nd ed. (Leiden, 2013), 93–113.
12  G. Andreou, “New Evidences Relating to the Studite Rite,”
BollGrott 3rd ser. 5 (2008): 33.
13  Y. Burns, “The Lectionary of the Patriarch of Constan­
tinople,” StP 15 (1984): 515–20 (TU, vol. 128). The seven days
are Easter, 11 May, 5 June, 1 September, 25 September, Holy
Thursday, and Holy Friday.
89
 Fig. 4.2.  of various SEL manuscripts.14 That theory has
Jaharis Lectionary, not been generally accepted, one reason being,
New York, perhaps, that her article did not initially receive
Metropolitan wide circulation. Another might be that the
Museum of Art, catalogue description of the manuscript dated
fol. 3r: Evangelist it broadly from the eleventh to the thirteenth
John (© The century.15 This small (242 × 180 mm), carefully
Metropolitan written book with minimal decoration should,
Museum of Art, however, be assigned to the eleventh century, a
courtesy Art
Resource, NY)
14  Y. Burns, “The Historical Events that Occasioned the
Inception of the Byzantine Gospel Lectionaries,” JÖB 32, no.  4
(1982): 119–27.
15  E. Feron and F. Battaglini, Codices manuscripti graeci Otto­
boniani Bibliothecae Vaticanae, etc. (Rome, 1893), 98–99.
more relevant date for the evolving notions of the
patriarchal lectionary.
Burns’s article was noted, however, by Mary-
Lyon Dolezal, who made the true beginning in
the quest for the patriarchal lectionary. In her
1991 dissertation Dolezal offered a thorough
review of the prior textual and art-historical
scholarship before turning to her topic, an
illustrated lectionary in the Vatican, gr. 1156
(GA ℓ 120). Dolezal showed its textual connec-
tions with several richly illuminated lectionar-
ies, Venice, Istituto Ellenico, cod. 2 (A) (GA ℓ
279), New York, Morgan Library M 639 (GA ℓ
381), and Oxford, Bodl. Lib. Auct. T. inf. 2.7
(GA ℓ 341), as well as Paris, BnF suppl. gr. 1096

90 Robert S. Nelson
(GA ℓ 374), which was written in 1070 by Peter
of the school of the Chalkoprateia, a church
near to and associated with Hagia Sophia.16 The
Venice lectionary, she noted, had long, detailed
instructions about rites for 1 September (Τάξις
καὶ ἀκολουθία, Order and Office). A procession
with the patriarch, the rest of the clergy, and the
laity formed at Hagia Sophia, proceeded up the
Mese, the principal avenue of Constantinople, to
the Forum of Constantine where the patriarch
read the lection, continued to the church of the
Chalkoprateia for the liturgy, and returned to the
cathedral.17 Previously Mateos had republished
those instructions, derived from a Kiev manu-
script (GA ℓ 1380), in an appendix to his edition
of the Typikon of the Great Church.18 Although
Dolezal sampled ninety-two lectionaries for her
dissertation, she had encountered this text in no
other manuscript and thus thought it a signifi-
cant hallmark of a patriarchal lectionary.
In addition to this and other distinctive
Constantinopolitan rites and commemorations
in the menologia, Dolezal also made an impor-
tant observation in the synaxarion concerning
rubrics about Hagia Sophia. The passage is found
in the lection for the fourth Sunday in the sec-
tion of Luke, and Gregory had cited it long ago
from a single manuscript that he purchased for
the Princeton Theological Seminary.19 Dolezal
observed that a few manuscripts, such as Vat.
gr. 1156, added a second reading to the fourth
Sunday in the Lukan section and preceded this
lection about paying tribute to Caesar (Lk.
20:21–25) with rubrics that mention a church
16  M.-L. Dolezal, “The Middle Byzantine Lectionary:
Textual and Pictorial Expression of Liturgical Ritual” (PhD
diss., University of Chicago, 1991), 146–47.
17  Ibid., 181. For the 1 September rites, see also P. Schreiner,
“Historisches und liturgisches zum byzantinischen Neujahr,”
RSBS 2 (1982): 13–23. The ritual is discussed in more detail in my
article, “Empathetic Vision: Looking at and with a Performative
Byzantine Miniature,” Art History 30 (2007): 489–502, esp.
493–500.
18  J. Mateos, ed. and trans., Le typicon de la Grande Église:
Ms. Sainte-Croix no. 40, Xe siècle (Rome, 1962–63), 2:200–203.
19  Οὕτως μὲν ἀναγινώσκεται καὶ τελεῖται εἰς τὰς ἔξω
ἐκκλησἰας· εἰς δὲ τὴν μεγάλην ἐκκλησίαν· τὸ ταῦτα λέγων ἐφώνει
οὐ λέγεται· ἀλλὰ τὸ ἐν ὑπομονῇ προστίθεται ταῦτα· ἀρχὴ τῆς
συνόδου. Gregory, Textkritik, 355 (Princeton Theological
Seminary 11.21.1900 [GA ℓ 303]). S. Kotzabassi and N. Patterson
Ševčenko, Greek Manuscripts at Princeton, Sixth to Nineteenth
Century: A Descriptive Catalogue (Princeton, 2010), 269–75.
Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
synod and stating that the lection was to be
read in the Great Church.20 The added second
lection, she noted, was not common, and she
pointed out that it appeared in the Morgan but
not the Venice lectionary. The rubrics in the
Vatican and Morgan manuscripts are distin-
guished from the biblical texts by being written
in semi-uncial script. Other manuscripts, as will
be discussed below, also change the ink color of
these instructions (Fig. 4.9). The preponderance
of other Constantinople rites in the manuscripts
of her group led Dolezal to conclude that they
were made for Hagia Sophia and, because of their
high-quality script and decoration, they must
have been intended for the patriarch himself.
The notion of a patriarchal lectionary thus began
to take form.
In 1996 Dolezal wrote a separate article on
the richly illustrated lectionary at the Dionysiou
monastery at Mt. Athos, cod. 587 (GA ℓ 1692) and
announced a monograph on middle Byzantine
lectionaries that has been long delayed because
of illness.21 Yet her work to date has not gone
unnoticed. Anna Zakharova, who has produced
important studies of lectionaries in Russian
collections, commented on it in her literature
review of 2005,22 and John Lowden built upon
Dolezal’s conclusions for his study of a heretofore
little known lectionary now at the Metropolitan
Museum in New York (GA ℓ 351) (Figs. 4.2, 4.3,
and 4.5), associating it with the above manu-
scripts, including Dionysiou 587, which, how-
ever, is a problematic member of the patriarchal
group.23 Drawing also upon the research on
20  Dolezal, “Middle Byzantine Lectionary,” 223–24.
21  M.-L. Dolezal, “Illuminating the Liturgical Word: Text
and Image in a Decorated Lectionary (Mount Athos, Dionysiou
Monastery, cod. 587),” Word and Image 12 (1996): 60.
22  A. Zakharova, “The Original Cycle of Miniatures in the
Trebizond Lectionary and Its Place in the Byzantine Tradition
of Lectionary Illustration,” Νέα Ῥώμη: Rivista di ricerche bizan-
tinistiche 2 (2005): 169–92.
23  J. Lowden, The Jaharis Gospel Lectionary: The Story of
a Byzantine Book (New York, 2009). He follows Dolezal in
accepting the Dionysiou manuscript into the group (p. 26).
In her dissertation (“Middle Byzantine Lectionary,” 197–215)
Dolezal was more cautious about its relationship with that
group, but she later argued for its use by the patriarch at Hagia
Sophia (“Illuminating the Liturgical Word,” 60). The manu-
script has a highly abbreviated text and is thus a SEL lection-
ary. Of all the textual hallmarks of a Patriarch manuscript,
as discussed below, it has only one (Oct. 26). In “An Imperial
91
 Fig. 4.3.  that the detailed rubrics for September 1 (Τάξις
Jaharis Lectionary,
New York,
Metropolitan
Museum of Art, fol.
22v: Initial (© The
Metropolitan
Museum of Art,
courtesy Art
Resource, NY)
menologia of Tomoyuki Masuda,24 Lowden
offered precisions concerning the relationships
of the manuscripts that Dolezal had isolated
and attributed a manuscript in Cambridge to
the patriarchal group.25 In particular, he noted
Lectionary in the Monastery of Dionysiu on Mount Athos:
Its Origin and Its Wanderings” (RESEE 7 [1969]: 239–53),
Weitzmann proposed that it was made for the Stoudios mon-
astery in Constantinople dedicated to John the Baptist. I think
this unlikely, however: the frame of its initial miniature of
the Anastasis contains a hierarchical arrangement with Mary
in the top center flanked by two angels and the twelve apos-
tles. At the bottom center on axis with Mary and Christ of the
Anastasis is an unidentified saint, but not John the Baptist. A
saint given this prominence is likely to be the patron of the mon-
astery for which the manuscript was made.
24  T. Masuda and R. Ebihara, “A Comparative Study of the
Synaxaria in the Middle Byzantine Illustrated Lectionaries”
(in Japanese), Bulletin of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies,
Waseda University 3 (2003): 82–89, available online at http://
www.waseda.jp/prj-med_inst/bulletin/bull03e.html, accessed
19 August 2014. I thank Yan Yang for translating this arti-
cle for me and Tomoyuki Masuda for sending me a group of
his articles, among which was “Liturgical Illustrations in the
Byzantine Lectionary Cod. 587 in the Dionysiou Monastery,
Mount Athos,” Orient 41 (2006): 91–108.
25  Cambridge, Univ. Lib. Dd.8.23 (GA ℓ 146): Lowden,
Jaharis Gospel Lectionary, 29. Another manuscript, Paris, BnF,
gr. 286 (GA ℓ 69), here discussed as patriarchal by Masuda,
92 Robert S. Nelson
καὶ ἀκολουθία) appeared not only in the Venice
lectionary, as Dolezal had observed, but also
in Oxford Auct. T. inf. 2.7, Paris, BnF, gr. 286
(GA ℓ 69) and the Cambridge manuscript, and
he agreed that it indicated a connection with the
patriarch and Hagia Sophia.
Lowden examined the entire menologion
section of this group of manuscripts and showed
that the closest textual relative to the Jaharis lec-
tionary was the Morgan M 639. The correspon-
dence of their entries is greater than 99 percent,
an affinity that distinguishes these books from
the other patriarchal manuscripts.26 A compari-
son of their scripts and initials, which are virtu-
ally identical, shows that this relationship is more
than textual. Both manuscripts were written in
the eleventh-century version of the Perlschrift, a
standardized script used especially for religious
manuscripts that left little room for personal
variation. The strong relationship would there-
fore not necessarily be indicated by the similar
scripts of the two lectionaries, were it not for
the agreement in their initials. Most epsilons in
the Jaharis manuscript are illuminated in several
colors, but a few are freely drawn in gold ink like
those in Morgan M639. In these examples (Figs.
4.3–4.6), what is shared is the shape of the letter,
the excrescences, the small circle around the bot-
tom of the letter, and the curving tail. For the tau
(Figs. 4.5 and 4.6), both letters have the same hor-
izontal bar that curves down and ends in a trefoil.
The vertical shafts are decorated with knobs and
an x. This is the work of the same scribe or the
same copying center, one that worked for or in
the patriarchate. By the accidents of history, two
manuscripts, made at the same time and place in
Constantinople, ended up centuries later near
each other in institutions—a museum and a rare
book library—in a city and even a continent that
no one could have imagined in eleventh-century
Byzantium.
In recent years, research on the lectionary
by liturgical scholars has not been as active as
that by art historians. Robert Taft wrote in 2011
that “from the liturgical point of view, at least,
had earlier been attributed to the same context by Velkovska,
“Studio dei lezionari bizantini,” 267.
26  Lowden, Jaharis Gospel Lectionary, 26–27.

