Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The article represents the first attempt to investigate the sources of the apocryphal story “Pilate and the Holy Virgin” from Father Theodore Popovych Tukhliansky’s manuscript of the 18th century. It is proved that the logic of Virgin Mary’s divine miracle is a key narrative technique that progresses the plot. Even though the idea that Pilate and his wife were converted to Christianity after the conversation with the Virgin Mary accompanied by the miracle star on her shoulder is absent in Ukrainian handwritten collections of apocrypha, the analyzed story – as the part of compilation – hypothetically could not be of purely local origin.The system of correlations between the Holy Scripture and the apocrypha about the Virgin Mary and Pontius Pilate is considered through the prism of Genette’s theory of hypertextual transformations. The apocryphon is defined as a text in the second degree, the invariant core of which can be described as a set of intertextual relations which a text has with the Bible. The motif-index of the apocrypha about Pontius Pilate is compiled by using the tools of structural analysis, and namely theoretical frameworks proposed by folklorists Badalanova, Belova, Zovchak, and Kmet.Although the question of a particular protograph of the story “Pilate and the Holy Virgin” has not be solved in this research paper yet, the list of genetic-contact relations between the analyzed apocryphal narration and several medieval and early modern monuments were revealed. Some textual coincidence was found 1) with the corpus of apocryphal apologies of Pilate dedicated to his conversion to Christianity with his wife and two children and martyrdom (“The Tale of How Martha accused Pilate before Caesar Augustus”, “Pilate and St. Stephen”); 2) with the folk tradition of Marian iconographic art; 3) creative adaptations of the Christmas plot in apocrypha from Ukrainian manuscript books of the 16th–18th centuries; 4) and stories of the Entrance of the Theotokos to the Temple Presentation, derived from the Life of the Virgin Mary by Epiphanius the Monk. Special attention is given to apologetic and psychological aims pursued by authors, scribes, and translators of Christian apocryphal texts.
Author: Пелешенко, Олена Юріївна
Institution: National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6997824543
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