St Jerome and the Invention of Yet More Slavic Myths

The urge to invent a foundational mythology whereby an "apostle" came to and established a local church is an old one. As Susan Wessell's splendid book Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome showed, this urge was given great energy thanks to Leo and the sharply declining prestige of his see after the shift of the imperial capital to Constantinople in 330. But as earlier scholarship, especially that of Francis Dvornik in his The Idea Of Apostolicity In Byzantium And The Legend Of Apostle Andrew made clear, the West was not alone in feeling it necessary to stress apostolic foundation and lineage: Constantinople later got into the act, and later still the East-Slavs, as a new book suggests: Julia Verkholantsev, The Slavic Letters of St. Jerome: The History of the Legend and Its Legacy, or, How the Translator of the Vulgate Became an Apostle of the Slavs (Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), 280pp.

About this book we are told:

The Slavic Letters of St. Jerome is the first book-length study of the medieval legend that Church Father and biblical translator St. Jerome was a Slav who invented the Slavic (Glagolitic) alphabet and Roman Slavonic rite. Julia Ver­kholantsev locates the roots of this belief among the Latin clergy in Dalmatia in the 13th century and describes in fascinating detail how Slavic leaders subsequently appropriated it to further their own political agendas.

The Slavic language, written in Jerome’s alphabet and endorsed by his authority, gained the unique privilege in the Western Church of being the only language other than Latin, Greek, and Hebrew acceptable for use in the liturgy. Such privilege, confirmed repeatedly by the popes, resulted in the creation of narratives about the distinguished historical mission of the Slavs and became a possible means for bridging the divide between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches in the Slavic-speaking lands.

In the 14th century the legend spread from Dalmatia to Bohemia and Poland, where Glagolitic monasteries were established to honor the Apostle of the Slavs Jerome and the rite and letters he created. The myth of Jerome’s apostolate among the Slavs gained many supporters among the learned and spread far and wide, reaching Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and England.

Grounded in extensive archival research, Verkholantsev examines the sources and trajectory of the legend of Jerome’s Slavic fellowship within a wider context of European historical and theological thought. This unique volume will appeal to medievalists, Slavicists, scholars of religion, those interested in saints’ cults, and specialists of philology.

St. Mark of Alexandria

Francis Dvornik's 1948 study The Idea Of Apostolicity In Byzantium And The Legend Of Apostle Andrew was one of the most important to help us understand the process by which the early Church gradually shifted the argument from the "principle of accommodation" to the importance of "apostolicity" when arguing over the pre-eminence of patriarchal sees. More recently, Susan Wessel's fascinating and very important study has shown in great and convincing detail how this process was really accomplished in the fifth century under Pope Leo I: Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome.

Now another recent publication has examined the role of the apostle Mark in shaping the Church of Alexandria: Thomas C. Oden, The African Memory of Mark: Reassessing Early Church Tradition (IVP, 2011, 279pp).


About this book, the publisher tells us:

We often regard the author of the Gospel of Mark as an obscure figure about whom we know little. Many would be surprised to learn how much fuller a picture of Mark exists within widespread African tradition, tradition that holds that Mark himself was from North Africa, that he founded the church in Alexandria, that he was an eyewitness to the Last Supper and Pentecost, that he was related not only to Barnabas but to Peter as well and accompanied him on many of his travels. In this provocative reassessment of early church tradition, Thomas C. Oden begins with the palette of New Testament evidence and adds to it the range of colors from traditional African sources, including synaxaries (compilations of short biographies of saints to be read on feast days), archaeological sites, non-Western historical documents and ancient churches. The result is a fresh and illuminating portrait of Mark, one that is deeply rooted in African memory and seldom viewed appreciatively in the West.

One of the "blurbers" draws out the Coptic implications:

"The African Memory of Mark honors the way the Coptic Church has been the faithful, preeminent carrier of the Markan tradition in the church, and does that by weaving the different genres of sources into a narrative whole. Oden is not unaware of standard depictions of Mark and the Gospel that bears his name in which the African note is rather marginal--where it is acknowledged at all--but he challenges established scholarship by marshaling the evidence and refocusing it on the continuity of the Coptic memory of Mark. Whether or not the reader agrees with the argument of the book, Oden has raised the bar of scrutiny and challenged many of the unstated assumptions of conventional scholarship. From critic and fan alike, Oden deserves credit." (Lamin Sanneh, D. Willis James Professor of Missions & World Christianity, Yale University )