Byzantine lectionary studies are still in their
infancy.”27 Several recent articles by the liturgical
scholar Elena Velkovska have nonetheless direct
bearing on the patriarchal lectionary. After pro-
ducing a dissertation on the lectionary of the Acts
and epistles, she turned to gospel lectionaries,28
writing an article about its study by liturgical
scholars and another that argued that Vat. gr.
2041 (GA ℓ 126, Fig. 4.14) should be identified
as a patriarchal lectionary.29 More recently she
has revisited Vat. Ottob. gr. 175 (GA ℓ 131), the
manuscript that Burns published in the 1980s,
and confirmed the book’s date in the later elev-
enth century. She provided the larger context for
the patriarchal identification, citing affiliations
with a euchologion of Hagia Sophia, Paris, BnF,
Coislin 213, which was written in Constantinople
in 1027 and with an undecorated lectionary, Vat.
27  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): 273.
28  Ibid., 274 n. 8.
29  Velkovska, “Studio dei lezionari bizantini,” 253–71; eadem,
“Il lezionario evangelico Vatican gr. 2041,” BollGrott n.s. 52
(1998): 153–59.
Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
Fig. 4.4. 
The Pierpont
Morgan Library,
New York, MS
M.639, fol. 89r:
Initial. Purchased by
J. P. Morgan (1867–
1943) in 1919 (© The
Pierpont Morgan
Library, New York)
gr. 2041, which can be dated to about 1025/1028.
Because of the dates of the last two manuscripts,
she argues that the creation of the patriarchal lec-
tionary most likely occurred during the first half
of the eleventh century.30
Wishing to enlarge this discussion of patri-
archal lectionaries, both decorated and undeco-
rated, I have taken a different tack. Earlier scholars
made a detailed investigation of either single man-
uscripts or small groups of manuscripts and their
entire calendars, a technique that can be com-
pared with the archaeological excavation of a rich
site over many years by means of deep trenches.
My approach resembles survey archaeology, for I
want to evaluate larger numbers of manuscripts to
search for other possible patriarchal lectionaries,
to define the limits of the genre, and to suggest top-
ics for future research—places to excavate. I have
studied approximately 130 manuscripts. The sam-
ple overlaps Dolezal’s to some extent, but it also
includes SEL lectionaries and is chronologically
30  Eadem, “Il lezionario patriarcale Ottoboni gr. 175,”
in Alethes philia: Studi in onore di Giancarlo Prato, ed. M.
D’Agostino and P. Degni, 2 vols. (Spoleto, 2010), 2:687–94.
93
 Fig. 4.5.  26 Oct. St. Demetrios and commemoration of
Jaharis Lectionary,
New York,
Metropolitan
Museum of
Art, fol. 50v:
Initial (© The
Metropolitan
Museum of Art,
courtesy Art
Resource, NY)
broader, ranging from the tenth through the
fourteenth centuries. I have concentrated on
manuscripts that have a plausible connection
with Constantinople. Rather than examining
the entire calendar of every manuscript, I have
chosen a smaller group of sixteen diagnostic texts
that earlier scholars found to be hallmarks of the
patriarchal lectionary. In addition to the Τάξις καὶ
ἀκολουθία and the double readings for the fourth
Sunday in the Lukan section of the synaxarion,
these include three of the seven days that the
patriarch read in the lections during the church
year (11 May, 5 June, 25 September), as described in
the 1 September text, and eleven other days.31 All
fourteen menologion entries either have rubrics
pertaining to Hagia Sophia or describe commem-
orations, churches, or chapels of Constantinople,
as follows:32
25 Sept. Litany of the Kampos, referring to a pro-
cession to the Hebdomon, outside the city
walls, where the patriarch read the lection33
31  Lowden, Jaharis Gospel Lectionary, 29.
32  This list is drawn from the Jaharis manuscript and
Lowden monograph (ibid., 94–117) unless noted otherwise.
See Lowden’s discussion “Constantinopolitan and Patriarchal
Indicators,” in ibid, 31–41.
33  Mateos, Typicon, 1:46–47.
94 Robert S. Nelson
great earthquake34
31 Oct. Dedication of an oratory of Theotokos in
patriarchate
1 Dec. Dedication of a naos in Palace
18 Dec. Dedication of Chalkoprateia35
22 Dec. Opening of Hagia Sophia36
23 Dec. Dedication of Hagia Sophia37
1 May. Dedication of Imperial Nea Basilica in
Palace38
11 May. Birthday of Constantinople, normally
referred to as “the city”39
5 June. Litany of the Kampos
16 July. A lengthy text about the 4th and 5th
Ecumenical Church Councils with instruc-
tions about its celebration in Hagia Sophia40
31 July. Adoration of the Holy Cross
16 Aug. Deposition of the Mandylion41
31 Aug. Deposition of the Virgin’s girdle at the
Chalkoprateia42
A reasonable place to begin is the lectionary in
Kiev (Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, Φ.
301 (KDA), 23 л = GA ℓ 1380) that has been men-
tioned in prior discussions of patriarchal lection-
aries, because it is the source for the procession on
1 September in which the patriarch took part and
34  For the earthquake, see Synaxarium ecclesiae Constanti­
nopolitanae, ed. H. Delehaye (Brussels, 1902), cols. 163–66.
On the earthquake commemorated, see B. Croke, “Two Early
Byzantine Earthquakes and Their Liturgical Commemoration,”
Byzantion 51 (1981): 122–47.
35  Delehaye, Synaxarium, col. 324.
36  Ibid., col. 338.
37  Ibid., col. 340.
38  R. Janin, La géographie ecclésiastique de l’Empire byzantin,
pt. 1, vol. 3, Les églises et les monastères, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1969),
361–64. The actual commemoration from the emperor’s per-
spective is described in Constantine Porphyrogennetos, The
Book of Ceremonies, trans. A. Moffatt and M. Tall (Canberra,
2012), 1:118–21. See also P. Magdalino, “Observations on the Nea
Ekklesia of Basil I,” JÖB 37 (1987): 55–56; G. Dagron, Emperor
and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium (New York, 2003),
208. The event is commemorated in Delehaye, Synaxarium,
col. 648.
39  Noted in Delehaye, Synaxarium, col. 674.
40  Noted by Dolezal (“Middle Byzantine Lectionary,” 249–
51) in Vat. gr. 1156 and the Venice, Morgan, and Oxford lec-
tionaries of the patriarchal group. Mentioned in Delehaye,
Synaxarium, col. 826.
41  Noted in Delehaye, Synaxarium, cols. 893–901.
42  Noted in ibid., cols. 935–36.

