With or without Candles? Manipulating Cyril of Alexandria's Third Homily In Lucam: Three Versions for One Text

Abstract:The 156 homilies that Cyril of Alexandria dedicated to Luke's Gospel have experienced a turbulent textual history. In this corpus, the third homily, commenting on Luke 2.21–24, enjoys a special position. Indeed, we can read some fragments of it in the catenae; like two other of the 156 homilies, the third homily is transmitted through a Greek liturgical tradition; and, since Joseph-Marie Sauget discovered the Damascus Patr. 12/20, we have access to a Syriac translation. These three different forms sustain complex relationships with the original text, but all of them are, in various ways, vestigia, manipulations, and rewritings of it. This article thus proposes to focus on the phenomena of manipulating the text of Cyril's third homily, which depends on various needs, either exegetical in the catenae, or liturgical in the Greek tradition. This enables us to get a clearer view of the original text and its reception. The Syriac translation is the most faithful to the hypotext. The catenists, for sure, selected passages and rewrote them, but sometimes they preserved a more conservative text in comparison with the direct tradition. Finally, the liturgical tradition does not hesitate to add a liturgical incipit and to cut the explicit of the homily in the process of fusion with the fourth homily.