On the Apocrypha in the Pilgrimage by Daniel the Traveler

Abstract

The abundance of apocryphal material in the text of the Pilgrimage by Daniel the Traveler has become the subject of several special studies in the past, by Ya. I. Gorozhansky, M. A. Venevitinov, P. A. Zabolotsky, V. P. Adrianova-Peretts, and M. Garzaniti. All of these studies, however, were based on the text of the First Redaction of the Pilgrimage (according to Venevitinov’s classification) and they did not consider the work’s literary history. The present study reveals the various ways in which the reproduction of apocryphal subjects appears in different redactions of the Pilgrimage (both full-text and abridged) and its later adaptations made in the 16th and 17th centuries. One of the examples is the description of Nazareth, which is accompanied by an apocryphal version of the Annunciation in the Pilgrimage. This version differs from the Bible text (Mt 1:18–25, Lk 1:26–28) in that it tells about the events directly preceding the Annunciation: the pre-Annunciation at the well, where Mary comes to draw water, and the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to her in a cave. In the group of abridged copies of the 16th century from the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, this information is missing, and the only thing said about Nazareth is that “Archangel Gabriel announced to Her [Mary] there.” Thus, the complete story appearing in the full-text redactions of Daniel’s Pilgrimage  was replaced by a compact report consistent with the Bible narrative.

The nature of the variant readings presented in this paper remains to be interpreted, as these variants may be later interpolations in the text made by redactors or they may represent traces of the earlier period of the history of the text. At the same time, any reconstruction of the literary history of the Pilgrimage has to take into account the peculiarities of the reproduction of apocryphal subjects in different redactions of the text.