read the lection.43 The Τάξις καὶ ἀκολουθία text
was initially published by Aleksei Dmitrievskii
from the Kiev manuscript and then republished
by Mateos. Dmitrievskii printed the full text that
appears in the lectionary, but Mateos inexplica-
bly omitted several lines at the end, thus leav-
ing the procession at the Chalkoprateia before
it returned to Hagia Sophia.44 The continuation
is found in the Venice lectionary (GA ℓ 279) and
the other manuscripts of the patriarchal group.45
Textually, the Kiev lectionary bears most of
the hallmarks of a patriarchal lectionary and
includes, for example, the list of the lections that
43  I. Ševčenko et al., eds., Greek Manuscripts in the Collections
of Kyiv: Catalogue (Washington, DC, 2000), 40–41.
44  A. Dmitrievskii, Opisanie liturgicheshikh rukopisei, khrani-
ashchikhsia v bibliotekakh pravoslavnogo Vostoka (Hildesheim,
1965), 1:152–54; Mateos, Typicon, 2:200–203. Lowden ( Jaharis
Gospel Lectionary, 28) translated the version in Mateos.
45  As listed by Lowden (ibid., 28), besides the Venice manu-
script, Oxford Auct. T. inf. 2.7, Paris, BnF gr. 286, and Cam­
bridge, Univ. Lib. Dd 8.23.
Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
Fig. 4.6. 
The Pierpont
Morgan Library,
New York, MS
M.639, fol. 62r:
Initial. Purchased
by J. P. Morgan
(1867–1943) in 1919
(© The Pierpont
Morgan Library,
New York)
the patriarch would read during the church year
(Fig. 4.7).46
Velkovska listed the Kiev lectionary as a
member of the patriarchal group but no details of
the actual manuscript, including its current shelf
mark, have been reported in this context.47 This
eleventh-century weekday lectionary is well writ-
ten in Perlschrift in the standard two columns
and has original quire signatures on the lower
margins of the first and last pages of quires. The
book’s simple decoration begins with a Π-shaped
headpiece at the beginning of the lectionary
46  I have studied the manuscript in Kiev and Münster. Of the
sixteen diagnostic texts, the Kiev lectionary has at least thirteen:
the long text for September 1, the two lections for the fourth
Sunday in the Lukan section with rubrics in semi-uncials, and
at least eleven of the fourteen calendar entries. It is missing an
entry for 26 October. I could not read the entries on the INTF
microfilm for 18 December and 16 August. I am grateful for the
assistance of Olenka Pevny in Kiev.
47  Greek Manuscripts in the Collections of Kyiv, 40–41.
Peter Schreiner (“Byzantinischen Neujahr,” 15) is critical of
Dmitrievskii for not providing an accurate citation of the
manuscript.
95
(Fig. 4.8); smaller horizontal bands mark sec-
tions for Matthew and Mark. The filling orna-
ment is the Blütenblattstil that Weitzmann
identified for the tenth century and which lin-
gers into later centuries. It is thus of little help
in dating the manuscript.48 The closest analogue
to the Kiev lectionary is Paris, BnF, gr. 386; both
are well-written manuscripts with simple head-
bands making major textual divisions. These are
examples of more ordinary lectionaries for Hagia
Sophia, the adjacent patriarchate, or dependent
churches in the eleventh century.
One reason that the Kiev manuscript has
heretofore not been studied as a manuscript is
that art historians working on lectionaries have
naturally privileged deluxe illustrated manu-
scripts. It has even been argued that the patriarch
would not have read the lection from a compara-
tively humble manuscript like the undecorated
Vat. Ottob. gr. 175.49 The latter contains only
those lections that the patriarch read, however,
and it thus would have had been of little use to
anyone but him. Surveying a broader range of
lectionaries has turned up various styles of man-
uscripts, some simple, some ornate, suggesting
that the patriarchate may have employed a range
of lectionaries on different occasions or in dif-
ferent spaces. Not every lectionary read in the
liturgies of Hagia Sophia or the patriarchate
and its allied churches need have been a deluxe
manuscript; indeed, the aforementioned 1396
inventory of the treasury of Hagia Sophia distin-
guishes between those lectionaries with ornate
covers that are stored in the treasury and another
evangelion, termed daily (καθημερινόν), that was
kept in the church.50
Liturgical practices changed at Hagia Sophia
during the middle of the eleventh century. The
emperor Constantine Monomachos (r. 1042–
1055) made a donation to the church that fur-
nished it with rich liturgical objects and made
it possible to add more services. Formerly, the
liturgy had been celebrated only on Saturday,
Sunday, and the great feasts, but the emperor’s
48  K. Weitzmann, Die byzantinische Buchmalerei des 9. und
10. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, 1996), 1:22–34.
49  Lowden, Jaharis Gospel Lectionary, 31.
50  See n. 8 above.
96 Robert S. Nelson
bequest allowed for daily liturgies to be added.51
This would have required more and different
manuscripts—at a minimum, lectionaries with
weekday feasts. The Kiev manuscript, which
contains pericopes for all the days of the year, is
an example of the type of text needed after the
emperor’s bequest.
Two other lectionaries of similar character
and provenance are presently in the Balkans—
Sofia, Dujčev Research Center D. gr. 157 (GA ℓ
1068) and Ochrid, Nat. Mus. 4 (GA ℓ 1970).52
The former manuscript has a miniature of
Symeon Stylites at the beginning of the menolo-
gium, 1 September being his feast day, but other-
wise both manuscripts are decorated only with
horizontal bands of ornament separating textual
divisions. The Ochrid lectionary has the double
readings for the fourth Sunday of Luke joined
by rubrics in semi-uncial script; the Sofia manu-
script lacks the second lection. Neither has the
long set of instructions for 1 September, but the
percentage of test entries in their menologia cor-
respond reasonably well to patriarchal lectionar-
ies: 13 of 14 and 11 of 14 in the Sofia and Ochrid
manuscripts, respectively.
The latter lectionary begins to test the limits
of the relationship with patriarchal lectionaries,
but with two other manuscripts that issue cannot
be avoided. What, for example, is one to make of
the aforementioned eleventh-century lectionary
at the Princeton Theological Seminary, which
Gregory cited for its rubrics in the lesson for the
fourth Sunday of Luke? As in a patriarchal lec-
tionary, those rubrics are written in semi-uncial
script (fol. 127r) that its scribe must have copied
from an exemplar produced ultimately in the
patriarchate, although this feature alone need
not necessarily make a manuscript patriarchal,
as a later lectionary in Chicago proves.53 Unlike
51  Lowden, Jaharis Gospel Lectionary, 16. See Ioannis Scylitzae
Synopsis historiarum, ed. H. Thurn, CFHB, vol. 5 (New York,
1973), 477; trans. J. Wortley, John Skylitzes: A Synopsis of
Byzantine History, 811–1057 (New York, 2010), 444–45.
52  A. Dzhurova, Rayonnement de Byzance: Les manuscrits
grecs enluminés des Balkans (VIe–XVIIIe siècles). Catalogue
d’exposition, XXIIe Congrès internationales d’ études byzantines,
Sofia, 22–27 août 2011 (Sofia, 2011), 117–18.
53  Chicago, University of Chicago Library, ms. 715 (GA ℓ
1642), available online at http://goodspeed.lib.uchicago.edu/
ms/index.php?doc=0715, accessed 6 June 2015. At fol. 77r, the
rubrics in red are visible between the two readings. Bruce M.
Fig. 4.7.  Kiev, Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, Φ. 301 (KDA), 23 л, fol. 224r (photo V. Vernadsky,
© National Library of Ukraine)

Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople 97

 Fig. 4.8. 
Kiev, Vernadsky
National Library
of Ukraine, Φ. 301
(KDA), 23 л, fol. 1r
(photo V. Vernadsky,
© National Library
of Ukraine)
the  latter, the Princeton lectionary is plausibly
from Constantinople and from the eleventh cen-
tury, the prime period for patriarchal lectionar-
ies. It has only half of the fourteen test entries
in the menologion, however, and the omitted
citations are among the more obscure ones, e.g.,
31 October, the dedication of an oratory in the
patriarchate; 18 December, the dedication of the
Chalkoprateia; or 1 May, the dedication of the
Nea church in the Palace.54 Similar issues obtain
with a lectionary in Athens, Nat. Lib. cod. 2676
Metzger cited the manuscript for this reading in The Saturday
and Sunday Lessons from Luke in the Greek Gospel Lectionary
(Chicago, 1944), 77, together with GA ℓ 374 (Paris, BnF suppl.
gr. 1081), which has been mentioned above for its relation to the
patriarchate. Of thirteenth-century date, the Chicago manu-
script is neither patriarchal nor Constantinopolitan. Measured
by the hallmarks of a patriarchal lectionary, it agrees only par-
tially with the entry for 26 October. Its script and ornament
are provincial.
54  For the menologion contents, see Kotzabassi and Ševčenko,
Greek Manuscripts at Princeton, 269–72.
98 Robert S. Nelson
(GA ℓ 1813) of the later eleventh century.55 It
presents the two readings for the fourth Sunday
in Luke but omits the connecting rubrics that
mention the Great Church. Like the Princeton
lectionary, Athens 2676 also lacks the long dis-
cussion of the rites for 1 September (Τάξις καὶ
ἀκολουθία). Its Menologion is damaged but, as
in the Princeton manuscript, only half of those
entries that are preserved match the patriarchal
lectionaries.56
The examples of two other Constantinopoli­
tan lectionaries in Athens provide evidence at the
opposite end of what may prove, once more data
are assembled, to be a continuum from complete
agreement to no agreement with a patriarchal
lectionary. The first, Athens, National Library,
55  A. Marava-Chatzinicolaou and C. Toufexi-Paschou,
Catalogue of the Illuminated Byzantine Manuscripts of the
National Library of Greece, vol. 1, Manuscripts of New Testament
Texts 10th to 12th Century (Athens, 1978), 163–65.
56  In agreement with the patriarchal lectionaries are the
entries for 26 October and 18, 22 and 23 December. The manu-
script breaks off in January.
cod. 2804 (GA ℓ 1530), has been plausibly attrib-
uted to the Stoudios monastery on the basis of
script and decoration.57 Its Blütenblattstil orna-
ment resembles other Stoudite manuscripts,
although its evangelist portraits are anomalous.
It has little textual affinity with a patriarchal lec-
tionary. Of the sixteen criteria for the latter, the
Athens manuscripts has perhaps only one, the
entry for 11 May, the birthday of “the City,” as
Constantinople was commonly denoted.58 The
second Athens lectionary, National Library cod.
2363 (GA ℓ 1805), again has ornament in the style
and of the quality of Constantinople, as others
have observed.59 In this Saturday/Sunday lec-
tionary, the commemoration on 16 December
of Nicholas, the patriarch of Constantinople,
termed the “founder,” and the opening of the
church on 14 August have rightly been seen as
significant. The manuscript may have been made
for the use of a monastery on Mt. Olympos.60 It
has none of the textual characteristics of a patri-
archal lectionary.
Finally, three candidates for patriarchal lec-
tionaries—London, British Library Add. 39603;
Moscow, State Historical Museum, gr. 225; and
Istanbul, Ecumenical Patriarchate cod. 8—and
the recently discovered and still little published
manuscripts of the sacristy of the Vatopedi
monastery on Mt. Athos illustrate some of the
potentials and problems of the category.61 The
first, London, British Library Add. 39603 (GA ℓ
233), belongs to a small group of lectionaries
entirely written within a cruciform text block
57  Marava-Chatzinicolaou and Toufexi-Paschou, Catalogue,
1:88–95; I. Hutter, “Le copiste du Métaphraste: On a Centre for
Manuscript Production in Eleventh Century Constantinople,”
in I manoscritti greci tra riflessione e dibattito: Atti del V
Colloquio Internazionale di Paleografia Greca (Cremona, 4–10
ottobre 1998), ed. G. Prato, 3 vols. (Florence, 2000), 2:556–57.
58  This entry also mentions the Great Church, as in patriar-
chal manuscripts. There might be a few more correspondences
because the folios of the calendar after June are confused and
difficult to sort out on the INTF microfilm.
59  Marava-Chatzinicolaou and Toufexi-Paschou, Catalogue,
1:149–54; Hutter, “Copiste du Métaphraste,” 559–60, 562–68,
573, 582.
60  Hutter, “Copiste du Métaphraste,” 567.
61  Another manuscript that should be studied further, but has
not been because a microfilm was not available at the INTF, is
Odessa, Historical Museum, Ms. ПИ–2251 (GA ℓ 1554), cited
by Lowden, Jaharis Gospel Lectionary, 87.
Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
(Fig. 4.9).62 Jeffrey Anderson devoted a mono-
graph to these lectionaries, focusing on one in the
Morgan Library in New York, M. 692 (GA ℓ 1635).
In the London manuscript, as in the others of the
group, prominent textual divisions are denoted by
full-page titles enclosed in cross-shaped frames of
Blütenblatt ornament set off by eight palmettes at
the corners.63 The ornamental palmettes appear
in the same positions on the following unframed,
cruciform text pages (Fig. 4.9). Another indica-
tion of luxury is the text layout itself. Writing in a
cruciform instead of the standard rectangular for-
mat, it has been estimated, necessitates 20 percent
more parchment for the same amount of text, and
parchment is a significant part of the high mate-
rial cost of a medieval book.64
The London manuscript contains only the
first half of the lectionary, the synaxarion, in its
196 folios. A band of ornament on the last page
marks the conclusion of this section and indi-
cates that the menologion would have followed
in a companion volume that is no longer extant
or has not yet been identified. This is unfortu-
nate since most of the hallmarks of a patriarchal
lectionary are found in this later section, but the
synaxarion does have two lections for the fourth
Sunday for Luke. In between are the rubrics that
mention the Great Church, written in semi-
uncial script as in patriarchal manuscripts, such
as Vat. gr. 1156 or Morgan M 639, but in this case
the scribe further calls attention to this passage
by the use of gold ink (Fig. 4.9). Two other cru-
ciform lectionaries lack the double reading for
this lection and their calendars are also unrelated
to the patriarchal group.65 Thus, the cruciform
62  J. C. Anderson, The New York Cruciform Lectionary (Uni­
versity Park, PA, 1992), 76–80; S. McKendrick, in Byzantium:
Treasures of Byzantine Art and Culture from British Collections,
ed. D. Buckton (London, 1994), 163–64. The London manu-
script has been digitized and is available on the website of the
British Library, at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.
aspx?ref=Add_MS_39603, accessed 6 June 2015.
63  Anderson, New York Cruciform Lectionary, figs. 43–47.
64  M. Takiguchi, “Some Greek Gospel Manuscripts in the
British Library: Examples of the Byzantine Book as Holy
Receptacle and Bearer of Hidden Meaning,” eBLJ (2011), art
no. 13, p. 11, at http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2011articles/article13.html,
accessed 6 June 2015.
65  New York, Morgan M 692 (GA ℓ 1635) and Washington,
Dumbarton Oaks, cod. 1 (GA ℓ 2139); for their calendars, see
Anderson, New York Cruciform Lectionary, 43–59 and 84,
respectively.
99
Fig. 4.9.  London, British Library, Add. 39603, fol. 128r (photo courtesy of the British Library)

100 Robert S. Nelson

lectionaries that Anderson studied are not as uni-
fied textually as they are artistically, which has
implications for the production or patronage of
lectionaries. Finally, it should be noted that the
same cross-shaped text block with eight corner
palmettes appears at the end of Vat. gr. 1156.66
The second lectionary is the aforementioned
manuscript, Moscow gr. 225 (GA ℓ 49) that
Nikephoros Moschopoulos most likely had trans-
ferred to Mistra in the early fourteenth century
(Figs. 4.1 and 4.10 and p. 87 above). To be pre-
cise, what is known is that Moschopoulos and his
library left Constantinople for Mistra in 1305, and
that in 1311/12 he donated this lectionary to the
church of the Brontochion in Mistra.67 Although
likely, this is not sufficient to prove that the lec-
tionary was among the books of Moschopoulos
that were brought from Constantinople. A
closer examination of the manuscript, however,
reveals more of its history. As Boris Fonkich has
observed, the first part of the book was copied
in the second half of the eleventh century in a
writing style of high quality that he attributed
it to the “imperial scriptorium.” In contrast, the
second half of the manuscript, fols. 287–437,
was written at the end of the thirteenth or the
beginning of the fourteenth century in a man-
ner of the Atelier of the Palaiologina, the leading
style of deluxe manuscripts in early Palaiologan
Constantinople, as discussed below.68
The older part consists of the synaxarion that
extends through Cheesefare week and the section
66  Takiguchi, “Greek Gospel Manuscripts in the British
Library,” fig. 5.
67  It has been proposed that Nikephoros Moschopoulos was
the guiding intellectual spirit behind the sophisticated pro-
gram of the narthex frescoes of the church of the Brontochion.
See R. Etzeoglou, Ο Νάος της Οδηγητρίας του Βροντοχίου στον
Μυστρά: Οι τοιχογραφίες του νάρθηκα και η λειτουργική χρήση
του χώρου (Athens, 2013), 175–79, 206–7.
68  Fonkich, Grecheskie rukopisi (n. 2 above); B. Fonkić,
“Scriptoria bizantini: Risultati e prospettive della ricerca,”
RSBN n.s. 17–19 (1980–82): 114. Fonkich assigned the script to
what is known as the Atelier of the Palaiologina. While I agree
that the archaizing script is from that period of book production
in Constantinople, the ornament of this section of the manu-
script does not agree with the Atelier’s work, and as discussed
below, the text of the menologion is not similar to that of the
Atelier’s lectionaries. On the earlier script of the manuscript,
see N. F. Kavrus, “Imperatorskii skriptorii v XI veke,” VV 48
(1987): 134–42. The similar scripts that appear in the patriar-
chal lectionaries suggest a patriarchal rather than an imperial
scriptorium of some sort.
Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
of Luke. Beginning with the first Saturday of
Lent, the more recent scribe took over and con-
tinued through the menologion to the end of the
book. The decoration of the first part belongs to
the eleventh century and presently includes two
evangelist portraits that continue types from
the tenth century as well as square frames for
titles filled with the standard ornament of the
period.69 The script style of the latter half of
the manuscript is the archaizing minuscule of
the early Palaiologan period. The square panel
of ornament that introduces the first Saturday of
Lent in the later section is drawn with pen and
ink and consists of a centralized pattern of over-
lapping vines. The design owes its inspiration
ultimately to Islamic sources (Fig. 4.10).70 Such
designs resemble the headpieces of a gospel book
in Athens, Nat. Lib. cod. 2251 (GA 808), whose
date is not without issue, but can reasonably be
assigned to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth
century.71 In the Moscow and Athens manu-
scripts, the scribal ornament features large fleshy
leaves that are expertly drawn but uncolored.
Because the script and decoration of the latter
part of the Moscow manuscript may be attributed
to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century,
this part of the manuscript coincides with the
ownership of Nikephoros Moschopoulos, who
is the likely sponsor of the changes to the ear-
lier lectionary. The revisions were executed more
likely in Constantinople than in Mistra, because
contemporary manuscripts produced in Mistra
are no match for the quality of workmanship of
the Palaiologan section.72 Moreover, since both
earlier and later parts of the Moscow lectionary
69  The portrait of Luke from the manuscript was discovered
by Elina Dobrynina in another Moscow manuscript; see E. N.
Dobrynina, “O proiskhozhdenii miniatiury s evangelistom
Lukoi v grecheskom Tolkovom Evangelii tret’ei chetverti XII
v. (RGADA, F.1607, OP.1, N° 3),” in Obraz Vizantii: Sbornik
statei v chest´ O.S. Popovoi, ed. A. V. Zakharova (Moscow, 2008),
154–62, 644. I thank Alexander Saminsky for this reference.
70  R. S. Nelson, “Palaeologan Illuminated Ornament and the
Arabesque,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 41 (1988): 7–22.
71  Marava-Chatzinicolaou and Toufexi-Paschou, Catalogue of
the Illuminated Byzantine Manuscripts of the National Library
of Greece, vol. 2, Manuscripts of New Testament Texts 13th to 15th
Century (Athens, 1985), 82–93.
72  R. Etzeoglou, “ ‘ Ἐγράφη ἐν τῷ Μυζιθρᾶ’: Βιβλιογραφικές
δραστηριότητες στον Μυστρά κατά τον 13ο και τον 14ο αιώνα,”
ΔΧΑΕ, ser. 4, 26 (2005): 181–92.
101
 Fig. 4.10. 
Moscow, State
Historical Museum,
gr. 225, fol. 287r
(photo courtesy
State Historical
Museum)
are Constantinopolitan, the proedros must have
brought the manuscript with him when he left
for Mistra in 1305, rather than acquiring it there;
the terminus ante quem for the later part of the
manuscript is therefore 1305.
The synaxarion section of the Moscow vol-
ume has the telltale reading for the fourth Sunday
of Luke, viz., the double lection, separated by the
usual rubrics written in red semi-uncial script,
but since the menologion section was replaced
by the Palaiologan scribe, this lectionary, like
the previous one in London, has lost its eleventh-
century menologion. Thus, there is no textual
evidence available to prove or disprove an associa-
tion with the patriarchal group other than a less-
than-strong argument about provenance. As a
high ranking prelate, Moschopoulos presumably
had access to important manuscripts. However,
the eleventh-century illumination of manuscript
102 Robert S. Nelson
is Constantinopolitan and its initial miniature of
the evangelist John (Fig. 4.1), framed by a broad
band of ornament and spanning both columns of
text at the opening of the lectionary, resembles
the similarly framed evangelist in the Jaharis lec-
tionary (Fig. 4.2).73
The evidence is more extensive for the third
manuscript, Ecumenical Patriarchate skeuo-
phylakion cod. 8 (GA ℓ 1780).74 A few of its
twenty-five illustrations were published by
73  Dobrynina has independently reached similar conclusions
about the style of the illumination in the Moscow lectionary,
as she reported in a paper given in Moscow in the fall of 2013.
There she announced a forthcoming publication on the manu-
script with Rodoniki Etzeoglou. I thank Elena Dobrynina for
kindly sending me an abstract of her paper.
74  M. Kouroupou and P. Géhin, Catalogue des manuscrits
conservés dans la Bibliothèque du Patriarcat Œcuménique: Les
manuscrits du monastère de la Panaghia de Chalki (Turnhout,
2008), 1:409–11. The authors were able to study the lectionary
Georgios Soteriou in this catalogue of the collec-
tions of the patriarchate in 1937,75 but like other
manuscripts in that library and especially in the
skeuophylakion, it has received no recent study.
Textually, the manuscript meets all the criteria of
a patriarchal lectionary: the double lections for
the fourth Sunday of Luke, the long note discuss-
ing the rites for 1 September, and all of the diag-
nostic calendar entries.76 Unfortunately, it has
not been possible to illustrate its figural initials
and marginal miniatures, but the microfilm of
the manuscript at the INTF, on which this study
has been based, has been digitized, uploaded to
the web, and can be consulted.77 Its illumination
provides further links with patriarchal lectionar-
ies. The title of the first lection is written within
a quatrefoil set inside a square panel of rich orna-
ment. From the diagonal corners of the cen-
tral quatrefoil spout large acanthus plants that
generate spiraling vines populated by birds and
diverse animals. This same design also appears
on the first lectionary headpiece in other patri-
archal lectionaries in Oxford and Rome (Figs.
4.11 and 4.12). The Istanbul version is the most
elaborate, because of its extensive menagerie, and
finds a close analogue in another lectionary at the
Iviron monastery on Mt. Athos, cod. 46m (GA ℓ
2267).78 Irmgard Hutter published the Iviron and
Oxford manuscripts as part of a group of related
eleventh-century illuminations.79 Artistically,
the connections are not to be denied, but they
raise other issues. Although its ornament is of
high quality and surely Constantinopolitan,
the text of the Iviron lectionary is not securely
patriarchal and belongs in the same ambigu-
ous category as the aforementioned lectionary
at the Princeton Theological Seminary.80 The
only on microfilm, as was I (GA ℓ 1780; for the INTF database,
see chap. 1 n. 11 above), accessed 8 June 2015.
75  G. A. Soteriou, Κειμήλια τοῦ Οἰκουμενικοῦ Πατριαρχείου:
Πατριαρχικὸς ναὸς καὶ σκευοφυλάκιον (Athens, 1937), 86–92.
76  The only deviation from the pattern is the rubrics between
the two lections for the fourth Sunday for Luke, fol. 114v. These
are not written in semi-uncial script.
77  See n. 74 above.
78  Pelekanidis et al., Οἱ Θησαυροὶ τοῦ Ἁγίου Ὄρους, 2:330 and
fig. 151.
79  Hutter, “Copiste du Métaphraste,” 568–71.
80  Textually, the Iviron lectionary (studied at INTF) does not
quite qualify as patriarchal. While it has some textual hallmarks,
Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
figural illustrations in the Istanbul manuscript
find their closest companions in the Venice lec-
tionary, Istituto Ellenico, cod. 2 (A) (GA ℓ 279).
The latter and Vat. gr. 1156 are the most densely
illustrated of the patriarchal lectionaries, the for-
mer concentrating its miniatures in the synax-
arion, the latter in the menologion. In contrast,
the Istanbul lectionary spreads its illustrations
more evenly across both sections, thirteen in
the first part and twelve in the second. Like the
Venice manuscript (Fig. 4.13), it favors marginal
illustrations that span columns, as in the case of
the resurrection of Lazaros. In the Istanbul ver-
sion (fol. 196r), Christ stands in the inner margin
making the gesture of speech just below the line
with the word Lazaros in the vocative, as he says
in a “loud voice, ‘Lazaros, come out’” (Jn. 11:43).
Bound tightly, Lazaros is entombed between the
two text columns; the stone opening of the sep-
ulcher is at his feet. This scene, not illustrated
in the Vatican lectionary, is virtually the same
in the Venice manuscript (Fig. 4.13) and follows
traditional iconography in its basic elements.81 In
more elaborate renditions, Jesus is surrounded by
groups of figures, including Mary and Martha,
the sisters of Lazaros.82 The version in the two
lectionaries strips the narrative down to its basics:
Jesus, Lazaros, and the tomb. Jesus stands next to
the relevant word in the text, “Lazaros,” so that
his outstretched arm can visually declaim it. In
the Venice manuscript (Fig. 4.13), the bound
corpse has been moved away from Jesus’s words
and action to allow for the large initial tau for the
next lection. In this respect, the Istanbul scribe/
illuminator has better positioned text and image
for their mutual correspondence and coherence.
To the vignette of Lazaros, the Venice illumi-
nator has added a small house to give the impres-
sion of a tomb, and in general, when scenes can be
compared between the two manuscripts, those
it lacks many others. It has two lections for the fourth Sunday in
Luke, but not the rubrics in between the lections that mention
the Great Church. It lacks the long 1 September text and the
relevant notices for 1, 22, 23 December, 1 May, and 16 and 31 July.
81  H. Omont, Évangiles avec peintures byzantines du XIe
siècle: Reproduction des 361 miniatures de manuscrit grec 74 de
la Bibliothèque nationale (Paris, 1908), 2: pl. 165; T. Velmans, Le
tétraèvangile de la Laurentienne, Florence, Laur. VI. 23 (Paris,
1971), fig. 288.
82  Cf. Mt. Athos, Dionysiou 587, in Pelekanidis et al., Οἱ
Θησαυροὶ τοῦ Ἁγίου Ὄρους, 1: fig. 221.
103
Fig. 4.11.  Oxford, Bodl. Lib. Auct. T. inf. 2.7, fol. 2r (with the permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The
University of Oxford)

104 Robert S. Nelson

Fig. 4.12.  Rome, Bibl. Vat. gr. 1156, fol. 2r (with the permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, all
rights reserved)

Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople 105

 Fig. 4.13. 
Venice, Istituto
Ellenico, cod. 2
(A), fol. 253r:
Resurrection of
Lazarus (photo
courtesy Istituto
Ellenico di Studi
Byzantini e
Postbyzantini
di Venezia)
in the Venice lectionary are slightly more elabo-
rate. For example, in the Istanbul lessons about
Jesus and the Samaritan women (fol. 14r) or the
blind man (fol. 20r), the illustrations are bundled
together into a figural initial, whereas in the Venice
versions (fols. 32r, 40r),83 the figures are spread out
between the columns, allowing for more pictorial
detail. Similarly both manuscripts illustrate the
pericope of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples,
but while the Venice lectionary shows several men,
the Istanbul manuscript illustrates only Peter. In
both cases, the lection is for Holy Thursday, when
the patriarch himself read from the lectionary,
according to one of the texts that follow the Τάξις
καὶ ἀκολουθία found before 1 September in both
manuscripts or on the verso of the folio illustrated
from the Kiev lectionary (Fig. 4.7).84
83  Available online at http://www.istitutoellenico.org/
biblioteca/index.html, accessed 8 June 2015.
84  Istanbul, Patriarchate 8, fol. 265r; Venice, Istituto cod. 2
(A), fol. 328v.
106 Robert S. Nelson
The main difference between the two
manuscripts, however, is the relative density of
illustration—the Venice lectionary has eighty-
eight illustrations versus the twenty-five in the
Istanbul manuscript. Thus, while the iconogra-
phy of some scenes has a clear relationship, the
overall programs differ. The shorter cycle is not
simply a reduced version of the longer one. The
Istanbul lectionary illustrates several lections
that are either ignored or not illustrated in the
same manner in the Venice and Vatican manu-
scripts, as, for example, the marginal miniature
of Jesus standing over the Son of Perdition (Jn.
17:12, fol. 320r).85 The Istanbul manuscript sup-
ports the conclusion that Dolezal reached about
the other decorated patriarchal lectionaries: each
has a unique program of illumination.86
In the Istanbul manuscript, annotations
at the end of the calendar entry for 31 August
85  Soteriou, Κειμήλια, 89.
86  Dolezal, “Middle Byzantine Lectionary,” 64.
(fol. 332v) provide information about the book’s
history in the fifteenth century.87 Here two
notes describe the final days of the last emperor
of Trebizond, David I. In 1461 he surrendered
his city to Mehmed the Conqueror in exchange
for keeping his life and movable property. The
former emperor was first sent to Istanbul and
then to Adrianople, the previous Ottoman
capital.88 According to the notes in the Istanbul
lectionary, David was imprisoned in a tower in
Adrianople on 26 March 1463 and executed on
1 November in Constantinople. Similar and
slightly more detailed entries about these events
appear in a London manuscript that was cop-
ied by a scribe who has been identified as the
Trebizond intellectual George Amiroutzes.89
A trusted official of the Komnenian emperor,
Amiroutzes later switched sides and joined the
court of Mehmed the Conqueror in Adrianople
and Constantinople. The London notices add
that the emperor of Trebizond was imprisoned in
Constantinople near the Stoudios church before
he was executed. The London note is the work of
a well-informed local informant.90 The slightly
briefer variant in the lectionary may indicate
that it, too, was written by someone local, that
is, someone in Constantinople. If so, the manu-
script had presumably remained there since the
eleventh century.
The last entry in the manuscript attests that
by the later sixteenth century it belonged to the
imperial and patriarchal monastery of St. John
Prodromos at Sozopoulos on the Black Sea coast
of Bulgaria, a monastery of medieval origins.91 In
87  Kouroupou and Géhin, Catalogue, 1:410.
88  W. Miller, Trebizond: The Last Greek Empire (London,
1926), 104–6.
89  E. Gamillscheg, “Der Kopist des Par.gr. 428 und das Ende
der Grosskomnenen,” JÖB 36 (1986): 295–96. On Amiroutzes,
see ODB 1:77–78; PLP 1:784.
90  The fall of Trebizond, the capture of its emperor, and the
return of the Ottoman fleet to Constantinople made a strong
impression on the scribe of a Latin manuscript who was in that
city at that time. He recorded these details in a colophon of 1461.
See E. H. Wilkins, “The Harvard Manuscript of Petrarch’s
Africa,” Harvard Library Bulletin 12 (1958): 321.
91  I consulted the useful entry by Kazimir Popkonstantinov
and Rossina Kostova, “Medieval Monasteries on the West Black
Sea Coast,” Encyclopaedia of the Hellenic World, Black Sea (2008),
online at http://kassiani.fhw.gr/blacksea/forms/fLemmaBody
Extended.aspx?lemmaID=10647, accessed 23 November 2015.
Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
1629 the monks of Sozopoulos and their manu-
scripts migrated to the monastery of the Panagia
on the island of Chalki near Constantinople.92
The bulk of that monastic collection was trans-
ferred to the patriarchate library in 1936. Because
of the return of the lectionary to Istanbul, it
again became patriarchal, and the Ecumenical
Patriarch has the possibility to read the lection
from the same manuscript that his eleventh-
century predecessors may have used. In so doing,
he would thereby reestablish liturgical, if not spa-
tial continuity across many fraught centuries.
The last lectionaries to be discussed in this
section are two in the skeuophylakion of the
Vatopedi monastery, a collection that became
known to the scholarly world in the 1990s and
will be published in detail by Erich Lamberz
and Sotiris Kadas.93 For the purposes of this
study, the most promising and disappointing is
the handsome and well-illustrated ms. 3 (GA ℓ
2422). John Lowden reproduced a color image of
the opening for 1 September and Sotiris Kadas
has provided details of a number of the manu-
script’s marginal illustrations.94 The latter invite
comparison with the aforementioned Venice and
Vatican (gr. 1156) lectionaries and should be cred-
ited to Constantinopolitan scribes and illumina-
tors of the second half of the eleventh century.
Despite its having many traits in common with
manuscripts made for the use of Hagia Sophia,
skeuophylakion ms. 3 is not a patriarchal lection-
ary. It lacks the double lection and the rubrics
for the fourth Sunday of Luke and the proto-
col for 1 September (Τάξις καὶ ἀκολουθία) and
agrees in only four of fourteen of the diagnostic
92  On the transferral, see Kouroupou and Géhin, Catalogue,
1:15–17; B. Dimitrov, “I monasteri di Sozopol nei secoli XIII–
XV,” Byzantinobulgarica 7 (1981): 279–81. Spyros P. Lampros
(“Σúμμικτα,” Nέος Ἑλλ. 7 [1910]: 86) referred to the lectionary
as belonging to the commercial school of Chalke.
93  See the preliminary accounts of S. Kadas, “The Illustrated
Manuscripts,” in The Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopaidi:
Tradition, History, Art (Mt. Athos, 1998), 2:593–97; idem, “Τά
χειρόγραφα τοῦ σκευοφυλακίου πρώτη προσέγγιση τῆς τέχνης
τους,” in Ιερά μονή Βατοπεδίου· Ιστορία καί τέχνη / The Monastery
of Vatopedi: History and Art (Athens, 1999), 129–36. I thank
Erich Lamberz for his aid in studying the Vatopedi manuscripts,
and I am grateful for the hospitality of the abbot Fr. Ephraim,
the skevophylax Fr. Iosiph, and the librarian, Fr. Philip, at the
monastery.
94  Lowden, Jaharis Gospel Lectionary, fig. 99; Kadas, “Illus­
trated Manuscripts,” 593–94 and figs. 540–41.
107
menologion readings of patriarchal lectionar-
ies. A more positive assessment of the text and
illustrations of this fascinating manuscript must
await the publication of the skeuophylakion
manuscripts.
Also from the same general period is ms. 5
(GA ℓ 2424), a lectionary about which nothing
has so far been disclosed by Kadas and Labertz.
Its four evangelist portraits are high-quality
products of Constantinopolitan illuminators
during the second half of the eleventh century.
Textually, it is closer to the patriarchal group
than ms. 3, for it does have the double lection for
the fourth Sunday of Luke. The rubrics normally
written between the two pericopes are inscribed
in the upper margin in gold semi-uncials (fol.
129r). The manuscript lacks the Τάξις before
the beginning of the menologion and has seven
of the fourteen hallmark menologion entries. It
deserves further study as to its relation to patriar-
chal lectionaries.
The foregoing has concentrated on a small part of
the history of the Constantinopolitan lectionary,
namely, those manuscripts that may plausibly be
connected with the patriarchate in the eleventh
century. When defined textually patriarchal lec-
tionaries sometimes correspond in both script
and illumination, as in the case of the Jaharis
and Morgan manuscripts. At other times, their
other richly decorated contemporaries, Vat. gr.
1156, Venice, Istituto Ellenico cod. 2 (A), and
Oxford, Bodl. Lib. Auct. T. inf. 2.7 have different
patterns of affinity in text and decoration, while
being reasonably close to each other textually, as
Lowden has discussed.95 Yet other manuscripts, it
was noted, agree in decoration but are unrelated
textually, even when all are likely to have been
produced in Constantinople. Thus, the history
of patriarchal lectionaries is not congruent with
the history of the gospel lectionary in the capital
at large, much less the Byzantine empire. Finally,
it must be noted that most illustrated lectionaries
are not textually part of the patriarchal group.96
95  Lowden, Jaharis Gospel Lectionary, 77–89.
96  A useful general discussion of these manuscripts is to be
found in Zakharova, “Relationship between Text and Image,”
283–312.
108 Robert S. Nelson
While much work remains to be done at this
preliminary stage of research, the patriarchal
lectionary appears to be a phenomenon of the
eleventh century and somewhat later. Velkovska
pointed to important undecorated manuscripts
from the 1020s, including Vat. gr. 2041 (GA ℓ
126).97 The latter has all the diagnostic hallmarks
of a patriarchal lectionary, including, it may be
added, the rubrics between the two lections for
the fourth Sunday in Luke in semi-uncial script
(Fig. 4.14). Others have assigned the decorated
manuscripts, such as Vat. gr. 1156, Morgan 639,
and the Venice and Jaharis lectionaries, to the lat-
ter half of the eleventh century.98 What might be
the lower and upper temporal boundaries of the
patriarchal lectionary?
All lectionaries heretofore judged patriarchal
are written in minuscule script. A cursory study
of ninth- to eleventh-century uncial lectionar-
ies that have a plausible Constantinopolitan
provenance has turned up none with all or sub-
stantially all the hallmarks of patriarchal manu-
scripts. Since only four uncial lectionaries before
1000 are dated,99 chronology and provenance
in this period are challenging. For that reason
it is best to start with London, Brit. Lib. Harley
5598 (GA ℓ 150), dated 995. Its high-quality orna-
ment, seen in the framed titles that stretch across
both text columns, and its script and initials
suggest a metropolitan origin, and the manu-
script may be traced back to seventeenth-century
Constantinople.100 Of the fifteen textual mark-
ers of patriarchal manuscripts, this lectionary has
only one, the entry for 25 September. It omits 11
May, the birthday of Constantinople, as well as
the entry for 16 August and the deposition of the
Mandylion in Constantinople, which took place
in 944.101 For 31 August, it also does not record
97  Velkovska, “Lezionario evangelico Vaticano gr. 2041” (n. 29
above); eadem, “Lezionario patriarcale Ottoboni gr. 175” (n. 30
above), 693–94.
98  Lowden, Jaharis Gospel Lectionary, 77; for Vat. gr. 1156, see
Hutter, “Copiste du Métaphraste,” 559.
99  Lowden ( Jaharis Gospel Lectionary, 122 n. 5) follows
Dolezal in this. Note that by a misprint, Vat. gr. 2138 is misiden-
tified in the former.
100  For provenance, other catalogue information, and color
illustrations see http://molcat1.bl.uk/illcat/ILLUMIN.
ASP?Size=mid&IllID=26410, accessed 6 June 2015.
101  Av. Cameron, “The History of the Image of Edessa:
The Telling of a Story,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 7 (1983):
Fig. 4.14.  Rome, Bibl. Vat. gr. 2041, fol. 110v (with the permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, all
rights reserved)

Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople 109

the location of the relic of the Virgin’s girdle,
which patriarchal manuscripts uniformly place
at the church of the Chalkoprateia, a dependency
of the patriarchate.
An uncial lectionary of even greater artistic
merit is London, Brit. Lib. Arundel 547 (GA ℓ 183)
with evangelist portraits, large framed headpieces
of Blütenblatt ornament before major textual divi-
sions, and many smaller headpieces and figural
initials. The hardness or abstract quality of the
painting style of the evangelists suggests a date in
the first half of the eleventh century.102 This lec-
tionary may also have come from Constan­tinople
in the seventeenth century.103 Although contem-
porary with the earliest patriarchal lectionaries,
Arundel 547 has only two of their characteris-
tics, the entries for 11 May and 31 August. In the
latter entry, the Virgin’s girdle is said to be at the
Chalkoprateia. This same pattern of slight agree-
ment with patriarchal lectionaries is also found in
three tenth-century lectionaries, which note the
birthday of Constantinople on 11 May and per-
haps one more patriarchal trait—Mt. Athos, Lavra
Aʹ 86 (GA ℓ 1086) with evangelist portraits and
many golden initials and ornaments;104 Mt. Athos,
Lavra Aʹ 92 (GA ℓ 1091), which has an initial fron-
tispiece depicting a standing Christ flanked by
medallions of Mary, John the Baptist, and the four
91–92; on the celebration of the feast, see V. Grumel, “Léon de
Chalcédoine et le canon de la fète du Saint Mandilion,” AB 68
(1950): 135–52; É. Patlagean, “L’entrée de la Sainte Face d’Édesse
à Constantinople en 944,” in La religion civique à l’ époque
médiévale et moderne: Chrétienté et islam, ed. A. Vauchez
(Rome, 1995), 21–35.
102  The script is dated to the end of the tenth or the begin-
ning of the eleventh century by G. Cavallo, “Funzione e strut-
ture della maiuscola greca tra i secoli viii–xi,” in La paléographie
grecque et byzantine: Paris, 21–25 octobre 1974, Colloques inter-
nationaux du CNRS, vol. 559 (Paris, 1977), 105.
103  For provenance, other catalogue information, and color
illustrations, see http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminated
manuscripts/record.asp?MSID=8077&CollID=20&NStart=
547, accessed 6 June 2015. On its decoration, see S. P. Madigan,
“The Decoration of Arundel 547: Some Observations about
‘Metropolitan’ and ‘Provincial’ Book Illumination in Tenth-
Century Byzantium,” Byzantion 57 (1987), 336–59; O. S. Popova,
A. V. Zakharova, and I. A. Oretskaia, Vizantiĭskaia miniatiura
vtoroĭ polovini X—nachala XII veka (Moscow, 2012), 48, 52.
104  Of the fifteen hallmarks, it has 11 May and 5 June. A
microfilm of the manuscript is online at the INTF. On the lec-
tionary, see Weitzmann, Byzantinische Buchmalerei, 1:46–48;
2:84. Cavallo (“Funzione e strutture,” 109) assigns its script to
the late tenth century.
110 Robert S. Nelson
evangelists;105 and Mt. Athos, Protaton 20 (GA ℓ
735), decorated with fine ornament.106
Probably earlier than any of these uncial lec-
tionaries is Vat. gr. 2144 (GA ℓ 563), which has
only simple scribal decoration of initials and
pen and ink frames drawn around titles. Its
slanted ogival uncial script has been assigned
to the ninth century.107 Although earlier than
the others, the menologion of Vat. gr. 2144 has
a somewhat greater correspondence with the
patriarchal system, as seen in its entries for the
celebrations at the Kampos on 25 September and
5 June and the notice for 11 May, the city’s birth-
day. The Mandylion on 16 August is ignored,
presumably because that relic was brought to
Constantinople later in 944.108 Of the fifteen
test passages sampled, the most interesting is 1
May, which in a patriarchal manuscript denotes
the dedication of the Imperial Nea church in
the Great Palace.109 Vat. gr. 2144 mentions more
succinctly the “dedication of [a/the] church.”110
Closely related in script style is an uncial lec-
tionary in the British Library, Harley 5787 (GA
ℓ 152), which Weitzmann attributed to Asia
Minor because of possible associations with
Bursa among other factors.111 This manuscript
also shares certain agreements with Vatican 2144
and with the liturgy of Constantinople, as in the
entries for 25 September and 5 June and the lita-
nies performed at the Kampos. Both manuscripts
have similar accounting of the church councils
commemorated on 16 July, which will be elabo-
rated in greater detail in the later patriarchal
lectionaries.112 A third uncial lectionary, London,
105  Of the fifteen hallmarks, it has only 11 May. On the
manuscript, see Weitzmann, Byzantinische Buchmalerei, 1:24;
2:32; Pelekanidis et al., Οἱ Θησαυροὶ τοῦ Ἁγίου Ὄρους, 3: fig. 48;
Madigan, “Decoration of Arundel 547,” 350–51.
106  Of the fifteen hallmarks, it has only 11 May. A microfilm
of the manuscript is online at the INTF. On the lectionary, see
Weitzmann, Byzantinische Buchmalerei, 2:84; Pelekanidis et al.,
Οἱ Θησαυροὶ τοῦ Ἁγίου Ὄρους, 1:389–90 and figs. 5–6.
107  Velkovska, “Studio dei lezionari bizantini,” 260.
108  See n. 101 above.
109  See n. 38 above.
110  Fol. 233r. The manuscript is online at the INTF.
111  Weitzmann, Byzantinische Buchmalerei, 1:43. The manu-
script is digitized at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.
aspx?ref=Harley_MS_5787, accessed 22 November 2015.
112  In general on this celebration, see S. Salaville, “La fête du
concile de Nicée et les fêtes de conciles dans le rit byzantin,”
Brit. Lib. Add. 39602 (GA ℓ 181) contains the
entry on the councils favored in uncial lection-
aries and, like the above two manuscripts, has a
few entries that agree with the patriarchal pattern
(25 September, 26 October, 18 and 22 December,
11 May), one of which is rare, that for 18
December, the dedication of the Chalkoprateia.
The London lectionary was written in 980 for a
bishop of a diocese of Caesarea, thus assuredly
not Constantinople.113
Are all three lectionaries evidence of some
type of a protopatriarchal lectionary in uncial
format? At this stage of research, the uncial lec-
tionaries that have been examined from the tenth
and the first half of the eleventh centuries do not
display the fully developed system of a patriar-
chal manuscript, even if the above three manu-
scripts share aspects of that profile. In contrast,
a few lectionaries in minuscule script from the
early eleventh century do present the complete
apparatus. Did the comparatively late transition
in lectionaries from uncial to the more efficient
minuscule script afford the opportunity of incor-
porating additional information into the lection-
ary’s calendar? Was this occasion for a significant
calendar revision in manuscripts associated with
Hagia Sophia and the patriarchate in the early
eleventh century? Such questions can only be ini-
tial hypotheses for further research.
Of equal interest is the fate of the eleventh-
century patriarchal lectionary, as defined here.
Once again the evidence is limited, but prelimi-
nary indications suggest that patriarchal lection-
aries were less common in the twelfth than in the
eleventh century. The best example from the later
Échos d’Orient 24 (1925): 447–53. The particular variation
found in the two uncial lectionaries is that discussed by Salaville
on p. 449 and taken from a secondary source not available to me,
which appears to have an early manuscript as its source. Gregory
(Textkritik [n. 4 above], 382) cites a possible variant on this entry
from GA ℓ 13 (Paris, BnF, Coislin 31), a deluxe uncial manuscript
of the tenth or eleventh century. The text of this important man-
uscript needs to be examined. A number of images are available
online through the Index of Christian Art, and its illumination
has been studied by O. S. Popova, Vizantiĭskie i drevnerusskie
miniatiuri (Moscow, 2003), 11–27, 325–26; eadem, Zakharova,
and Oretskaia, Vizantiĭskaia miniatiura vtoroĭ polovini X—
nachala XII veka (Moscow, 2012), 134–35. See also R. Devreesse,
Le fonds Coislin (Paris, 1945), 26; Cavallo, “Funzione e strut-
ture,” 108. The entry in the patriarchal lectionaries is discussed
by Dolezal, “Middle Byzantine Lectionary,” 249–50.
113  Weitzmann, Byzantinische Buchmalerei, 1:65.
Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
period is another lectionary from the Vatopedi
sacristy, ms. 7 (GA ℓ 2426). Its extant evangelist
portraits have small symbols descending from the
top of the frames to inspire the authors. Probably
dating to the first half of the twelfth century, the
manuscript agrees with the textual model of a
patriarchal lectionary in all respects, including the
rubrics between the lections for the fourth Sunday
of Luke being written in semi-uncials. It is always
possible for a manuscript to copy a patriarchal lec-
tionary somewhere else, and this may be the case
with the more humble, unillustrated manuscript
in Cambridge, Univ. Lib. Ms. Dd 8.23 (GA ℓ 146)
that Lowden discussed but did not illustrate,114
but the text of ms. 7 appears to be metropolitan.
Another promising manuscript for further
investigation is a lectionary at the Stavronikita
monastery on Mt. Athos, cod. 1 9 (GA ℓ 744).115
Its ornament and initials link it with a large
group of Constantinopolitan manuscripts that
circle around well-known codices, such as the
Codex Ebnernianus in Oxford, Bodl. Lib. Auct.
T. inf. I.10 (GA 105);116 the copies of the Homi­
lies of the Monk James in Paris and Rome, asso-
ciated with the Sebastokratorissa Eirene;117 and
the Homilies of Gregory Nazianzenos in Sinai,
cod. 339, commissioned by the abbot of the
Pantokrator monastery in Constantinople.118
The origin of these codices should be credited
to a loose confederation of scribes and illumina-
tors in Constantinople that was patronized by
prominent members of the imperial family and
the abbot of an imperial monastery and hence the
highest levels of Constantinopolitan society.119
Although the manuscript group includes several
114  Lowden, Jaharis Gospel Lectionary, 27–29, 32–35.
115  C. Mauropoulou-Tsioumi and G. Galavaris, Holy Stav­
roniketa Monastery: Illustrated Manuscripts from 10th to 17th
Century (Mt. Athos, 2007–8), 1:90–92; 2: figs. 221–26.
116  I. Hutter, Corpus der byzantinischen Miniaturenhand­
schriften, 5 vols. in 8 (Stuttgart, 1977–97), 1:59–67.
117  See K. Linardou, “The Kokkinobaphos Manuscripts
Revisited: The Internal Evidence of the Books,” Scriptorium
61 (2007): 384–407; E. Jeffreys, “The sebastokratorissa Irene
as Patron,” in Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond, ed.
L. Theis, M. Mullett, and M. Grünbart, Wiener Jahrbuch für
Kunstgeschichte 60–61 (Vienna, 2014): 184–87.
118  Weitzmann and Galavaris, Monastery of Saint Catherine
(n. 7 above), 140–53.
119  R. S. Nelson, “Theoktistos and Associates in Twelfth-
Century Constantinople: An Illustrated New Testament of
111
gospel books in addition to the Ebnerianus,120
the Stavronikita codex is the only lectionary that
has so far been attributed to it; hence, the desir-
ability of its detailed study. The lectionary has
the two lections for the fourth Sunday in Luke
but lacks the descriptive rubrics between them
that mention the Great Church. Only a vestige
of that text survives in the margin in the form of
the title of those notes. It also has no Τάξις καὶ
ἀκολουθία, but it does have nine of the fourteen
menologion entries of the patriarchal manu-
scripts, suggesting some association with the
patriarchal system in the second quarter of the
twelfth century. This relationship, of course, is
not of the same character as the preceding and
roughly contemporary Vatopedi ms. 7. The latter
has total agreement with eleventh-century patri-
archal lectionaries. The complete menologion of
Stavronikita 1 needs to be studied to see whether
it might have further clues to associate it with
churches or monasteries around Hagia Sophia or
else to link it with another part of the city.
By the first half of the twelfth century the
focus of courtly activity had shifted to the
Blachernai Palace near the walls of Constantino­
ple, a change that had important consequences
for imperial and aristocratic patronage of reli-
gious foundations in that quarter of the city.121
The nearest major church became that of the
Virgin at Blachernai. Hagia Sophia and its adja-
cent patriarchate and dependent churches, such
as the Chalkoprateia, now lay at some distance
from the imperial court. Over time the court’s
change of venue affected the competitive dynamic
that had long existed between the two principal
sites for Marian devotions in Constantinople, the
church at Blachernai and that of Chalkoprateia,
the latter favored by the patriarchate.122 After
1133 A.D.,” J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 15 (1987), 24–27; repr.
in idem, Later Byzantine Painting, chap. 5.
120  E.g., Rome, Bibl. Vat. Urb. gr. 2; Paris, BnF, gr. 71; Paris,
BnF, gr. 75; Oxford, Christ Church gr. 32; Patmos, cod. 274;
Mt. Athos, Panteleimon 25; Mt. Athos Lavra Aʹ 44 and two
miniatures in the Walters Art Museum cod. W 530d, e; London,
Brit. Lib. Burney 19.
121  On the Blachernai Palace, see S. Runciman, “Blachernae
Palace and Its Decoration,” in Studies in Memory of David
Talbot Rice, ed. G. Robertson and G. Henderson (Edinburgh,
1975), 277–83.
122  On this earlier competition, see D. Krausmüller, “Making
the Most of Mary: The Cult of the Virgin in the Chalkoprateia
112 Robert S. Nelson
the Byzantine reconquest in 1261 the palace of
Blachernai again served as the imperial residence.
As Pseudo-Kodinos makes clear and as Albrecht
Berger has reviewed, the emperor celebrated
most major religious feasts within the Blachernai
Palace.123 The depopulated city had two princi-
pal districts, one around the palace and another
at Hagia Sophia. These were like small towns, set
within the massive walls of the late antique city.
During the reigns of Michael VIII and
Andronikos II, the aristocracy joined the impe-
rial family in the refounding and restoring
of churches and monasteries in the capital.124
Newly refurbished churches, whether cathedral
or monastic, needed service books, but the his-
tory of the Palaiologan lectionary, decorated or
undecorated, has not begun to be written. Only
basic details are known. No lectionaries with fig-
ural illumination have as yet been noted. Rather,
the earlier tradition of illuminated headpieces
and initials placed before the standard textual
units continued. In general, in contrast to mid-
dle Byzantine, Palaiologan religious manuscripts
restrict or even avoid narrative illustrations.
Instead, the walls of the late Byzantine church
became the preferred venue for detailed imagery,
some of which has direct connection with the
liturgical cycle.125
from Late Antiquity to the Tenth Century,” in The Cult of the
Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images, ed. L. Brubaker
and M. B. Cunningham (Farnham, Surrey, 2011), 219–45.
123  R. Macrides, J. A. Munitiz, and D. Angelov, Pseudo-Kodinos
and the Constantinopolitan Court: Offices and Ceremonies
(Farnham, Surrey, 2013), 117–204; A. Berger, “Imperial and
Ecclesiastical Processions in Constantinople,” in Byzantine
Constantinople: Monuments, Topography and Everyday Life, ed.
N. Necipoğlu (Leiden, 2001), 83–84. Macrides, Munitiz, and
Angelov (Pseudo-Kodinos, 447) argue against the withdrawal of
the Palaiologan court from the city and its religious life, noting
that the emperor in the tenth century did not attend the liturgy
at Hagia Sophia many more times than he did in the fourteenth
century. What did change, however, was the distance between the
Hagia Sophia, the patriarchate, and the palace, and the ease with
which priests and perhaps lectionaries formerly moved between
churches and chapels of the Great Palace and the Great Church.
124  A.-M. Talbot, “The Restoration of Constantinople under
Michael VIII,” DOP 47 (1993): 243–61; eadem, “Building
Activity in Constantinople under Andronikos II: The Role
of Women Patrons in the Construction and Restoration of
Monasteries,” in Necipoǧlu, Byzantine Constantinople, 329–43.
125  N. Zarras, “The Iconographical Cycle of the Eothina
Gospel Pericopes in Churches from the Reign of King Milutin,”
Zograf 31 (2006–2007): 95–113.
 The most prominent group of illuminated
manuscripts in early Palaiologan Constantinople
are those associated with the Atelier of the
Palaiologina, so named after the feminine mono-
gram found on a canon table of a gospel book in
the Vatican Library. In 1978 Hugo Buchthal and
Hans Belting made the initial investigation of
these manuscripts that then numbered fifteen.126
Since then, that count has increased markedly.
In contrast to the Kokkinobaphos group with its
single lectionary, the Atelier of the Palaiologina
emphasized the production of lectionaries.
Buchthal and Belting knew of three lectionar-
ies of the Atelier and another related manu-
script. Subsequent authors have added seven
more, one of which is now lost. The most recent
is an important discovery by Inmaculada Pérez
Martín of a lectionary in Madrid, Bibl. Nac. Vitr.
26–4 Cod. 348 (GA ℓ 2408). It has the mono-
gram of a male member of the imperial family
emblazoned on the headpiece at the beginning
of the Matthew readings.127 These ten extant
manuscripts make a good case study of the fate
of the eleventh-century patriarchal lectionary in
Constantinople.128
126  H. Buchthal and H. Belting, Patronage in Thirteenth-
Century Constantinople: An Atelier of Late Byzantine Book
Illumination and Calligraphy (Washington, DC, 1978). The
gospel book that they record as “location unknown” is now
J. Paul Getty Museum ms. 65. An important overview of the
production of this small workshop of scribes and miniatur-
ists is I. Hutter, “Schreiber und Maler der Palaiologenzeit
in Konstantinopel,” in Πρακτικά του ϛʹ Διεθνούς Συμποσίου
Ελληνικής Παλαιογραφίας (Δραμα, 21–27 Σεπτεμβρίου 2003)/
Actes du VIe Colloque international de paléographie grecque
(Drama, 21–27 septembre 2003), ed. B. Atsalos and N. Tsironi,
3 vols. (Athens, 2008), 1:162–71.
127  I. Pérez Martín, “Manuscritos iluminados,” in Bizancio
en España: De la Antigüedad tardía a El Greco, ed. M. Cortés
Arrese (Madrid, 2003), 198–99; G. de Andrés, Catálogo de los
codices griegos de la Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid, 1987), 536–37.
On the female patronage of this manuscript group, see now
A.-M. Talbot, “Female Patronage in the Palaiologan Era: Icons,
Minor Arts and Manuscripts,” in Theis, Mullett, and Grünbart,
Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond, 269–71. I thank
Kathleen Maxwell for pointing out that the Madrid lection-
ary is now digitized at http://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/detalle/
bdh0000010663, accessed 6 June 2015.
128  In addition to the Madrid manuscript, the lectionar-
ies are Mt. Sinai gr. 228 (GA ℓ 862), Mt. Athos, Iviron 30m
(GA ℓ 2266), Mt. Athos, Stavronikita 27 (GA ℓ 745), and the
related Rome, Vat. gr. 1523 (GA ℓ 549) discussed by Buchthal
and Belting, Patronage in Thirteenth-Century Constantinople,
5, 95; Rome, Vat. gr. 352 (GA ℓ 540), attributed by K. Maxwell,
“Another Lectionary of the ‘Atelier’ of the Palaiologina, Vat. gr.
Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
The fifteen text passages from these manu-
scripts are reported in the first ten listings of
Table 4.1 below. As seen there, few textual con-
nections remain with the earlier system. None of
the manuscripts has the long notice concerning
the procession to the Forum of Constantine on
September 1. In the later centuries, the nature
of that procession and of the ceremony at the
Forum in the Palaiologan period are unclear, but
evidently some of the pomp and circumstance
of the eleventh century was lost. The emperor
and the patriarch still gathered on 1 September
at what Pseudo-Kodinos in the mid-fourteenth
century called the Porphyry Column, but he tell-
ingly added that it was formerly called a forum.129
Another source from the period mentions a vine-
yard there.130 The historian Gregoras was more
explicit about the changed circumstances. On
1 September 1327, Gregoras reported that while
the choir was singing the antiphons, a pig soiled
with excrement suddenly began running amok in
the midst of the singers.131
Of the ten lectionaries of the Atelier of the
Palaiologina, only two—Athens, Nat. Lib. cod.
2546 (GA ℓ 1225) and Istanbul, Ecumenical
Patriarchate cod. 1 (GA ℓ 791)—contain the dou-
ble readings for the fourth Sunday in the Lukan
section. In both, the connecting rubrics are written
in semi-uncial script, as in a patriarchal lectionary.
The other codices have the standard single lec-
tion. Today Istanbul 1 is known as the lectionary
of Hagia Sophia, but it was donated to the Great
352,” DOP 37 (1983): 47–54; Athens, Nat. Lib. cod. 2546 (GA ℓ
1225), Athens, Nat. Lib. cod. 2646 (GA ℓ 1809), London, Brit.
Lib. Add. 29713 (GA ℓ 332), Istanbul, Ecumenical Patriarchate
cod. 1 (GA ℓ 791), and the related Smyrna lectionary, now lost,
all discussed in R. S. Nelson and J. Lowden, “The Palaeologina
Group: Additional Manuscripts and New Questions,” DOP 45
(1991): 59–68.
129  Macrides, Munitiz, and Angelov, Pseudo-Kodinos, 13–14,
194–95.
130  MM 1:313, dated 1351 refers to the “so-called Old Forum”
where are now planted vineyards. Macrides, Munitiz, and
Angelov, Pseudo-Kodinos, 14, 195. I thank Ruth Macrides for
this reference.
131  Nikephoros Gregoras, Byzantina historia: Graece et
Latine, ed. L. Schopen, 3 vols. (Bonn, 1829), 1:385. This incident
was first connected to Byzantine lectionaries in E. H. Freshfield,
A Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Aldenham upon the
Subject of a Byzantine Evangelion, Dated September 1st, 1900
(London, 1900), 7, where the author described a lectionary that
he owned. It had a text for 1 September that was similar to the
aforementioned Τάξις καὶ ἀκολουθία.
113
Table 4.1

.
5] H. M
7 13

. 22 S .
27

d1 l

grscow
22 8

29

c o bu
A ddon
r.

26 r i d
352 gr .

254e ns

2 6 e ns
152 r
30mon

S t os

d.
av

–4
t. g

46
6

an
ai

d
ir

t.
h

o
Si n

Ist

Ma
Lo
At

At

At
Va

Va

[M
Iv
4th Sun LK • • •
Sept 1 Taxis
Sept 25
Oct 26 • • • • • •
Oct 31
Dec 1
Dec 18 •
Dec 22
Dec 23
May 1
May 11 • •
June 5
July 16 • •
July 31 •
Aug 16 • • • • • • • • •
Aug 31 • • •* •* •* •* • •*** •** •*

* no place designed for the relic of the Virgin’s girdle

** relic of Virgin’s girdle at the church of Blachernai
*** entry cannot be read on INTF microfilm

Church only in 1438 and can be traced back no
further.132 Most manuscripts by the Atelier have
the requisite entry for 26 October, that is, they
record on that day the standard St. Demetrios plus
an earthquake. The earthquake is the critical ele-
ment, but by itself, it is not rare. Finally, almost all
lectionaries contain notices for the last two feasts
sampled, 16 and 31 August.
The reading for 31 August, pertaining to
the Virgin’s girdle, is the more interesting. In
patriarchal lectionaries the relic is said to be at
the church of the Chalkoprateia. Three of the
Atelier’s manuscripts continue that tradition;
five specify no location for the girdle; and one,
the Madrid codex, states that it was kept at the
church of the Theotokos at Blachernai. In the
Palaiologan period the church of Chalkoprateia
did not fare well and fell into disuse. The Latins
132  Nelson and Lowden, “Palaeologina Group,” 63.
had earlier taken its most famous relic, the girdle,
to the West, although subsequent pilgrims report
that a part or a replacement could be seen at the
Blachernai church.133 The Madrid lectionary is
thus the most historically accurate in this detail,
and it may be significant that this lectionary has
the best documented association with the impe-
rial family.
The evidence presented in Table 4.1 dem-
onstrates that the late thirteenth-century lec-
tionaries of the Atelier of the Palaiologina differ
significantly from those employed by the patri-
archate in the eleventh century. The sampling
method employed, however, offers only hints as
to the reasons for these changes, and no attempt
has been made to define Palaiologan lectionaries
133  G. P. Majeska, Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Washington, DC, 1984),
333–36 with further literature.

114 Robert S. Nelson

positively on their own terms. All this remains
for the future. Yet preliminary research does
help to explain why a fine eleventh-century lec-
tionary, Moscow, gr. 225, was no longer adequate
for Nikephoros Moschopoulos on the eve of his
move to Mistra even though it may have once
been used at Hagia Sophia. It was approximately
then that the end of the synaxarion, perhaps
readings for Holy Week, and the entire menolo-
gion were removed and replaced with the results
that are listed on the bottom line of Table 4.1.
The first entry in Moscow 225, the Lukan lec-
tion, is in the eleventh-century synaxarion, but
those that follow belong to the new menologion.
The latter has little relation with the patriar-
chal system, even as represented in the attenu-
ated form in the manuscripts of the Atelier of
the Palaiologina, for only two entries agree with
the earlier system, 11 May and 31 August. The last
for 31 August is frequent and may be typical for
the period. The notice for 11 May, the birthday
of Constantinople, appears only in the Madrid
lectionary with the Palaiologan monogram and
may be another suggestion of that manuscript’s
imperial associations. For his renovated evange-
lion, perhaps the proedros could not bear to leave
behind all traces of the “City.”
In conclusion, the lectionary is an apparatus
that enabled the performance of the Gospels in
Byzantium. Neither the text as read nor the text
as heard, a lectionary manuscript is an empty
shell today. In studying it we are like archae-
ologists of the future who discover abandoned
mobile phones and attempt to reconstruct the
oral culture of our world. Their task would be no
more difficult than that confronting us in deal-
ing with thousands of mute lectionaries. While
New Testament scholars have studied lection-
ary pericopes for their contribution to the his-
tory of the continuous text of the Gospels and
Patriarchal Lectionaries of Constantinople
art historians have successfully interpreted indi-
vidual manuscripts or groups of manuscripts,
few have examined the lectionary as a whole as
the most important technology that connected
the Bible with its public in Byzantium. The fore-
going has offered remarks toward such a study
rather than presenting a proper investigation
itself; doubtlessly, details will need revisions after
further work. The dense network of associations
that surrounds the lectionary leads first to the
liturgy itself but also to the cult of saints through
the menologion, the index that matched holy per-
sons with gospel passages in different ways and
places throughout the Christian world. It is here
that lectionaries may have the most to contribute
to Byzantine studies generally, if the calendars
of hundreds of lectionaries could be tabulated
and correlated with provenance, chronology,
script, decoration, and as many other aspects of
the modern study of manuscripts as codicology
allows. In 1900 Caspar René Gregory published
the basic calendar of the Byzantine lectionary
and noted a few variants.134 Until the studies on
the patriarchal lectionary, no one had improved
on Gregory’s work, and few would have thought
it possible since Gregory spent his lifetime travel-
ing to see manuscripts. Thanks to the decades of
microfilm acquisition at the INTF in Münster,
however, Gregory’s experience could be repli-
cated in months not years, or years not a lifetime,
and with the aid of an online database multiple
authors could contribute to this task. While the
full oral dynamic that surrounded lectionaries is
as lost and irretrievable as the people who once
held these books in their hands, lectionaries,
like mobile phones, had their codes and proto-
cols that allowed them to function. Deciphering
them will enrich our understanding of the life of
the New Testament in Byzantium.
134  Gregory, Textkritik, 1:365–84.
115